The Robots Are Coming!

by Andres Oppenheimer

  RICHARD GERE: TODAY’S MOVIES ARE SHOT IN THREE WEEKS

  One of the things that caught my attention when I interviewed actor Richard Gere was his assertion that today’s movies are shot in half the time they once were. During the interview, shortly after he had presented his film Norman at the Miami Film Festival in 2017, Gere told me that “before, we used to make films like Norman with budgets that let us film for forty-five or fifty days. But now we can do that in twenty to twenty-five days,” with smaller budgets.

  Shooting times have been cut mainly thanks to computer technology. Where you once had to build multiple sets in different locations, which required moving large numbers of people from one place to another and setting up new lighting and shooting equipment, technological advances such as virtual scenes and digital crowds are allowing producers to save time and money. And while all that is cutting the working time of actors and crew members, it is also allowing for many more low-cost independent films to be made, Gere told me. “I’m much more optimistic” than those who are predicting a future of growing unemployment for actors, he said. Thanks to lower production costs, “there are a huge number of independent productions being made every year,” he added.

  Stuart Dryburgh, an Academy Award–nominated cinematographer and director of photography known for his work on The Great Wall, Emperor, and several other Hollywood films, gave me a few more examples to further explain how moviemaking is becoming increasingly efficient. In the past, in order to film a car speeding down an empty highway from a helicopter, you had to start shooting at dawn so there wouldn’t be any other cars on the road. And if a car showed up, you had to wait for it to pass and shoot the whole scene over. “Now we just remove the other cars in postproduction,” he explained. In much the same way, it used to take cinematographers hours, if not days, to prepare a set so that the lighting and overall environment were perfect. “Now we know that we can simply take out everything we don’t want,” Dryburgh said. “We can change a cloudy sky to a blue one and vice versa.”

  MORE FILMS AND TV SERIES ARE BEING PRODUCED THAN EVER

  The good news for actors, directors, visual effects artists, screenwriters, and everyone else working in the film industry is that the number of visual content companies has skyrocketed. Since 2013, when Netflix began streaming shows like House of Cards online—allowing viewers to binge-watch several episodes of a series in a single viewing, instead of having to wait a week for the next one—many tech companies have jumped into the moviemaking business. Where Hollywood and television studios once essentially had a monopoly on content production, they now have to compete with producers like Netflix and Amazon.

  After the success of House of Cards, Netflix spent $6 billion on the production of TV series in 2017 and announced that it would spend $8 billion in 2018. Amazon invested $4.5 billion in visual content in 2017. Both Google and Apple launched their own film divisions to produce original content, and Facebook and Twitter were said to be considering following suit. All this has led to unprecedented investments in movie making, and all indications are that this trend will continue.

  “It’s only a matter of time—perhaps a couple of years—before movies will be streamed on social-media sites,” writes Nick Bilton in Vanity Fair. “For Facebook, it’s the natural evolution. The company, which has a staggering 1.8 billion monthly active users, literally a quarter of the planet, is eventually going to run out of new people it can add to the service. Perhaps the best way to continue to entice Wall Street investors to buoy the stock—Facebook is currently the world’s seventh-largest company by market valuation—will be to keep eyeballs glued to the platform for longer periods of time. What better way to do that than a two-hour film?”

  Which is probably why Facebook bought the Oculus virtual reality viewer company for $2 billion in 2014. With virtual reality headsets, Facebook users can digitally share a movie from the comfort of their homes, regardless of where they are in the world. And Facebook will be able to inject ads into the movies, which will allow the company to offer free visual content. When Bilton asked a Facebook executive why that hasn’t happened yet, his response was, “Eventually it will.”

  According to industry data, the number of movies that people watched in American theaters—not counting those that are shown only at film festivals—increased from 478 films in 2000 to 736 in 2016. And while the number of theatergoers isn’t growing, there are increasingly more pay-per-view online platforms where people are watching movies. According to the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), there are currently 480 legal websites such as Netflix, iTunes, and Google Play, where people can watch movies and TV shows for a small fee.

  The booming movie production business is providing jobs for 2 million people in the United States, 4.1 million in China, and 1.8 million in India, according to MPAA figures.*2 Writers, too, are benefiting from the proliferation of movie and TV series platforms, to the point where many novelists who once dreamed of winning a literary prize are now focusing their efforts on writing screenplays for Netflix and Amazon. “The number of online platforms for legally viewing movies and TV shows continues to grow steadily, making more creative content from all over the world available to more audiences than ever before,” says Julia Jenks, vice president for global research for the MPAA.

