The conflict between capital and culture has been simmering for hundreds of years, and Hollywood and the popular music industries have always involved big companies that sought to commodify culture and corner the market. What's different about film, television, and music today? In a word, it's more often derivative. The degree to which a popular story or song is based on a previous story or song, directly or indirectly, is much higher than it was in the past. The degree to which the formal elements within a story or song are directly connected to business decisions within the company that funded that story or song is much higher. The degree to which a hit song or popular story is plundered for all its worth through derivative and ancillary products is much higher. The ratio of global hits to the rarely seen or heard is wider than ever. The disparity between the big-budget products of high-powered producers and superstar musicians and the smaller-scale, independent output of lower-wage creators has never been wider.

XREF: Connects to ongoing debates about IP, remakes/reboots, and streaming-era corporate media consolidation.

4. Historical. If the economic, legal, and textual foundations of the cultural industries have shifted, then so too has its overall structure. Many of the data presented in this book chart a simple but destructive historical trend: a financial instrument or type of organization is deregulated at some point in the late twentieth century, then escalates in use over the course of the past two decades. While there is no single identifiable year or inflection point in which everything changes, there is the slow accumulation of many trends in finance that each gain power during this period. In other words, the argument here is a periodization claim. Derivative media, in this fourth instance, refers to a new era for the cultural industries, starting around the late 1990s and early 2000s, when their organizational structure became predicated on financial extraction.

DEFINE: Defines 'derivative media' as a periodization concept marking a new era, not just a medium or genre.

5. Qualitative. The adjective derivative is often used pejoratively, to judge an object as being unoriginal and thus of lesser quality. A common sentiment concerning contemporary popular culture is dissatisfaction with the predominance of endless franchise entries, repurposed beats and melodies, rebooted hits of yesteryear, comic book adaptations, and dopamine doses of nostalgia. While adaptation and transformative use of a previous work can no doubt produce meaningful cultural objects, repurposing something already successful is now the default, reducing the opportunities for experimental, radical, original, and complex work to achieve wider circulation beyond niche audiences. Derivative media, in this fifth instance, refers to the weakened state of creative production, its capacity to offer critique and diversity reduced as it suffers under the economic constraints of its new bosses on Wall Street.

XREF: Connects to the author's broader argument about derivative media's multiple meanings, and to general cultural critiques of franchise economics and Wall Street-driven consolidation.

In an era plagued by crisis—climate collapse, worsening inequality, authoritarianism and imperialism on the march, unending racialized and gendered injustice, a lingering pandemic—it might seem trivial to spend an entire book bemoaning the state of entertainment and popular culture. Are movies and TV shows and pop songs that important to our deepening, interrelated crises? Indeed, media matters for a number of reasons: it shapes and circulates values, it represents communities and experiences, it offers pleasures and connections, it educates and informs, it persuades and misinforms, it shapes identities and discourses, it creates and expresses.

My understanding of these industries is informed by two fields of study: political economy of media and cultural studies. The former is more oriented toward organizational structures and broad social relations, while the latter often focuses on the text, the audience, and the rich affordances of both, especially when they interact. Both are interested in power, but political economy of media conceives of power in its material, hierarchical form, while cultural studies sees power as fluid and contingent and potentially immaterial.

DEFINE: Distinguishes political economy of media (material, hierarchical power) from cultural studies (fluid, contingent power).

Robert McChesney once decried the "sad state of political economy" in U.S. media studies, and claimed that scholars had made a "molehill out of a mountain." We'd taken the mountainous problem of media ownership and capitalist culture and dismissed it as inessential, or insurmountable, in a digital world full of subversive texts, active fans, resistant practices, and global circulation.

XREF: Connects to political economy of media critiques and contemporary digital culture studies.

But even political economy of media has had little to say about the effects of finance and investment on this consolidated structure, resulting in an incomplete understanding of "how capitalism works." I would add to McChesney's concern a question: Is it even the correct mountain that we've made into a molehill? We need to give greater focus to control and structure in the media, yes, but also refocus on the true lever of power in contemporary capitalism: financial capital.

XREF: Connects to media political economy critique of McChesney, extending the structural analysis beyond ownership consolidation to financial investment flows.

There is no shortage of looming mountains to analyze today, all of which have consolidated and now dominate the U.S. (and often global) market: four tech companies (Alphabet/Google, Apple, Amazon, Meta/Facebook), five film/television companies (Disney, Netflix, Comcast/NBCUniversal, Sony, Warner), three theater chains (AMC, Cineworld, Cinemark), three recorded-music companies (Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, Sony), three streaming music services (Spotify, Apple, Amazon), three radio groups (iHeartMedia, Audacy, Cumulus), three talent agencies (Endeavor, Creative Artists Agency, United Talent Agency), three wireless carriers (AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile), two cable companies (Comcast and Charter), and one music conglomerate (Liberty Media) that controls the biggest satellite radio company (SiriusXM), the biggest digital radio service (Pandora), and the biggest live-music, venue, ticket-sales, and artist-management firm (Live Nation/Ticketmaster).

For philosopher Julia Kristeva, who coined the term intertextuality, "any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another." Similarly, her contemporary Roland Barthes proclaimed that "the text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture."

DEFINE: Introduces and defines the concept of intertextuality via Kristeva and Barthes, framing any text as a mosaic or tissue of quotations from culture.

