Content, Culture & the Bottom Line: How Finance is Killing the Avant-Garde

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2:07David McWilliams: To understand the economy, you have to understand human nature. This podcast is powered by Acast.

2:20David McWilliams: How you doing there? It is time for the podcast. John and I are back in... The HQ. The HQ after a long weekend of high culture, John. High culture. High culture. High culture it was. We were at the... I feel clever already. I mean, we're brainy. You know, I mean, how many brains did we meet over the weekend? No, but we were just back from the Doggy Book Festival, which was fantastic. Thank you for all your support. It was a total hoot. We'll be back again next year. But the festival, together with the fact that I've been on the book tour, John, has got me thinking about culture and whether or not culture is stagnating.

3:05David McWilliams: So I've been doing this. Stagnating? Stagnating. Whether or not innovations in culture are not so much as stagnating, but where is the intersection between culture, economics, technology, etc.? Because I was thinking about the Renaissance, John, as I do, right? In the shower. Exactly, exactly. No, but I was thinking about, because we were doing, remember we were talking a bit about, you know, Florence in the old days and this extraordinary celebration of economics, finance, and culture. The Medici's financing, the likes of Leonardo, the likes of Leonardo not only being an artist, but also being a technologist, the man who came up with the idea for the helicopter, all sorts of things like that.

3:52David McWilliams: Yeah, yeah, yeah, amongst other things, yeah. And then that culture stagnates. You get this incredible flourishing of extraordinary innovation and then gradually or maybe suddenly the culture stagnates. And I'm looking at the United States. Sorry, is that like a normal cycle though? It could well be, it could well be. But the question is, is the cultural stagnation, or does the cultural stagnation suggest the stagnation of the imperial superpower? So it's the idea that, for example, you know, the Roman Empire took a long, long time to collapse, about 200 odd years. But you can argue that its cultural imprint peaked about 200 years before it collapsed.

4:40Okay.

4:40David McWilliams: So the idea being, you know, whether or not culture, And again, the reason I was thinking of this is when you're involved in or when you're financing or when you're putting together cultural events, it's really very different from putting together other sort of business ideas, right? Because you're dealing with people and you're dealing with artists and you're dealing with writers and you're dealing with poets, you're dealing with musicians. and the worst thing that was said to me over the weekend, this is what got me caught on my coat, somebody said to me, a sort of a, dare I say, a businessy guy said, great content.

5:22David McWilliams: He's not wrong, but he missed the point. It's the idea, right, that this is not content. This is art. This is literature. This is music. so then it got me thinking of the types of people now who own lots of art and the way in which they refer to art or musicians as content or the way in which they refer for example when you meet a really creative person I mean you love music so you listen to it and the idea is that the really creative person is the source of all value Yeah, yeah. If you don't have the artists, you have nothing. Yeah, but the accountant looks at them, and I'm not talking about all accountants, but these type of accountants, that's an expense.

6:15David McWilliams: So rather than the creative person being the source of value, the creative person is an expense. Yeah. Rather than the music. A line on the account. On a balance sheet, exactly, exactly. So rather than the music being fantastic, you would love the music. They call it great content, not great music. And rather than nurturing the artists, you know, these guys talk about we have amazing intellectual property. Yeah. Sorry for the American accent. I know it's very bad. Let's see. Sorry, we're very intellectual. There's an apology to all Americans, right? Okay. You know, and rather than investing in talent, you know, they invest in data centers and technology.

6:52David McWilliams: Yeah. Amplifying and these sort of things. And this got me thinking about the writings of a fellow who's really, really very brilliant called Ted Gioa. He has a wonderful, wonderful substact called The Honest Broker, which is about art and culture and where it's going. And then this all got me thinking about what is going on in movies, in literature, in music. I mean, you've said it before, that there's a sort of a weird situation where young artists are not getting financed. Yeah. But massive music companies are buying the back catalogs catalogues of old artists. Yeah, but I mean, I've always argued and hated the idea of, when I worked in the music industry.

7:40Yes. There was always the...

7:41David McWilliams: You still work in the entertainment industry, it's just podcasting. But there was always the battle, the ongoing battle between the artist and the record company. But in particular, the A &R guys in the record company are supposed to be on the side of the musician and the artists, and the good ones are. But then there was always the battle with the lawyers and the accountants for those very reasons but back in the day when you got a record deal it was always or usually a three album deal and that was the record company's faith and investment in a developing artist whereas now you get a maybe a song an ep or Maximum.

