Over the past few months, I’ve been spending most of my time thinking about the future of media, and how crypto might fit into that picture. Media is at the core of almost every consumer behavior and experience — education, entertainment, culture, commerce, communication, advertising — so when most people talk about “rapid technological change,” much of what they’re describing is the evolution of media and how it’s transformed these aspects of their lives.
Progressive Democratization
Thanks in large part to the proliferation of personal computing, the costs of both distributing and creating media have been steadily declining for the last two hundred years. The 19th and 20th centuries brought with them an abundance of innovation in media technology, although the real sea change was ushered in the by the rise of the Internet, because it drove the cost of media distribution to near $0 so rapidly. Consequently, the last thirty years have been an exploration of this economic reality.
As I’ll dive into below, the cost of media creation has conversely been much more elusive. While the possibilities afforded by cameras phones and “home studios” have meaningfully expanded access, the reality is that financing & production costs remain the primary constraint for most creators. When it comes to brining these costs down, innovation has felt much more incremental, although I think this is finally beginning to change as Generative AI and Crypto (yes, crypto!) come online and catalyze this next phase of “progressive democratization.”
The Media Supply Chain
The focus of this essay is media businesses, specifically, how they evolve through these economic fluctuations. I think this is a worthwhile area of inquiry in part because many “consumer crypto” businesses are fundamentally media businesses in search of a real business model, but also because I think there’s a deeply interconnected, but under-appreciated relationship between media formats <> new consumer behaviors <> advertising surfaces <> business models. In light of yet another major shift, this time in the cost of creation, its worth looking to this relationship for signal.
Broadcast Media
The era of Broadcast Media (essentially pre-Internet) was characterized by relatively high costs for both the creation and distribution of media. This economic reality gave rise to what I’ll be referring to as the corporate studio & label model, which became the predominant business model for the creation, production, distribution and monetization of creative media, and remains so today.
Within this model, corporate studios & labels (i.e. Disney, Warner Bros, Paramount) function very similarly to private equity and venture capital firms, but for the development of commercially viable creative media, rather than for technology businesses. Financing & Production are arguably the most important functions of the business, although the largest media conglomerates were often vertically integrated, meaning that they owned Distribution channels (i.e. theaters, radio stations, TV networks, brick & mortar stores) as well. Finished products (i.e. musical compositions, films, shows) were generally monetized via some combination of direct sales and advertising revenue. Any payment that made its way back to the Creative Labor (i.e. writers, producers, composers) was generally outlined in complex contracts drawn up by corporate media lawyers and fundamentally downstream of the corporation’s revenue. Indie studios & labels (i.e. Miramax) existed but generally only catered to niche and longer-tail audiences, never directly threatening the control of the “majors.”
Today, most of us interact with what remains of the corporate studio & label model via “streaming platforms,” which I think are best understood as lasting relics of the Broadcast Era rather than as a counter to the trend of “progressive democratization.” Despite the changing economics of the Internet and digital media, streaming platforms exist because the majority of content hosted on these platforms is produced and/or financed by corporate studios & labels, meaning that there is a real floor on ROI. Too much capital has been invested for that media to be distributed freely. Full stop. So although direct sales largely remain a thing of the past, media companies have figured out that they can get consumers to pay something by offering “premium” features with all-you-can-watch-style subscriptions. Streaming subscription revenue is not what direct sales or TV revenue was (hence why ads are making a come back!) but its absolutely better than the alternative: nothing. It’s also worth noting that the continued existence of corporate studios & labels and they “fiat media” they produce assumes the (timely and competent) enforcement of IP law to combat behaviors such as “piracy” — an assumption which may not hold in the age of generative AI.
For those of us living in 2024, this model will seem a bit draconian, but its important to keep in mind that there were really no alternatives at the time. Today we make jokes about which artists might be “industry plants,” but this was a time when being co-signed by a major studio or label was the only real way to get one’s work out into the world. It was only the falling costs of creation and distribution that created other options.
User-generated Media
The era of User-generated Media (essentially post-Internet) has been characterized by relatively low costs of distribution, but a stark bifurcation in the costs of creation. Instead of directly disrupting the broadcast model of corporate studios & labels (where the cost of creation remained high), the ubiquity of smartphones ushered in an entirely new era of amateur, low-cost media (i.e. photos, stories, short-form video, text posts) that exist separate from and in parallel to the old model. This is the current paradigm of “social media,” where we expand beyond the mere ability to “read” and also begin to “write.” Media is user-generated, networked, and interactive.
Within this model, we see the emergence of a new kind of media conglomerate — one that produces no media of its own, but instead aggregates and distributes media generated by end-users onto a centralized digital platform. As media became essentially free to reproduce and distribute, the notion of “direct sales” vanished completely and was replaced entirely by advertising revenue. There is nothing of value to sell but aggregated attention. This the logic of the “Attention Economy,” a fundamentally new economic regime for media in which scale and volume matter above all else, and where media is only valuable insofar as it captures end-user attention on behalf of an advertiser.
Most people reading this will be familiar with the (endless) challenges and setbacks of “social media” platforms, but again, we must resist the urge to see only the downsides in these business models. Platforms like Instagram, TikTok and especially YouTube are radically democratized and empowering to creators in comparison to what the Broadcast Media era had to offer — it’s not even close. Although social media has not been a direct disruption of the corporate studio & label model, it has absolutely forced the incumbents of the Broadcast Era to move differently by forcing them to compete for the public’s finite attention, as well as by arming the amateur creator with truly power distribution tools:
YouTube and the semi-pro creator — Easily the most prolific user-generated media platform ever, YouTube commands a very unique place in the market as neither a “social media” platform nor a traditional “streaming platform.” Although short-form content has become more of a focus in recent years, the true power of YouTube lies in the way it’s transformed traditional long-form media formats, such as Radio —> Podcasts, TV Show —> Web Series, MTV —> Artist channels, as well as pioneered new formats: Video Essays, Reaction Videos, Product Reviews, DIY content, Music Cover content and (much) more. YouTube is also in many ways a pioneer of “direct-to-creator” advertising, and remains the undisputed leader in creator monetization thanks to their robust ad revenue sharing programs.
