The Sky Is Rising: The Entertainment Industry Is Large & Growing.. Not Shrinking

[p2p rules]

Announcing the release of our new research report, The Sky Is Rising


Today, in Cannes, at the Midem conference, I did a presentation that was something of a follow up to the presentation I did here three years ago, about how Trent Reznor's experiments represented the future of music business models. This time, the presentation coincided with the release of a new research paper that we've spent the past few months working on, sponsored by CCIA and Engine Advocacy, in which we did a thorough look at the true state of the entertainment industry. For years, we've been hearing doom and gloom reports about how the industry is dying, how customers just want stuff for free, about analog dollars turning into digital dimes... and (all too frequently) about how new laws are needed to save these industries.

Yet, what we find when looking through the research -- from a variety of sources to corroborate and back up any research we found -- is that the overall entertainment ecosystem is in a real renaissance period. The sky truly is rising, not falling: the industry is growing both in terms of revenue and content. We split the report up into video & film, books, music and video games -- and all four segments are showing significant growth (not shrinking) over the last decade. All of them are showing tremendous opportunity. The amount of content that they're all producing is growing at an astounding rate (which again, is the most important thing). But revenue, too, is growing. Equally important is that rather than consumers just wanting to get stuff for free, they have continually spent a greater portion of their income on entertainment -- with the percentage increasing by 15% from 2000 to 2008.

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