  WELCOME TO THE “VISUALIZATION INDUSTRY”

  The future expansion of work opportunities for filmmakers, visual effects artists, and actors will come not only from TV series and independent films but also from a growing visualization industry. For instance, with the advent of virtual reality devices, there will be a need for more immersive video games, which will allow us not only to watch movies, but to enter them and become their stars. As in the science fiction novel Ready Player One—which Steven Spielberg adapted into a film in which the leading character participates in the virtual search of an Easter Egg for a multimillion-dollar prize in 2044—we will move from being passive viewers to active participants while sitting in our own homes wearing virtual reality headsets.

  Beyond movies and TV, virtual reality will lead to a new visual content industry for schools, doctors’ offices, and businesses of all kinds. As mentioned earlier in this book, restaurants will be producing their own videos to tell their story and feature their dishes, while supermarkets and department stores will be generating their own visual content in much the same way as they do on their websites today.

  Growing numbers of medical students will be using virtual reality to digitally dissect corpses, instead of using real bodies. Schoolchildren who want to learn about the pyramids in Egypt will be able to tour them virtually and even “touch” artifacts as they explore them. All companies in every industry will have to be constantly updating their visual presentations, and to do that, they will need creative directors, videographers, writers, and actors. Even business cards may soon be replaced by electronic presentation videos, which people will send by cell phone and will tell others who we are, what we do, and what our life story is. We may even need multiple video presentation cards, depending on whether we want to use them for work or social occasions. In many cases, they could become major productions that will need to be renewed constantly, thus generating more work for content and visual artists. “There’s an explosion of possibilities in what used to be called the film industry. Movies will be just one part of it, because we will be seeing a phenomenal growth in the visualization industry,” Arguello told me.

  THE FALL—AND RISE—OF THE MUSIC INDUSTRY

  The music industry—which had reached record worldwide sales of nearly $24 billion in the 1990s—took a nosedive after the 1999 creation of Napster, which allowed people to listen to music online for free. It was a brutal crash that led many to predict that the industry was mortally wounded. But music sales began to recover in 2015 thanks to the fact that a relatively small but growing number of people started paying to listen to their favorite artists on le
gal platforms like Pandora, Spotify, iTunes, Amazon Music, and Google Play.

  After fifteen years of declining sales, music industry revenues grew by 3.2 percent to $15 billion in 2015, by another 5.9 percent in 2016, and by an additional 8.1 percent in 2017, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI). While still below their all-time record, the new figures were a sign of hope that the industry could recover and that streaming—which had nearly killed the industry—could actually become its savior. According to a study by the investment bank Goldman Sachs, the music industry is “on the cusp of a new era of growth.” It added, “The growth of streaming will help music revenues almost double by 2030.”

  One of the most hopeful signs for professional musicians is that young people in China—the world’s biggest consumers of pirated music—are starting to pay for the songs they listen to. Revenues of legal music-streaming companies in China increased fivefold between 2012 and 2017 despite the fact that the vast majority of Chinese music fans continue to get their songs from illegal websites. According to The Economist, only 20 million Chinese online music listeners use legitimate sites, out of a total of 600 million listeners in the country. But the number of legal users is increasing rapidly, thanks in part to the fact that smartphones are making it much easier to download apps that allow you to listen to music legally through a monthly subscription. And that trend is growing worldwide.

  IS SPOTIFY KILLING THE MUSIC INDUSTRY OR SAVING IT?

  In the short term, however, this isn’t of much help to professional musicians, who went from selling ten-dollar records just a few years ago to earning less than a penny for every song that someone listens to on a legal platform today. In 2017, a song had to be downloaded more than 700,000 times on Spotify—a free platform financed with advertising—in order for the artist to earn one hundred dollars.

  Spotify does provide another pay-based service that offers musicians a better deal, where fans pay a monthly fee in exchange for access with no ads and better selections. But it will take many years for artists to live off the royalties from the streaming of their songs the way they used to live off their record sales. For now artists will have to see Spotify, Pandora, and other legal online music services as a means of promoting their music without expecting much in the way of compensation, at least not directly.

  THE SAVING GRACE FOR MUSICIANS: LIVE SHOWS

  As John Hartmann, the former manager of bands like Peter, Paul, and Mary and the Eagles, predicted some years ago, live concerts will be—and already are—the main source of income for musicians. Actual records, on the other hand, have basically become business cards for professional musicians. According to the concert trade publication Pollstar, live concert revenues in the United States have risen from $1.7 billion in 2000 to $7.3 billion in 2016, and are expected to continue growing at a rapid pace for the foreseeable future.

  And while artists are always complaining about how little they get from streaming platforms like Spotify and Pandora, they are starting to see huge indirect benefits from them, says Cherie Hu, a music industry analyst with Billboard and Forbes magazines. In an interview, Hu told me that “artists aren’t limited by geography anymore. Thanks to streaming services, young people in China are downloading ‘Despacito’ by Puerto Rican artist Luis Fonsi, and South Korean pop music is becoming famous in the United States. Music has become more democratized than ever before, and it’s giving artists more opportunities to thrive and shine.”