The rise of “influencer marketing” — One of the clearest illustrations of my progressive democratization thesis is the world of “influencer marketing,” which has become a multi-billion dollar industry in essentially a decade. This is a reflection, not only of user attention shifting from TV to social media, but also of significant shifts in user expectations — consumers want to buy products sold and advertised to them by people they trust (friends & niche internet micro-celebrities), in contexts they enjoy (organic content, not spam). For many brands, especially those with younger audiences, highly-curated social media campaigns with aligned creators have significantly better ROI than TV or streaming ads — a trend I expect to accelerate. Many still view platforms like TikTok as something like “the dancing platform for teenage girls,” but I think a better conceptualization is “decentralized QVC / MTV / etc.”
Indie studios & labels achieve mass distribution — It’s difficult to conceive of today, but User-generated Media platforms gave rise to the first amateur and independent creators to achieve mass distribution without any support from corporate studios & labels. Perhaps few moments capture this trend better than the success of Macklemore’s 2012 record “Thrift Shop,” which was recognized by Billboard as the first song to achieve #1 without any support from “majors.” In fact, this trend has been so prolific that old media players (corporate studios & labels) have begun sourcing talent and creative IP directly from social media platforms. Countless creatives have gotten their start in “Hollywood” by way of success on social media, and in some cases, creators have even been able to self-fund their productions through fan support and crowdfunding.
Programmable Media
The era of Programmable Media will be characterized by relatively low costs for both the distribution and creation of media across the board — including everything from studio production-quality films, shows and music to code & software.
First and foremost, I think its important to address the uniqueness of software as a creative medium, because unlike any form of broadcast or user-generated media, software has a “meta,” self-reproducing quality to it. Not only can you use software to create a song, but you can use software to create software that makes creating songs easier. Additionally, as software creation moves into an era of real abundance and media creation broadly goes to $0, I think we should expect to see meaningful shifts in what I’ll call the “domain of skill” — which refers to the social consensus, at any given moment, around what is considered “skilled” or “artful” work.
Fundamentally, I think the “software program” is emerging as the most important form factor for the next era of media. It’s of course still very early, but there are already pretty clear signs of this shift beginning to materialize if you know where to look. On the Generative AI side, we’re seeing lots of experimentation with agent-based media, simulations, generative personalization and relational interaction with media. While on the Crypto side, affordable access to public blockchains is enabling experimentation around user-generated money & value, media with access controls and economic incentives programmed into it, and liquid global markets for media assets. Not only is media cheaper than ever to produce (songs, money, video), but the financing tools at our disposal have also never been better:
Chatbots — Chatbots & agent-based media are becoming increasingly complex, personalized and embedded into applications of all kinds, transforming the way we interface with and produce media.
Generative Interfaces — Minimally technical users can now build functional, custom software (and even operating systems) purely through prompt engineering. Generative AI also enables these interfaces to be infinitely extending. (Here’s my winning submission for a competitive prompt engineering hackathon.)
User-generated Money — With Bitcoin as the original instantiation of user-generated money, blockchains have unlocked the possibility for any kind of value (from US dollars to JPEGs) to be represented by code. Token programs enable anyone to turn anything into an tradeable and programmable asset.
“Likeness” as a creative tool — Machine learning allows us to create programs that can “learn” the distinct aesthetic styles of human creators and then remix and/or recreate them at scale.
Runtime Artwork — For the first time ever, smart contract platforms have given computer-native artists a truly persistent, open and interactive medium to create with (blockchains as “digital sculpture gardens” h/t @0x113d).
Programmable Incentives — Token programs allow economic incentives & monetization schemes to programmed directly into a media asset, bringing new meaning to the phrase “direct-to-consumer.”
Closing Thoughts
For me, the real endgame and is about finally, once and for all, collapsing the extractive value chain between creators and end-users. Independent creators & collectives, as well as the “scenes” from which they emerge, can and (in my opinion) should start to replace corporate studios & labels as the dominant generators and monetizers of creative IP and “Culture.” This has been the dream of every creative for a long time, and it’s increasingly becoming a coordination problem, not a technical problem.
“…this technology… blockchains, trust-minimized architecture, unique digital objects that are provably scarce, these are the first ingredients to allow that fat, that intermediated extraction, to now get removed, and for value to truly collapse between a creator of anything and a fan of anything…” — Derek Edwards on Liquid Culture podcast
Some active research questions:
Price discovery mechanisms & secondary market structures for media assets — How much does a song cost? 99 cents to buy? $0.000001 per stream? What about permission to remix the vocal track? There’s a certain sense in which we don’t actually have any clue what anything costs because true price discovery for media has never been possible at scale.
Programmable Incentives — How creative can we get w/r/t the access controls, monetization primitives & incentive schemes we program directly into a piece of media? Instead of combating “piracy” with corporate lawyers and government enforcement, can we instead use economic incentives to align interests, incentivizing the remix & reuse of media in specific ways? What is the role of "platforms" in a world where these things are enforced at the level of the media itself?
Discovery & Curation — How will these aspects of consumption evolve as the media formats evolve? What new consumer behaviors, advertising surfaces and business models will emerge?
If you’ve made it this far — thank you!
I’ll be writing about the future of media on an ongoing basis, as well as working on some experiments around novel token standards & minting schemes. As always, my DMs are open to anyone exploring these ideas! :)
