Wall Street’s Content Wars: Financing Media Consolidation

If we frame the ongoing streaming transition occurring in the cultural industries as ‘content wars,’ with metaphoric ‘battlefronts’ in Hollywood, in Silicon Valley, and on Madison Avenue, then the silent arms dealer in this conflict is Wall Street and the investor class, whose financial engineering goes largely unacknowledged in studies of the media industries. This chapter will explore the impact of private equity in the American film, television, and music industries since 2004. The mercenaries of these content wars, private equity firms have enacted leveraged buyouts in every sector of the cultural industries: major music labels (Warner, EMI), radio networks (Cumulus, Clear Channel/iHeartMedia), film and television production and distribution companies (MGM, Miramax, Univision, Dick Clark Productions), exhibition (AMC, Odeon), the top talent agencies (CCA, WME, IMG), audience measurement (Nielsen), and the trade press (Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Billboard). The arms race in this conflict is the ability to monetize content catalogues across streaming platforms, which is a lucrative opportunity for financialization. From a critical political economy of media perspective attuned to the significance of financial capital, this chapter demonstrates that the financialization of various components of the media sector is facilitating a dramatic extraction of value from the cultural industries, leaving further consolidation in its wake. Who is profiting from the streaming transition and who is losing out? The answers are the same as in the wider economy of the second gilded age: the wealthy are extracting private, untaxed profit from the public arena while the middle class of creatives is being hollowed out. The ‘creative destruction’ of this war is being fueled by financial engineering

A User-Centric Case for Rights Reversions and Other Mitigations: The Cultural Capital Project Submission to ISED Consultation on Term Extension

Term extension is unlikely to benefit any but the largest of rightsholders, and indeed, in general independent creators typically do not benefit greatly from the promised financial exploitation promised by copyrights. This has been made even more evident by the COVID pandemic - while copyrighted works are consumed more than ever, independent creators have sunk further into poverty. We propose mitigation strategies for term extension that would help the people who are creating Canada’s cultural landscape, as well as additional actions that would alleviate additional current copyright losses.SSHR

The Lack of Competition in the Music Industries, the Effect on Working Musicians, and the Loss of Canadian Music Heritage

A Brief Submitted By: The Cultural Capital Project: Digital Stewardship and Sustainable Monetization for Canadian Musicians Presented to: Making Competition Work for Canadians: A consultation on the future of competition policy in CanadaIt is our contention that the music industries in Canada exhibit an oligopoly structure, formed of a handful of non-competitive, non-Canadian firms, which gravely harms both the livelihoods of Canadian musicians and the long term sustainability of Canadian music. Our research concludes the problem is not a consequence of anything unique to music as a cultural product, but partially a function of how competition is regulated in this country, or, more accurately, not regulated. Along with more rigorous enforcement of competition, we recommend that the Competition Act be updated to center the concerns of workers and consumers, which would have ripple effects on the health of many sectors in Canada, including music.Research contributing to this brief was conducted with a SSHRC gran

Hymenoptera of Canada

A summary of the numbers of species of the 83 families of Hymenoptera recorded in Canada is provided. In total, 8757 described species are recorded compared to approximately 6000 in 1979, which is a 46% increase. Of the families recognized in 1979, three have been newly recorded to Canada since the previous survey: Anaxyelidae (Anaxyleoidea), Liopteridae (Cynipoidea), and Mymarommatidae (Mymarommatoidea). More than 18,400 BINs of Canadian Hymenoptera are available in the Barcode of Life Data Systems (Ratnasingham and Hebert 2007) implying that nearly 9650 undescribed or unrecorded species of Hymenoptera may be present in Canada (and more than 10,300 when taking into account additional species that have not been DNA barcoded). The estimated number of unrecorded species is very similar to that of 1979 (10,637 species), but the percentage of the fauna described/recorded has increased from 36% in 1979 to approximately 45% in 2018. Summaries of the state of knowledge of the major groups of Hymenoptera are presented, including brief comments on numbers of species, biology, changes in classification since 1979, and relevant taxonomic references

Derivative Media: The Financialization of Film, Television, and Popular Music, 2004-2016