8:26Maximum. And if you don't make it, you know, on to the next one. And that's a huge difference.

8:32David McWilliams: Well, this podcast, John, right? You mentioned the AOR man, right? This podcast is going to be about the fusion of technology and financialization to massive, massive forces in our societies that we can really never really understand or quantify. and the fusion and the impact of technology and financialization on culture. And why us central stats may well have a point in worrying about what is happening because the most important thing in culture is innovation. Yeah. And the most important thing in innovation is novelty, is newness. And the most important thing in newness is if newness is given a chance to shine.

9:21David McWilliams: And then when you look, I'm going to give you some figures about cinema, right? In 2023, the top 10 highest grossing global movies were all, not just some of them, all sequels, spinoffs, remakes, or adaptations. Yeah. Right? All of them. Yeah. Okay? And of the top 50 movies in the 2010s, 90%, so not all, were sequels, rebots, adaptations, et cetera. But, fascinatingly, between 2005 and 2023, so the last 20-odd years, the share of original scripts amongst the top 100 movies dropped from 40 % to less than 10%. Wow. Think about that. Wow. So original scripts. Yeah. So people coming up with new ideas, with stuff that had never been made before, used to be 40 % of the top 100 movies, and it's now less than 10%.

10:29It's amazing that the...

10:31David McWilliams: So think about what that means. I know, it's incredible. But a company that I would feature largely in that is Marvel and the Marvel comics that they turned into movies. The franchise. The franchise, which was a brilliant idea at the time when they started making those. It gave New Lisa life to all the Marvel characters and industry and stuff. But it got to the point where they're just milking it now. They're milking it. Well, I'll give you another statistic, right, John? They've run out of ideas. They've run out of ideas. It's not they've run out of ideas. They've run out of entertaining ideas.

11:05David McWilliams: Now, we're going to come back of actually embracing new ideas, right? Movies in the top 20 by revenue in the United States, right? In the year 2000, 25 years ago, 20 % of movies in the top 20 by revenue were sequels, franchises, adaptations. Do you know how much it was in 2022? No. 90%. Right? So it means that putting on a new gig is going to be massively risky because of the dominance of the juggernaut of these franchises. So this is all about, we're talking about the stagnation of culture. I'll give you some more extraordinary figures, right? Yeah. Music fans are choosing old music instead of new music.

11:52According to the latest figures,

11:55David McWilliams: only 27 % of all tracks streamed are new or recent. Really? Only 27%. Wow, I am surprised at that. So the entire business is about the repackaging of old music. So much so that you see radio stations only repackaging old music. Yeah. Streamers only repackaging old music. You talked about franchises in comics. Yeah. Comic books are a$15 billion business, and they're driven by almost exactly the same franchises that were created in the 70s and 80s. Yeah. There are no new ones. Yeah. There's no new ones, right? The top grossing shows in Broadway, so in theater as well, Phantom of the Opera and The Lion King are the two highest grossing theater productions.

12:46David McWilliams: And 83 % of all Hollywood's revenues, 83 % now come from franchises. It's incredible. I mean, like what is, I was going to say what is driving this. What's putting the brakes on, you know, creativity? I'll give you one last thing, right? Let's just contrast the top movies, 1973, top grossing movies in the States versus 50 years later, 2023. Yeah, go on. The Sting, The Exorcist, American Graffiti, Mean Streets. All great movies. These are all, right? Yeah. This is Scorsese. These were young directors. These were young directors, right? What are they, Las and Barbie? Super Mario Brothers, the movie.

13:32David McWilliams: Spider-Man, Across the Spider-Verse. Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3. Yeah, Volume 3, yeah. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Actually, in fairness, now hang on. Barbie was good. I actually thought Barbie was great. And it was a very creative take on the whole Barbie thing and a piss take of this genre. But the point is, you know, Barbie is a 1950s franchise, I suspect. 1950s, 1960s maybe? Yeah. And what you have is not so much the tyranny of nostalgia, but the repetition of nostalgia. It's a bit like the Lego movies as well, that were brilliant. They were brilliantly written. But it's a company like Marvel that have a product that has content.

