It's curious because the teen and young adult audience is precisely the audience that is most proficient at piracy (online streaming/torrenting) these shows. I mean, a large percentage of our generation (myself included) doesn't even own TVs because it's so easy to get all your watchable media from the internet, and even some of those that do just hook their computers up to their TVs. This generation is so incredibly plugged in that, if it exists and it is mediatized, we can access it, almost without a second thought. This fact only increases in scope and impact as time goes on.
Maybe it's a mark of our youth-obsessed culture that an industry that is drowning fast and sinking its dwindling funds into marketing to come up with cheap gimmicks like 3D to draw us back in has never thought to simply adjust its focus to an audience that isn't as likely to pirate. Image is everything in the culture industry, and being seen as "old" and "out of touch" is apparently not an option for the production companies.
Of course, that would be a temporary solution, since people keep getting old and dying. Eventually, all us 20-somethings will become the next crop of 80 somethings, and the new 20-somethings will have magical psychic machines wired directly into their brains so they can access the 25th season of Glee instantly. But they haven't come up with any better solutions, besides gimmicks and fads, so as temporary fixes go, its cheap and harmless.
No comments:
Post a Comment