  Plus, she told me, “streaming has given artists much more actionable data on who’s listening to their music, which they can use to program their tours.” Indeed, several streaming platforms now offer personalized dashboards to artists so they can know how many times their songs are being heard, and where around the world, as well as which are their most popular hits.

  In the past, bands had to plan their tours randomly. They went to some part of their country—or some part of the world—and hoped for the best. Sometimes, after spending a lot of time and money, they ended up playing to an empty room. But today, with the ability to analyze their geographic data on streaming platforms, these bands can know in advance where they will have a sold-out show and where they won’t. There’s no better example of this phenomenon than the huge success K-pop—or South Korean pop rock music—is enjoying in Chile.

  HOW A SOUTH KOREAN BAND ROCKED CHILE

  Much to the surprise of many, the K-pop band Bangtan Sonyeondan—also known as BTS or the Bangtan Boys—was a huge success in Chile in 2017 despite the fact that its music had never been played by Chilean commercial radio stations and that most of the traditional media in that South American country didn’t even know of its existence. The seven-member band, which was very famous in South Korea, went to the Chilean capital of Santiago to put on a concert and sold out the Movistar Arena for two nights in a row. According to The New York Times, the event promoters hadn’t even bothered to advertise it.

  The 12,500 seats for the first show sold out in just two hours. Thousands of teenagers had camped outside the stadium for days in advance, waiting to buy tickets priced between $38 and $212. Faced with such demand, promoters quickly set up a second show for the following night. More than $2 million in tickets were sold, plus whatever was brought in from sales of promotional T-shirts and other paraphernalia. Fans flocked to several parks across the Chilean capital to practice the band’s dance moves.

  How did this happen? It turns out that Wings, the BTS album that had topped the charts in South Korea the previous year, had become a global hit thanks to streaming services and social networks. Thousands of Chilean teenagers had become K-pop fans, and BTS lyrics that touched on teenagers’ internal conflicts and sense of pessimism had resonated without Chile’s traditional media even realizing it. And thanks to the audience-tracking data and location maps offered by streaming platforms, BTS’s managers learned that—no matter how strange it seemed—they had a huge fan base in Chile. So they planned a concert there. “We cross-checked with social-media-channel statistics to confirm the level of loyalty and fan base in the country,” said Yandi Park, a concert business manager for Big Hit. “We did expect to have good ticket sales because the promoters were also confident but did not anticipate the sellout in minutes.”

  “THE NUMBER OF MUSICIANS WILL INCREASE SIGNIFICANTLY”

  The growing globalization and democratization of music will make cases such as the surprise success in Chile of South Korea’s BTS increasingly common, and live performances—whether they take place in stadiums, concert halls, or bars—will become much more frequent. When I asked Hu, the music industry columnist for Billboard and Forbes, whether people will not stay home and watch a show on a virtual reality device rather than go to a live concert, she told me she doesn’t see that happening. “I don’t think there’s anything like being at a concert, being surrounded by a crowd of people, sharing the excitement of seeing an artist,” she said. “Virtual reality just isn’t the same.”

  In this new musical universe, big labels that once dominated the industry will lose some of their influence, and independent musicians will have more resources to make money and get their names out there. Indie artists can already fund their records with donations through Kickstarter.com, PledgeMusic.com, Indiegogo.com, or other similar sites where creative people can raise money for their projects. Thanks to social media, musicians can also make themselves known across the globe without the help of a record company to promote them. And thanks to the algorithms used by the streaming channels, they can pick up new followers in several new ways.

  For instance, when we click on a music video on YouTube, we get a list of other artists with similar styles popping out on the right-hand side of the screen. This allows us to find artists we didn’t know about before and greatly expands the range of music that’s available to us. All of it works to the benefit of the musicians, helping them reach even broader audiences.

 
“The number of musicians will increase significantly,” Gabriel Abaroa, Jr., president and CEO of the Latin Recording Academy, told me in an interview. When I asked him if it wouldn’t be just the big-name performers who will be making money giving live concerts, Abaroa replied that more music is being made now than ever, and that will benefit all artists. “When I was young, how many of my friends dreamed of going on a reality show and singing? Not many. I would have made fun of them, and people would have labeled them as losers. But today everyone wants to perform, everyone wants to go to a karaoke bar and sing. You get on a plane and half the people around you are listening to music. You go to a restaurant and there’s music playing. You go to your office and it’s not uncommon to see the receptionist listing to music at her desk. Music is everywhere,” he told me.

  INDEPENDENT MUSICIANS MUST BE SMALL-BUSINESS ENTREPRENEURS

  In the new music economy, more musicians will have to serve as their own managers, promoters, public relations agents, social media administrators, event organizers, distribution managers, and accountants. There will always be superstars who will have their own support teams, but most musicians will have to achieve success on their own, says Don Gorder, chair and founder of the Music Business/Management Department of the Berklee College of Music.