14:21Back to our friend, content. And they're just trying to figure out how we can reuse it in a new form. And I don't have a problem with that per se, but like the Marvel movies it's that you get to a point where you just need to stop stop you know you've run out of

14:40David McWilliams: you've run out of road and you need something new but the whole idea is that newness so for example you know when we're at Dalky we're always trying to introduce new novelists, poets younger novelists etc etc because you need youth, youth creates youth culture, youth creates new ideas when we were kids you know we were kids we were you know early teenagers in the early 80s it seemed to me to be a very youth orientated period and i think music you said was one of the most diverse yeah i mean it's back to the suburbs isn't it that we were talking about a little while ago but it is interesting somebody said to me a while ago that just picking the year 1981 was an incredibly eclectic year for music.

15:28You had all these very different genres in the charts at the one time, like everything from Depeche Mode to Shaken Stevens to Journey in the Blue Oyster Cult to Buck's Fizz to Super Freak. To Disco. Yeah, Super Freak was out that year.

15:45David McWilliams: But you had all this stuff. And you'd ska. Yes. And you had punk, and you had post-punk, and you had mods, and you had all these sort of various, as you say, tribes who identified with a certain gang or a certain genre of music, and you had lots and lots of... Yeah, you're right, you had an extraordinarily eclectic thing. And again, so this comes back... That was our youth. That was our youth, exactly, exactly. The two centrist dads in their stay press. Yeah. Exactly. Oh, back in our day. Yeah, no, but I want to talk about the process, what is happening in the world of entertainment, what is happening in the world of publishing, what is happening as a result in the world of literature, and the way in which a sort of a juggernaut of stagnant, repackaged, refinanced culture has its roots in economics.

16:41David McWilliams: This is the whole thing. Yeah, yeah. Right? Okay. So the first thing is financialization. So since the 1990s, we have seen a dramatic increase in the role of finance in our societies. So what you tend typically to hear if you're talking to people about lamenting the role of financialization, it tends usually to be in, for example, discussions of the housing market. and they'll say, in the old days, if 100 flats went on sale, you had 100 individual buyers, that was 100 families, that was 100 sort of dreams, and it was also 100 people who were on the social conveyor belt of upward social mobility through house prices.

17:26David McWilliams: That's before financialization. So you basically had the bank and the bank managers making decisions on who got the money and the people who got the money were the average citizen, the average worker. Then as financialization becomes a thing, what you get is the banks say, no, we don't want to be bothered any longer in dealing with 100 people for 100 mortgages. Why don't we just sell it all to one equity fund? Sell the entire thing to one equity fund. So for example, a pension fund, or for example, a private equity fund that is in the business of housing. So rather than have 100 applications, we will save money and add to our bottom line by just dealing with one person, i.e.

18:16David McWilliams: one institution. And then you have all these developments all around Ireland, all around the UK, all around the US, where they are renter-only developments, right? So what you do is you get one owner, that excludes all the first-time buyers, and turns the first-time buyers into renters. It's all nice and clean. It's all nice and clean. It's all tech-driven. When I say tech-driven, it's just spreadsheet-driven. And then the renters are turned into a stream of income. I'm going back to use the language. And in effect, the apartments are content. And the stream of income pays the private equity firm that has already borrowed from somebody else.

19:01David McWilliams: And in the process, what you have is the middlemen, which were the bank managers, the intermediaries they talk about, are disappeared. And the bottom line is the bottom line. So the renters pay the stream of income to give the bottom line to who? To a tiny bunch of owners, the shareholders of the private equity. So that's where we normally hear this. And people are lamenting it and they're going mad and understandably. but the same process is happening everywhere this is my point so you take for example what used to be the case in movies so it used to be the case the same idea right yeah so you had the bank then the bank manager and then the recipients i.e the first time buyers right now think about music industries you had the bank there was always a financer yeah your music the a and r man or in the case of movies you had the kind of slightly idiosyncratic eclectic producer but the a and r and the producers came from the DNA of creativity.

19:59David McWilliams: They were from music. They were from cinema, for example. And what they wanted to do was, yeah, make money. So the A &O man's brag in the world was, I signed the Beatles. Yes. Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It wasn't that I signed the people that delivered the most music to the record company. Yeah. It was, I signed Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Ringo Starr, and George Harrison. or I signed Pink Floyd or I signed U2 or, you know, I signed these bands. So their cultural capital and their professional integrity was based on their discernment in the industry, close to the artist. But here's the thing as well.