This dissertation traces the entrance of the financial industries – particularly private equity firms, corporate venture capital, and institutional investors – along with their corresponding financial logic and labor, into the film, television, and music industries from 2004-2016. Financialization – the growing influence of financial markets and instruments – is premised on highly-leveraged debt, labor efficiencies, and short-term profits; this project argues that it is transforming cultural production into a highly consolidated industry with rising inequality, further decreasing the diversity and heterogeneity it could provide the public sphere. In addition to charting this historical and industrial shift, this project analyzes the corresponding textual transformation, in which cultural products behave according to financial logic, becoming sites of capital formation where references, homages, and product placements form internal economies. The concept of ‘derivative media’ I employ to capture this phenomenon contains a double meaning: increasingly, the production process of popular culture ‘derives’ new content from old (sequels, adaptations, franchises, remakes, references, homages, sampling, etc.), just as the economic logic behind contemporary textuality behaves like a ‘derivative,’ a financial instrument to hedge risk. As we witnessed during the financial crash in 2007-2008, the derivative dismantles or unbundles any asset into individual attributes and trades them without trading the asset itself, in contracts such as futures, forwards, options, and swaps. This project demonstrates how cultural texts employ a similar ‘derivative’ logic, using intertextuality as a financial strategy, not just to sell products through brand integrations, but to maintain domination over the cultural sector through an interconnected referential economy. Through textual analysis and case studies, I explore the formal and interpretative implications that this financial shift has on cultural texts, arguing that popular digital media texts function as unbundled, risk-hedging derivatives through which capital accumulates in diversified cultural hedge funds operated by a handful of transnational media corporations. Utilizing a methodology combining political economy, data mining and visualization, ethnographic fieldwork, and textual analysis, this dissertation argues that financialization is a little-understood, yet profoundly transformative – and often destructive – force within the cultural industries

Financialized Hollywood: Institutional Investment, Venture Capital, and Private Equity in the Film and Television Industry

The financial sector has a hidden, but dramatic effect on Hollywood: three institutional investors hold the largest investment stakes in nearly all major companies; corporate venture capital has arisen within every entertainment conglomerate; and private equity firms have enacted leveraged buyouts of companies in all sectors, including production, distribution, exhibition, talent agencies, audience measurement, trade press, and content catalogues. This article argues that “Financialized Hollywood” is a dangerous development; financial engineering strategies are extracting capital and reducing operational capacity, further depriving Hollywood of the diversity and heterogeneity it might provide the public sphere

The Museum : textworks, cultural economy, and polytextual dispersion

The Museum is a theoretical model that aims to render a media-saturated world in which our media have become saturated with media. Corporate conglomeration of the cultural industries has transformed the production and circulation of art; the Museum captures the inter-related complexities of this development in which the notion of a singular text breaks down in the wake of synergistic proliferation. Conceiving of this ‘new society’ requires new conceptions: a model (the Museum), a language (polytextuality), a discipline (cultural economy), and a product (the textwork). Section I establishes the ‘Geography of the Museum’, starting with its chief architect, André Malraux, who designs the neo-aesthetic foundation of the ‘Imaginary Museum’ (Chapter Three). The post-structural blueprints are then drawn up by Mikhail Bakhtin and Julia Kristeva, giving the Museum its polytextual essence (Chapter Four). The Museum is then physically erected by the conglomerated cultural industries, transforming the Imaginary Museum into a material consumer experience (Chapter Five). Section II turns to the ‘Display of the Museum’, cataloguing the different ways in which art manifests itself within the Museum. By way of Roland Barthes, the textwork is theorized, a dialogical designation for the type of networked cultural output that now dominates popular culture (Chapter Seven). Case studies of particularly illuminating textworks are then presented, illustrating the polytextual content of the Museum in a multitude of intersecting forms and mediums. A decisively polytextual museum exhibition, “KRAZY! The Delirious World of Anime + Comics + Video Games + Art”, as well as two films – Children of Men and V for Vendetta – are seen as literal embodiments of the Museum (Chapter Eight). The next textwork is concerned with intermedial structure, and focuses on the Wu-Tang Clan’s interpolation of certain cinematic genres, as well as other mediums (Chapter Nine). The final textwork is General Electric, the world’s largest conglomerate. Transformers and 30 Rock, two very different GE products, both explicitly exhibit corporate synergy through polytextuality (Chapter Ten). Over-arching cultural shifts are demonstrated by the Museum: access over ownership, circulation over distribution, dialogue over delivery, digital social text over authorship, and multiple over singular.Arts, Faculty ofTheatre and Film, Department ofGraduat