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PORTSIDE CULTURE

CAPITALISM IS DRAINING THE LIFE FROM OUR CULTURE INDUSTRIES  
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Dean Van Nguyen
December 22, 2024
Jacobin
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_ Culture industries are dominated by a few big corporations that
prefer to keep flogging old stories instead of taking a risk on
something new. Creative workers can still produce fresh ideas, but
they’re snuffed out before they get a chance to breathe _

Disney has picked off Lucasfilm, Pixar, and Marvel since 2006 — not
exactly mom-and-pop entities at the time of their purchase. , (Jaque
Silva / NurPhoto via Getty Images)

 

Review of _Derivative Media: How Wall Street Devours Culture _by
Andrew deWaard (University of California Press, 2024)

The central notion of Andrew deWaard’s enlightening
book, _Derivative Media: How Wall Street Devours Culture_
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are a small number of mammoth companies hegemonizing the entertainment
industry. They are akin to the cluster of firms that dominate tech,
and as with the tech giants, most of their offices are bunched
together, on Santa Monica Boulevard. It’s a Billionaires’ Row
populated not by artists or creatives but by hedge fund analysts,
asset managers, and various other suits of all sizes.

 

Presaged by Marxist critiques of political economy, the book tells the
story, as deWaard puts it, of how “the cultural lifeblood of a
country has been spilled on these streets by a rogues’ gallery of
financial villainy,” acting with the help of various weapons:
“financial instruments and strategies such as dividends, stock
buybacks, diversified portfolios, management fees, index funds, tax
loopholes, and futures contracts.”

Culture Vultures

DeWaard paints a bleak picture of the predatory capitalist behavior
underpinning — some might say driving — the popular arts today. He
primarily focuses on music, movies, and television, eschewing news
media, video games, or more high-end cultural pursuits such as dance,
theater, and opera. Paragraphs heave with figures and percentages,
many of which are backed up by charts and graphs — this is primarily
an academic work. But the author does make an effort to keep things
light and accessible, comparing media barons to Charles Foster Kane
and quoting _Succession_’s failson in chief Kendall Roy to explain
private equity.

The book guides readers through the various acquisitions undertaken by
these mammoth corporations that have allowed them to grow and grow,
like the pixelated snake eating orbs in the old Nokia cell phone game.
Disney, for example, has picked off Lucasfilm, Pixar, and Marvel since
2006 — not exactly mom-and-pop entities at the time of their
purchase. DeWaard charges the company, associated with childhood and
innocence, with “cartel-like” behavior, such as demanding cinemas
hand over a higher cut of ticket sales on its _Star Wars_ franchise.
What choice do the theaters have? The popularity of these movies means
they must bend.

Turning his attention to the financialization of music, there’s a
useful breakdown of the payouts artists receive from streaming
platforms, and the lesser-known practice of “song management”
investment firms vacuuming up beloved hits for the purpose of
licensing or resale. DeWaard names Hipgnosis, a company headquartered
in London, as the most aggressive of these firms, with 64,000 songs
under its control, one thousand of which were number-one hits. Company
partner and funk legend Nile Rodgers has presented it to investors as
an opportunity “to establish songs as an uncorrelated asset class
with attractive risk[-adjusted] returns” — something of a pivot,
it’s fair to say, from his teen years spent as a member of the
overtly Marxist Black Panther Party.

No cultural sphere has seen its business models usurped as regularly
over the past few decades as music.

No cultural sphere has seen its business models usurped as regularly
over the past few decades as music. In decrying the gap between
superstar musicians and independent acts, deWaard correctly points out
that “the ratio of global hits to the rarely seen or heard is wider
than ever,” though we can partially explain this in terms of major
record labels losing the control they once exercised over the means of
releasing new material.

 

Home recording, online release platforms, and social media have
lessened the importance of the traditional route of penning a record
deal; even superstar artists such as Chance the Rapper have opted
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remain as disentangled from large corporations as possible. With this
democratization has come an explosion
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material. Listening habits have also changed, shifting the goalposts
in terms of what can and can’t be considered a “global hit.”
Most pop songs simply don’t resonate in the way they used to. For
all the things Taylor Swift has accumulated, even she cannot boast a
collection of ubiquitous singles that the average person is familiar
with.

Interestingly, deWaard charges the music industry with using the
Napster piracy scare of the early 2000s to further commodify catalogs
and consolidate its power under the ruse of protecting artists. He
cites research that claims piracy does not actually negatively affect
album sales.

While many would bristle at any defense of piracy — artists, whether
they are in league with large companies or not, do need to get paid
for their work — there has always been a socialist argument for it.
Maverick music producer Steve Albini, known during his life to refuse
royalties on the music of his clients, once put it like this:

The single best thing that has happened in my lifetime in music, after
punk rock, is being able to share music, globally for free. There
won’t ever be a mass-market record industry again, and that’s fine
with me because that industry didn’t operate for the benefit of the
musicians or the audience, the only classes of people I care about.