20:41When they are signing Paul McCartney or Pink Floyd or whatever, the jam, that they didn't know that they're going to turn into the jam. So it was a leap of faith, but it was done out of admiration and love of the music. And the knowledge of the music. And the knowledge, yeah. The knowledge of the music.

21:00David McWilliams: So look, these guys have something. And they are connecting with the youth of the time and they have something, right? It's kind of of the people, for the people, by the people. By the people. This is just... Oh my God. John, oh my God. John has just rewritten Bud Rock Neharon while we were sitting there, right? But, so think of it, think about movies. So you had the equivalent would be the producer. So the producer usually comes from the gene pool of movie makers, right? And the people I've known, you know, like for example, Ed Geiney of Element Films was on the podcast with Lenny Abramson, right?

21:39David McWilliams: Now it's a crazy thing. Both of those guys, Oscar nominated, right? I knew them when they were kids. And they were obsessed by movies when we were 17, 18. And they were obsessed with offbeat movies. They were of that terror. They weren't accountants who were dropped in who said, right. So, of course, what happens is then in the old days, the movie producers were trying not only to make money, but they were trying to make the best art. And their brag was, we're winning Oscars for creativity. And their brag was, I financed Mean Streets, or I financed Scorsese when nobody knew him, or I financed Lenny Abramson when nobody knew him.

22:23David McWilliams: You know, that's their brag. And so again, their professional capital came from their nows. But now, those guys are gradually being elbowed out. and what's been put in place is private equity firms are buying the large studios and the large studios are elbowing out those eclectic, idiosyncratic, independent producers and what they are doing now is they're being driven by sequels, by franchises. So the money that would have gone to, let's say... This worked before, so let's do it again, basically. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the idea would be the money that would have gone to the young Scorsese, let's just say, because everyone knows the name.

23:05David McWilliams: We'll never go to the young Scorsese again. It's just going to go to the director who can remake Marvel movies. And is this a function of, I mean, you've said before that, you know, one of the things, what happens when a person or a country or a city or whatever gets wealthy? What do they do with the money? Like we were talking about this in the Hanseatic League. When you talk about, okay, they made a whole load of money. So what do they do with it? They invest. They reinvest and they reinvest, they reinvest. So they're just coming purely from a money perspective. So is this bound to happen? No, I don't think so.

23:46David McWilliams: I think so. So we've got the financialization, number one, right? Which is that everything becomes a spreadsheet. Now, the impact on people's lives listening to the show could well be they're elbowed out in the property market because they've become renters, whereas their older brother or sisters or their parents were first-time buyers, right? And we see that happening. But what I'm saying is this process is happening in culture too. Yeah, okay. Where what you're seeing is the product at the end of the day is no longer the great novel, but it's the novel that sells best. So it's the, you know, John Grisham, the 20th John Grisham book because it's a franchise.

24:30Yeah.

24:30David McWilliams: Or, for example, it is, as you talk about music, it is the fact that big music companies are buying the back catalogue of old artists rather than taking a risk on new artists. And so what you're doing is you're getting a kind of an echo chamber of old stuff. And again, this means that new artists can't make a living. And eventually, you know, as Ted Goyor said, if Bach was around these days, he'd probably have mooched around Hollywood for a couple of months trying to get financed and then said fuck it and joined a hedge fund right because he's a clever guy and he says I want to get into the industry the best way to get into it is to join the finance guys the tech bros then the final thing is technology right and I think this is crucially important for us to understand right so think about AI AI is entirely reliant on looking backwards right and this is really really important right all those large language models that the tech bros talk about all the time they're entirely dependent on the formula is looking backwards so what ai is looking for is what is familiar not what is good yeah and what is familiar than in a algorithmic based society just regurgitates what's been listened to before and before and before, because the models only work if they digest an enormous amount of cultural history, right?

26:02David McWilliams: Content. Content, exactly. And then they can manipulate this in all sorts of ways, but the whole process is backward-looking. Yeah. So despite the appearance of innovation, they talk about innovation. You know, you hear all those Sam Altman, all those guys talking about AI. They talk about innovation. It's not innovation. it's actually dredging history. So the entire model is based on the past, not the future. Reracking history. So therefore familiarity, have I heard that before, becomes the emotional response as opposed to, shit, I've never heard something like that before. Yeah. Right? So think about then in an algorithmic society, as we embrace algorithms more and more and more, to generate our own taste.

