Technology disrupts the business model for entertainment, again.

I just updated the blog from my phone. Test is successful. Technology makes everything better.

Well, maybe not everything. If you’re a Hollywood screenwriter, you have a front row seat as technology sends the film making industry to the same resting place where it has already sent the music industry. The business model is collapsing for big budget entertainment with lots of people, locations, catering, staff, accountants, and financing.

If you look at entertainment before 20th century recording technology (including the motion picture camera), it makes sense.

Entertainment was the little guy. Musicians and artists, vaudeville, the theater, the traveling circus. The business model for the artist didn’t really scale up to millions of people. Even attracting the eyes and ears of a few thousand people required packing hundreds at a time into a very large room, and performing the same thing over and over again. Money for a performing arts organization was hard to raise and harder to pay back.

Technology took entertainment into the hands of mass media during the past 100 years. It centralized. It mass produced. It quantified the financial value of its products, tell you what sold well, and then go make more of what audiences wanted. Lots more. This way of doing entertainment returned huge profits to investors, even though the Risky Old Days were far from gone.

Entertainment is now well on its way back to individual hands, thanks again to technology. The means of production are in your hands if you own a smartphone. The means of distribution are available free to you if you own an internet connection.

This doesn’t mean that you’re likely to become the next David O. Selznick. It means you can make a film, and put the film where people can see it. You can reach an audience. The chances are slimmer than ever that you’ll make a living as a filmmaker, or any other kind of entertainer. The chances are greater than ever that you can have fun as a creative artist, provocateur, satirist, commentator, and the like, if you’re not putting pressure on your artistic product to support you financially.

Happy filmmaking! And enjoy the fruits of technology.