Where the Medium is King

When I was a kid, a Hollywood blockbuster would take months to come to India (if at all). Same with TV shows. Now, simultaneous worldwide releases are becoming quite common. And at times, even big name movies, like the recently released The Amazing Spider-Man 2 gets released in India before the US! TV shows are getting broadcast in India within days (or a week or two) of the US/BBC broadcast.

The reasons are easy to see: there is no longer the constraint of only so many reels; digital content can be sent almost instantly to any corner of the planet; and if they wait too long, people would have already seen the pirated version.

But with music, the digital medium has changed things in a different way. Describing Beyoncé’s last album released on 13 Dec last year, David Hepworth points out something very strange:
“The window of ballyhoo around a big album, which in the past would have lasted a couple of months, was finished in a week, leaving the rest of us wondering whether it had really happened at all.”
The hype just lasted 7 days. Imagine that! So why the ultra-short duration of the excitement?
“That's a reflection of how much the revolution in distribution has changed the game. The easier you make something to acquire the faster its mystique will decay.”

Further, digital distribution channels (aka the Net) allows for extremely niche content to find its patrons. So perhaps we are “spoiled for choice and our attention spans are getting shorter”. Hepworth says that’s not the reason (at least not all of it). He may not be exaggerating when he says that the delivery mechanism is becoming a bigger brand than the content or the traditional record labels! Case in point:
“YouTube and iTunes are just two of the brand names that were largely unknown 12 years ago but have now eclipsed all the record labels in all the world.”
Why’s that?
“The delivery mechanisms are the new stars. These are either free or they feel as if they're free, they touch us all in a way that individual products don't and they're designed by people so attuned to our inner child that they can make us hug ourselves from sheer delight.”
And perhaps we enjoy the thought of:
“Travelling endlessly along the intoxicating open highways of delivery, fervently hoping never to arrive.”

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