How the internet disrupted the recorded music, newspaper, film, and
television industries and what this tells us about surviving
technological disruption.
Much of what we think we know about how the internet disrupted media
industries is wrong. Piracy did not wreck the recording industry,
Netflix isn't killing Hollywood movies, and information does not want to
be free. In Media Disrupted, Amanda Lotz looks at what really happened
when the recorded music, newspaper, film, and television industries were
the ground zero of digital disruption. It's not that digital
technologies introduced new media, Lotz explains; rather, they offered
existing media new tools for reaching people.
For example, the MP3 unbundled recorded music; as the internet enabled
new ways for people to experience and pay for music, the primary source
of revenue for the recorded music industry shifted from selling music to
licensing it. Cable television providers, written off as predigital
dinosaurs, became the dominant internet service providers. News
organizations struggled to remake businesses in the face of steep
declines in advertiser spending, while the film industry split its
business among movies that compelled people to go to theaters and others
that are better suited for streaming. Lotz looks in detail at how and
why internet distribution disrupted each industry. The stories of
business transformation she tells offer lessons for surviving and even
thriving in the face of epoch-making technological change.
