It’s the end of the Media World as we know it.
I “professionally” recorded my first multi-track song when I was 15 years old and back in 1994
that was quite an accomplishment; these days, my 16 year old nephew has more videos on the web than I do. Media editing, once a respected and complicated profession has become the hobby of thousands of kids that make songs on their “garage band” (included in every mac) or make their own videos on Windows Video Maker (included in every PC), and these sometimes sound and look way better than those produced by media companies a few years ago. My brother posts HD videos of my 4 months-old nephew for the love God.
David Meerman Scott starts his book The New Rules of Marketing and PR, saying that you shouldn’t hire a video company and pay them $80,000 (average) for an online video campaign, that you should get that $200 video camera and upload it yourself (as he did for Microsoft Corporation a few years ago), and I’m proud to say, that I’ve been saying the same thing for a couple of years now. Earlier this year I hired a company to make a product video for close to $10,000 and then made another version of the same from scratch using Adobe Flash and some free music I found online for FREE.
These examples present me with the idea that this industry is going through some changes that we already saw the music industry go through after the whole Napster lawsuit, and the birth of affordable computer recording; the question is: For how long will it survive? My bet is five more years, till some new technology comes along, and everything known to man as the media industry dies as we know it.
Since this is called YOUNG AND EMPLOYED, I feel obligated to ask “what’s going to happen with all those jobs in the industry?” There are only so many Starbucks to work at, and these are people with degrees and years of experience doing what they do. I’m not saying that everyone will suddenly be unemployed, since there will still be room for SuperBowl commercials that require better quality than Youtube but a big chunk of these people will no longer be needed.
IF you believe in my hypothesis, I would recommend one thing. Everything you get paid for is for business, and even if you don’t understand business at all because what you do it carry a video camera around, it is a fact that they pay you because you help them make money. Chances are you won’t find another job with the similar description in 5 years unless you go to Hollywood, so learn about the business part of your job, a manager in the media industry can be as successful as a manager in the hotel industry, but if you know nothing of the business you work for and stay working on your JOB, instead of your CAREER… you are in trouble.
Good luck
-Frank
September 28th, 2009 at 5:28 PM
Agreed. Engineers have made it possible to replace so many human beings with pieces of software that do their job a lot better. You still need the creative hand/eye of the artist – but you just need it for significantly fewer hours than it used to.
In the new economy, ideas are worthless (they abound dime-a-dozen), information is next to worthless as well (it is free or almost free, just go to wikipedia). The only thing that matters is your time, and how you employ it to provide value to others. Good thing technology leaves you more time to build successful business relationships and to deliver a lot more value than it used to.
We just need to adapt to the new realities.