26:55David McWilliams: Well, nostalgia sells. Nostalgia sells, but the problem is now it's been repackaged and reworked and re-manipulated, so much so that nostalgia is drowning out the new. And if you start to drown out the new, then your culture has to stagnate because there's no avant-garde. Yeah, innovation does seem to be on the wane in many ways in the arts world, but let's talk about this further after the break.

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29:20Mark, I was just reading a comment there from, you know, your man, Mark Cuban, the entrepreneur, the billionaire entrepreneur.

29:28David McWilliams: American geezer. Yeah, yeah, I'm not even sure what he does, to be honest with you. But anyway, he said something really interesting. He talked about his prediction for AI and the future and creativity that we're talking about. He calls it the Milli Vanilli effect. And what he was saying was... And Milli Vanilli. yes do you do you want to would you like to would you like to sing a few Milli Vanilli numbers actually now Milli Vanilli is a very interesting thing because they were huge in the 80s and they were all fake but there's a brilliant documentary on Sky about Milli Vanilli's story and I encourage everyone to watch it it's amazing so John and I have just been the last half an hour saying don't look backwards look forwards and now we're saying yeah whatever go on but But what Mark Cuban was saying was, within the next three years, there will be so much AI, in particular AI video, people won't know if what they see or hear is real, which will lead to an explosion of face-to-face engagements, events, and jobs.

30:34And he calls that the Milli Vanilli effect. And I hope he's right, because it will lead to more live gigs. It will lead to the kind of experience.

30:46David McWilliams: The sort of stuff like, you know, for example, we do at Kilconomics, people turn up in their thousands because they want to meet the artists, they want to meet the real writers, they want to listen to the process. How do you do that, etc. They also want to sit there and feel or dance. And they want to hang out with people, they want to chat, they want to have a laugh, they want to dance, they want to go to clubs, all that sort of stuff. So I think you're absolutely right that the pendulum will swing back towards much more proximity to the artist. But my fear is that in the meantime, we're going to have so many inappropriate owners.

31:24David McWilliams: I think this is an expression that I come back to all the time. There are good owners and bad owners. So for example, in the dereliction thing, a person who owns a property who allows that to be derelict is a bad owner. They're inappropriate owners, right? Yeah, yeah. When it comes to movies, music, art, et cetera, The question is there can be inappropriate owners. So somebody who runs a large language model and uses that to rank people's tastes based on familiarity, and that algorithm is therefore used on something like Spotify, is an inappropriate owner of the music industry because they are not in the business of innovation.

32:06David McWilliams: They are in the business of backward looking. And I think that what we're seeing now is a combination of inappropriate owners driven by inappropriate benchmarks, such as content, bottom line, profitability exclusively. Tech, which is now rampant, absolutely rampant. And we're moving into an AI society, which, as we said, is by definition a backward looking idea. all the while the young artists the new artists the avant-garde yeah is being squeezed out but the flip side of it though is that there is the demand side of the balance sheet which is what are the the public demanding are they not screaming out for new innovative music movies and all the rest but i wonder you know you talk about algorithms there i wonder is it that the algorithms and the way it's set up by the bad owners is that society and people are losing their curiosity i think you're absolutely right again i'll give you another another statistics right four years ago 2021 right this is just in catalog the dominance of catalog right old songs catalog music accounted for 70 percent of all u.s music consumption now that is 2021 that was up from 63 % in 2020.

33:34David McWilliams: So we don't have the latest figures, but this is accelerating this trend. Major labels are spending much more on old music than they are on new music. Spotify's top 200 is increasingly dominated either by new songs from old mega artists or old catalog tracks. And mid-tier experimental music isn't getting a look in it. Now, of course, experimental music, experiments, art, indies, will find a place. But my fear is that the processes, and we'll probably leave it here, John, financialization, the twin process, financialization and technology are creating an environment where economics is being used exclusively to generate bottom-line profitability in art, which has never been driven by profitability.

34:31David McWilliams: It's always been driven by experimentation. And then once it works, as you said, when the A.O. Norman goes to the club, the middle of nowhere, finds the band, it's not about profitability. It's about, yes, this is sound of the future. And I'm going to back that. And my status is not going to be, I'm the guy who made most money. but it's I'm the guy who made most difference and that is what is lacking in the cultural space. We'll talk to you in a couple of days time.

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