Big 5 media firms have made more acquisitions than Big Tech, nearly fifteen hundred

Evidence

Well-founded worries about the unchecked power of Big Tech motivates a lot of this debate, but the media system should not be overlooked. It is well known that the Big 5 tech companies (Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet/Google, Meta/Facebook), with high valuations on the stock market and thus easy access to credit, bought their size and scale through constantly acquiring competitors. Microsoft excelled (no pun intended) in this strategy in the personal computing sector, while the Google/Facebook duopoly bought up the vast majority of firms in the AdTech market, up and down the value chain. In total, as seen in figure 2.7, the Big 5 tech companies have gobbled up at least eleven hundred other companies. Less well known is the fact that the Big 5 media companies actually surpass Big Tech in terms of mergers and acquisitions, approaching fifteen hundred by my calculations, as seen in figure 2.8.16 The biggest acquisitions—like Comcast buying NBCUniversal, or Disney’s string of acquisitions in the 2010s that included Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, and Fox—are mere drops in a very large bucket. Consolidation has been a recurrent feature of the film, television, and music industries for decades, but media companies are increasingly expanding their dominance across the globe and across multiple sectors. The next two chapters explore the dominant companies within the music industry and the film and television industries, respectively, but at this point we can note that although consolidation is not a new phenomenon, it is supercharged by financial capital. — Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, 108

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s study of media consolidation and ownership structures shaping artistic form; this is the empirical foundation for the Part One claim.