About geeks, the industry of mass art and how copyright killed classical music

The idea to write a similar post came to me a long time ago; In some copywriters, I wrote in plain text that copyright kills classical art and promised to reveal this thesis later. For a long time I was stopped by the fact that on Habré such a topic is unlikely to be very interesting. But, after some deliberation, I came to the conclusion that the problem “copyright is an art” is wider than classical music and literature proper and affects many much more mundane things. For example, the gaming industry.



If we look closely at the genre diversity in the gaming industry (I’ll make a reservation right away, I mean single-player story games without touching mmorpg and casual fashions), then we will find that it has significantly degraded compared to the 90s. Quest genre disappeared completely, TBS is on the verge of extinction. Significantly reduced livestock classic RPG type Baldur Gate, Planescape Torment (ie such RPG, where you have to think with your head when building a character). It has become much less games with the original game mechanics (such as Settlers I-II). Actually, everything was already said for me here, see the picture on the left.



Most of the modern games - this is some kind of cross between RPG from the first person, shooter and arcade. At the same time, which is typical, a lot of money is spent on developing these games, so the problem is clearly not in the desire of the publisher to save money. Exactly the same thing happened with music: all the variety of genres (opera, symphony, sonata, fugue, etc.) in classical art degraded to exactly one - the song. And, if I am not mistaken in my assumptions, very soon the same will happen with game devs.

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Actually, if some studios stop regularly digging up the corpse of a flight attendant (see Might & Magic Heroes VI, Civilization V, Diablo 3, etc), then this can happen right tomorrow. Why so? What do gamedev 90's and classical music have in common?







Both that, and another became geeks for geeks . It is necessary to thank here the 20th century for this wonderful word, because I can not find another term here.



Who, if not geeks, were the Viennese aristocrats of the early 19th century, arranging everyday musical salons, playing themselves on several instruments, and even sometimes ruining (!) Because of their passion for music? The real geeks were :)



What is the key difference between the boom and the ordinary mass consumer? Geek lives in his world where his hobby dominates. He does not care, by and large, on commerce; he is ready to spend a lot of time on his passion with great interest, and, as a rule, sooner or later, the geek begins to make his amusement park, that is, he himself is involved in the production of interesting content.



A geek doesn’t just care about difficulties - the harder the better! This geek invents the “nightmare” mode and passes Morrowind in 8 minutes. Geek Mozart, for example, played the piano with his nose, and some of Beethoven’s works during his lifetime were not performed due to their incredible complexity.



So, the gamedev of the 90s, and the era of classicism can be fully described as the formation of a numerous geek society that produced and consumed tons of original content. In general, almost any noticeable phenomenon in a culture is formed exactly this way - due to the mass of people with an accentuation of this phenomenon.



Much more interesting is what happens next.

Industry

If a geek hobby turns out to be sufficiently high-quality and interesting, it will gradually begin to capture non-geeks. If this process is also commercially profitable, then an industry of mass production will arise - with games and music it happened.



At first, the industry is geek oriented - they are willing to spend more money. Then the market grows, and at some point the mass audience begins to bring comparable money.



So, we have a certain area of ​​content production, segmented (conditionally, of course) into geeks and a mass audience. It is clear that the former prefer complex and original content, the latter - the content is simpler and more effective.



And here it is, the key question: how will the ratio of produced content change over time ?



It is clear that both the mass segment and the geek segment will reproduce themselves. Therefore, we are interested in the motivations for the transition of the consumer from one segment to another. In the general case, we are dealing with the motivations of market participants - producers (who may strive to drag the consumer to another segment) and consumers (who have intrinsic motivation).



1. Neither the consumer nor the manufacturer is motivated. Those. the society as a whole is still concerned with this particular hobby, and the manufacturer has no economic sense to work for the mass segment. An example is the art market. Because copies of paintings are not appreciated and the product is unique and single-piece, there is no mass market, not counting the artists on the Arbat and the reproductions of Mona Lisa on tapestries. The branch was kept on geeks in the times of Michelangelo, and it still holds today; the average man in the street is indifferent to modern art.



2. The consumer is motivated to move to the geek segment, the manufacturer is not motivated to influence consumer choice. This situation occurs where geekiness enhances social status — attractiveness for the opposite sex or the ability to measure by picks. The market in this case is strictly segmented and changes little over time. An example is the sports car market, which gets along well with the mass segment and does not show any tendencies to death. In essence, this is a situation of equilibrium.



3. Consumers are not motivated to move, and producers - yes. A situation arises when one of the segments (usually massive) is more attractive for the manufacturer. This is our case.



The market, I recall, is already segmented. The manufacturer generates content for both geeks and masses. But, at the same time, generating content for the masses is slightly more convenient for the manufacturer. Why?



Because in this case, production is more predictable. He made a film with chases and special effects, invited the "stars", rolled off 100M to the graphics - at the exit a blockbuster that would at least beat himself off. (Of course, anything happens here, but we say - as a whole.) I took off an art-house movie - the devil knows what will come of it. You will not collect much money, and you will not put the respect of connoisseurs in your pocket.



(By the way, sudden ups and downs, wealth and ruin - this is another reliable sign of the emerging geek market; in a stable industry, these processes stretch for decades.)



In total, the manufacturer begins to focus more on the mass market and less on the geeky market. Sometimes the situation reaches the point of absurdity, when a hundred radio stations operate in the pop segment, and a half cripple - on rockers or, say, blues lovers.



As a result, the ratio of the audience due to more intensive advertising of the pop segment, due to its greater efficiency and accessibility, begins to slowly creep in the direction of the mass market; Naturally, this additionally stimulates the manufacturer to work on the mass market - the process is accelerating. As a result, a geeky segment can simply become extinct or shrink to a microscopic size - as happened, for example, with the classics, which makes up about 3% of the world music industry, and that of these 3% most of the collections are “100,500 best classic tunes to visit a tanning salon .



Yes, yes, and with game devs it will happen soon.



It would seem, where is the copyright? And while copyright is, by definition, a set of legal rules governing the market. Now it is arranged in such a way that the mass segment is more profitable than the geek one - precisely due to the fact that revenue = the number of copies sold, and not quality. For example, in the field of fine art copyright is not important - only the original is valued, not copies, and there is no mass market there.



If copyright was originally arranged on the principle of subscription (there are content aggregators that buy it from the authors and sell the subscription to the consumer for all the content at once), then the described processes would at least significantly slow down - because the manufacturer no longer needs as many copies as possible sell, and as best as possible to satisfy the consumer.



By the way, now it is too late - a change in the principles of copyright will in no way help reanimate the 3% segment of classical music lovers.

Finally

Many things happen not because people are bad, but because there is no feedback. It is not clear that the gamedev could potentially stop sliding into these endless colorful time killers, there is no feedback. Music is no longer save.



And it is not clear that it can destroy the copyright system in the sense of the principle of payment by the number of copies produced. No feedback either.



Note. I know that the themes "is it true that game devil has fallen into UG" and "is it true that music has slipped into UG" are very holivorny. Therefore, I will not take part in this flame (and I have no doubt that it will begin now).