“The View From the Phlipside” is a media commentary program airing on WRFA-LP, Jamestown NY. It can be heard Monday through Friday around 7:30 AM. The following are scripts which may not exactly match the aired version of the program. Mostly because the host may suddenly choose to add or subtract words at a moment’s notice. WRFA-LP is not responsible for any such silliness or the opinions expressed. You can listen to a live stream of WRFA or find a podcast of this program at wrfalp.com. Copyright 2013-17 by Jay Phillippi. All Rights Reserved. You like what you see and hear? Drop me a line and we can talk.
Programs from week of June 11, 2017
This Week’s Podcast
My name is Jay Phillippi and I’ve spent my life in and around the media. TV, radio, the movies and more. I love them, and I hate them and I always have an opinion. Call this the View from the Phlipside.
And Now We Stream
Music superstar Taylor Swift does two things as well as anyone on the planet right now. One is making hit music. The other is dominate pop culture media. Last week she racked up a major move in category two.
Three years ago the pop star announced that she was pulling all her music from streaming music services like Pandora and Spotify. She felt that the artists did not get a fair financial shake for the use of their music. As of last Friday, that ban is over. All of her music catalog is available on all major streaming services.
That got me thinking about how much the relationship between the music industry and streaming services have changed over the last couple years. Fifteen years ago, the music industry treated Napster like a vampire that had to die. While the service had a variety of issues, it was clear that the old line music industry was going to cling to its long time business model to its dying breath. Today, people are pointing to the streaming media as the savior of the industry. Last year streaming media outstripped digital download and physical sales combined, to generate fifty-one percent of the total revenues for the industry in the U.S.
And there is a lot going on in the streaming media industry. One of the early leaders was Pandora, but the last couple years have been hard. Things may be turning around following the four hundred eighty million dollars that Sirius XM just invested in the company. That’s going to allow them to try and catch back up to industry leaders YouTube and Spotify.
The big streaming companies still present a problem for independent artists. The royalty system is based on millions of stream in order to make any money. That’s where a new service in Arizona comes in. Arena Music offers a much higher royalty (a penny per stream versus a couple thousandths of a penny) plus they offer an outlet for the artist’s merchandise too. It’s the kind of innovation that never seems to occur to old-line music distributors.
Plenty has changed over the last fifteen years. 2015 and 2016 were years when the industry saw revenues rise for the first time in a decade and a half. And it’s been streaming media that’s led the way.
The streaming industry will also enjoy the virtual endorsement of music’s biggest pop star. Taylor Swift has seen the industry make progress in paying the artists and so she’s back. Of course, her timing was impeccable. The announcement was made just in time to steal the spotlight from the launch of a new album by her arch-rival, Katy Perry. Like I said, she’s really good at this.
Price For Privacy
Over the last several years, we’ve been talking a lot about privacy when you are online. As I said just recently, assume that nothing is private when it comes to what you post. The other side of privacy has to do with the data about where you go on the Interwebs. What websites you visit, what kinds of products and services you are interested in. There is a ton of money being made by collecting and selling that kind of information. People tend to fall into a couple categories on that subject. Those who are very concerned and upset, those who are mildly concerned, and those who never even think about the subject at all. I don’t have any scientific data to support this claim, but if I were a betting man, I’d bet that most of us, the vast majority of us, fall into those last two categories. Even if we’re aware of the concept, it’s not something that we spend a lot of time worrying about.
So maybe we’re lucky that there is that small but cantankerous demographic that likes to make a lot of noise about it. Those concerns resulted in the announcement that Google would add an ad-blocker to its Chrome browser sometime next year. Apple followed suit, announcing the addition of ad-tracker blocker to its Safari browser. The goal there is to limit the amount of personalized data is shared by its users.
The big potential growth area for gathering this kind of info is on our mobile devices, phones, and tablets. Now ad-tracking is harder on mobile, so the data folk are always on the lookout for ways to increase their take. Turns out the entry point may be very simple.
Pay us for it.
A study done by the folks at Parks Associates found that fifty percent of users would be willing to trade their mobile data for discounts on their electrical bill. Almost as many people would do it in return for updates and improvements on their equipment. This supports other smaller studies that said for the right deal, folks would be willing to trade their usage data.
My hunch is that the fifty percent figure is low. Because of that whole third group, the “I don’t care”s, would be more than happy to get something in return for something they barely know they have. From a purely business point of view, why not? It’s my data, and it has value. In a free market, I should be allowed to make a financial gain on what I “produce”, right? So why not this.
Which brings up the question. How much would it take to buy your data? What’s that privacy that you barely think about worth to you?
Ladies Lead
Hollywood has long held that movie audiences won’t go see a movie with a female lead. That to be a big hit, you need a leading MAN. With the enormous success of “Wonder Woman”, those assumptions may finally be under serious review.
For the record, Wonder Woman had the third best opening weekend of any movie so far this year. It trailed only “Beauty and the Beast” and “Guardians of the Galaxy, Volume 2”. It is comfortably ahead of franchise mainstays like the latest “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie, and can reasonably be expected to move past “The Fate of the Furious” and “Logan” into the third spot overall so far. It’s interesting to note that another movie with a female lead is at number one, that’s “Beauty and the Beast”. The reason why I give the nod to “Wonder Woman” is that it’s a classic summer, blockbuster action movie. The kind that always is dominated by male leads. That’s the kind of movie performance that will make even the slow thinkers in Hollywood to take another look at what’s happening out there.
Of course, most of those slow thinkers in Hollywood are men. That’s because most of the people in positions of creative power are still men. Of the 250 top grossing movies from last year, only seven per cent had female directors. When you look at the behind the scenes folks, producers, writers, editors, and cinematographers, the number only rises to seventeen percent.
It’s not like there isn’t a long history of great movies with female leads to inspire the thought process. I am a huge fan of old movies. Just a week ago or so I finally saw 1945’s “Mildred Pierce” which won an Oscar for Joan Crawford and relaunched her career. Or try Crawford and Bette Davis in “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?”. Arguably, one of the greatest buddy films, a genre that almost assumes male leads, is 1991’s “Thelma and Louise”. At least two movies with female leads have topped a billion dollars in gross revenues, “Alice In Wonderland” and “Frozen”.
“Wonder Woman” presents a double-barreled challenge to the old boys of the movie world. It’s a movie about a woman that was directed BY a woman. There was a lot of pressure on director Patty Jenkins. If the movie flopped, female action movies and female directors would have one more argument against them. Instead, both director and film have performed beautifully.
Hollywood has become almost synonymous with liberal politics but remains a bastion of male chauvinism. Maybe it will require some serious butt kicking by a female superhero to get the industry to make the move that is so long overdue.
I’d pay to see that movie.
Call that the View From the Phlipside
Copyright Jay Phillippi, 2017
Theme music for “The View From the Phlipside” and “TVFTP – Podcast” is “Hustle”
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
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