The View From Annapurna

All that said, many of those who are in principle opposed to such
profit extraction will nevertheless try to close their minds to it
while flicking through Netflix. That’s fine — people don’t
always want to see how the sausage is made. But _Derivative
Media_ offers crucial analysis not just for leftists who oppose
corporate behavior for ethical reasons, but also for consumers who
simply want to be entertained, as deWaard examines how financialized
culture adversely affects media itself.

_Derivative Media_ offers crucial analysis not just for leftists who
oppose corporate behavior for ethical reasons, but also for consumers
who simply want to be entertained.

At this point, it’s worth pausing to say that determining the
quality of entertainment is, of course, extremely subjective. I
personally think the Marvel machine has been a disaster for Hollywood
as it monopolizes talent and resources, but others believe its scope
and technical achievement place it among the industry’s greatest
developments. Regardless, deWaard is rigorous in his pursuit of the
capitalist pressures that he insists are negatively affecting popular
culture, and many of his arguments are compelling.

DeWaard asserts that a class of wealthy funders is even having a
damaging impact on the independent movie scene, pointing to the
example of movie producer Megan Ellison, daughter of billionaire Larry
Ellison, who founded the highly successful — in terms of critical
approval, anyway — Annapurna Pictures. As declared in
the _Hollywood Reporter_
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“There’s no executive now who has a greater passion for film —
and not just the medium but a particular kind of movie-making that’s
becoming an endangered species: the specialty release, the thoughtful,
character-driven drama that the majors long ago turned their backs
on.”

Yet according to deWaard, Ellison’s overbudgeting of her projects
deters investors and increases costs for other independent films:

Even if Ellison did have the best of intentions upon starting this
company, the long-term result has been the weakening of the overall
infrastructure of independent film as it becomes ever more closely
linked to the whims of the wealthy and the vagaries of finance.

That may be true, though deWaard provides his own counterpoint by
listing the classic films Ellison has funded, including _Phantom
Thread _and _American Hustle_. It’s hard to argue against the
mechanisms that allowed such work to come into being. Movies are
expensive, after all, and directors no doubt consider Ellison’s
millions to be a godsend. Alternative crowdsourcing methods such as
Kickstarter have proved unreliable in comparison.

 

But perhaps there’s a lesson in the recent editorial choices of
the _Washington Post_. With newspaper sales plummeting, some
observers saw the rich-man ownership model, with a billionaire footing
the bill at the end of the month, as one of the few ways that a
large-scale institution like the _Post_ could still operate. But
deep suspicions that Jeff Bezos had a hand in the newspaper’s
decision not to endorse a presidential candidate this year show the
danger of any model that’s at the mercy of the one person’s whims.
Similarly, a healthier independent film industry may be one that is
built to be self-sustaining.

One of the most trenchant case studies examined in _Derivative
Media_ is the TV show _30 Rock_, which deWaard depicts as a yarn
ball of corporate interests, product placement, brand integration, and
marketing for its network NBC that presents itself as satire. I’ve
never watched _30 Rock_, but deWaard’s analysis did make me recall
a scene in the American version of _The Office_.

During a trip to New York, lead character Michael Scott mistakenly
believes he has spotted_ 30 Rock_ creator/star Tina Fey, while
failing to recognize the real Conan O’Brien. As both _The
Office_ and _Late Night with Conan O’Brien_ were NBC productions,
I assumed someone had simply knocked on O’Brien’s dressing room
door and asked if he would make a quick cameo. But had he been
carefully placed as a way to promote another NBC show? Should I have
been more cynical?

Future Schlock

As I read _Derivativee Media_, I thought more and more about _Ready
Player One_, Steven Spielberg’s tub of pop-culture-referencing gloop
released in 2018, which is only mentioned in the book briefly. The
movie is set in 2045, at a time when people escape into a virtual
reality of predominantly twentieth-century pop iconography. It
occurred to me while watching that the movie assumes that no new pop
culture will be created between now and when the movie is set.

There’s barely a blockbuster movie released these days that is not
based on a preexisting movie, character, book, or other form of
intellectual property.

It felt like a narrative choice born of convenience. But maybe _Ready
Player One_ is actually an accurate picture of the future we’re
racing toward. There’s barely a blockbuster movie released these
days that is not based on a preexisting movie, character, book, or
other form of intellectual property. Innovation is suppressed in the
quest for a sure thing, a quick buck. Of course, these industries have
always sought to make profit, but in the haze of sequels, reboots, and
remakes, some good and some bad, that word “derivative” seems more
apt than ever.

To his credit, deWaard never instructs readers to turn off, cease
listening, or stop watching, nor does he turn on the vast majority of
the talent. Media might be increasingly derivative, but it can still
be enjoyable, even nourishing. Every year, artists, operating inside
the system or as independents, overcome the quagmire of corporate
interests and economic pressures to produce great work. So perhaps the
message of the book goes largely unspoken: even in the capitalistic
crush, the human impulse to create endures.

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Contributors

Dean Van Nguyen is a Dublin-based freelance writer for publications
including the Guardian and Pitchfork.

 

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