How the internet disrupted the recorded music, newspaper, film, and television industries and what this tells us about surviving technological disruption.
Much of what we think we know about how the internet "disrupted" media industries is wrong. Piracy did not wreck the recording industry, Netflix isn't killing Hollywood movies, and information does not want to be free. In Media Disrupted, Amanda Lotz looks at what really happened when the recorded music, newspaper, film, and television industries were the ground zero of digital disruption. It's not that digital technologies introduced "new media," Lotz explains; rather, they offered existing media new tools for reaching people.
For example, the MP3 unbundled recorded music; as the internet enabled new ways for people to experience and pay for music, the primary source of revenue for the recorded music industry shifted from selling music to licensing it. Cable television providers, written off as predigital dinosaurs, became the dominant internet service providers. News organizations struggled to remake businesses in the face of steep declines in advertiser spending, while the film industry split its business among movies that compelled people to go to theaters and others that are better suited for streaming. Lotz looks in detail at how and why internet distribution disrupted each industry. The stories of business transformation she tells offer lessons for surviving and even thriving in the face of epoch-making technological change.
Reviews
"Provocative. Revolutionizes notions of the root causes of our sector’s disruption. Lotz exposes myths while connecting to consumers’ everyday experiences. Controversial enough to spark debate; commonsense enough to acknowledge the truth in her analysis and storytelling.”
—Chris Gannett, President of EarBuds (social music platform); former CMO of CORE Media Group (owner and producer of American Idol and So You Think You Can Dance)
“Amanda Lotz is one of the keenest minds in, and writers about, media. This book is an essential diagnosis of how and why tech disruption changed the media ecosystem, and as a consequence, a must-read road map for the disruption ahead.”
—Evan Shapiro, Producer; Professor of Media at NYU and Fordham University
“Lotz’s brilliant dissection of issues like the similarities between music and software, and why ‘news,’ isn’t ‘journalism,’ reveals why the conventional lens of ‘disruption’ stymies efforts to shape the digital landscape.”
—Amit S. Mukherjee, Professor of Leadership and Strategy, Hult International Business School; author of Leading in the Digital World
