Data analytics and new media competition made culturally weakened industries ripe for private equity

Evidence

Conventional wisdom holds that the cultural industries were historically not targeted as investment vehicles for two reasons: fickle audiences meant high rates of failure, and the Hollywood and music oligopolies maintained their grip on the necessary talent, distribution, and marketing networks. Over the past two decades, however, film, television, and music have lost much of their cultural centrality as a multitude of new options for entertainment and leisure activity have arisen, such as video games and social media. Meanwhile, Silicon Valley’s entrance into the cultural industries has developed the data analytics to help alleviate the riskiness of audiences, while also destabilizing legacy media’s grasp on the foundational components of talent, distribution, and marketing. Private equity has noticed this disturbance and has sought to capitalize on it since 2004. — Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, 141

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s broader project of tracing financial instruments into cultural artifacts — this is the causal precondition (why PE entered media at all) that Part Two’s formal arguments build on.
• QUESTION: The phrase ‘Silicon Valley’s entrance… has developed the data analytics to help alleviate the riskiness of audiences’ invites chasing exactly how data analytics reduces perceived audience risk — a mechanism worth investigating concretely.