Intertextuality may have been theorized as a linguistic and literary phenomenon, but the term's contemporary usage is overwhelmingly material, even financial. It's no longer just MFAs and their cultural studies that deal in intertextuality, it's also MBAs and their financial feasibility studies. Intertextuality and financialization make strange bedfellows, their effects difficult to untangle and study. But understanding how a cultural text creates meaning increasingly necessitates an understanding of its political economy, as financial logic is so deeply embedded within so many fibers of its construction and circulation.

XREF: Connects to political-economy-of-culture scholarship and debates about the commodification of art and media.

I believe it's worth returning to Adorno and Horkheimer's "The Culture Industry" with specific attention to the political economic context of its publication. Adorno and Horkheimer came of age during a time of deep economic inequality, monopoly capitalism, and global war. Having fled the Nazis for the United States, they arrived to Fordist assembly lines and vertically integrated film studios in Hollywood, a different kind of domination. Their vision of capitalist culture and power befitted their time. In subsequent years, postwar prosperity led to waves of innovative, occasionally radical popular culture and a field of cultural studies less haunted by the base constraints Adorno and Horkheimer saw all around them. Plotted along the U-shaped chart of the past century's economic inequality, the Culture Industry was born in the first peak, cultural studies was born in the fertile valley, and we find ourselves on the second peak, again perched atop a daunting level of inequality and cultural power held in the hands of the few.

The second and primary component of my method is research techniques associated with the political economy of media. I draw from the financial and trade press (Bloomberg Businessweek, the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Variety, Billboard), consult financial statements (such as company 10-K forms), and gather data from online financial databases. An essential piece of software I use is Refinitiv Workspace (currently being rebranded as LSEG Workspace), which is designed for investment bankers to access financial markets data such as real-time stock prices, market trends, annual reports, and SEC filings. It is owned by the London Stock Exchange Group (which also owns the globally influential stock exchange in its name), and is, according to Sarah Lamdan, a key "data cartel" of financial information along with Bloomberg and LexisNexis. Access to this software is prohibitively expensive and I am fortunate that the UCSD library maintains a subscription, allowing me to gather historical data on mergers, acquisitions, asset managers, hedge funds, stock buybacks, executive compensation, derivatives, and other metrics that have been elusive to many researchers of the media industries.

DEFINE: Clarifies what 'political economy of media' research entails: trade press, financial statements, and database tools like Refinitiv Workspace.

Temporally, this book focuses on the new century, from 1999 to 2023. The period begins with the repeal of Glass-Steagall and its financial deregulation, the dot-com crash and its birthing of Big Tech, and massive media mergers involving Viacom, TimeWarner, Clear Channel, and Vivendi. Twenty years of financial extraction and media consolidation later, we arrive in 2020 with four tech giants valued at over a trillion dollars each; a clear pivot to streaming media amid more mergers involving Disney, Fox, and Warner; and the COVID-19 pandemic's dramatic exposure of inequality. At this point, the fact of a New Gilded Age is unavoidable, yet the role of the cultural industries in this inequality is obscured.

XREF: Links financial deregulation (Glass-Steagall repeal) to cultural industry concentration — connects to broader critiques of neoliberal capitalism.

The music industry is the most financialized, as detailed in chapter 3. Hollywood is not far behind, as seen in chapter 4. Though not covered in this book, journalism and newspapers have been subject to predatory financial extraction, particularly from hedge funds, as has contemporary art, video games, and social media.

XREF: Connects to the documented financialization of music and Hollywood that other sections of this book detail at length.

Financial jargon is needlessly complicated, so I've written the book in an accessible, explanatory tone, with key terms defined in the text and in the glossary, for easy reference. … It is my belief that the financial sector is not nearly as sophisticated, necessary, or beneficial as it would have us believe; the mechanisms of wealth extraction are actually quite simple, and a healthy dose of disrespect is well earned.

SEED: The stance that financial complexity is deliberately manufactured could frame an essay exposing 'jargon as gatekeeping' across industries.

Understanding its influence requires us to dispense with the myth of efficient markets; instead, an analysis of power, politics, and hierarchy is essential, for both capitalism as a system and media within it. … The cultural industries are being reshaped by this “long downturn.”

Private equity is a destructive force in the music industries, as seen for example in the takeover of Warner Music Group by Bain, THL, and Providence in 2004. In the intervening years, EMI, Clear Channel (now called iHeartMedia), Cumulus, and other music companies were also subjected to acquisition by private equity, resulting in massive layoffs, debt, homogenization, and profit extraction.

With a renewed potential for profit in the streaming era, the music industries are subject to new financial predations, such as those by investment firms like Hipgnosis, Round Hill, Shamrock, and other “song management” firms that have turned music catalogs and publishing rights into an asset class. The effects of this financialization on the production and circulation of music are the same as they are in the wider American economy: a corrupt infrastructure, a plutocratic ruling class, a growing precarity for workers, and vast inequality.

XREF: Connects to the financialization of other asset classes (real estate, patents) and the broader rental economy critique common in contemporary political economy writing.

Though piracy is often considered the determining factor for the revenue losses in the music industry during this period, I argue that financialization is the true culprit, as Wall Street plundered the vulnerable record labels and radio companies. Once streaming became the technology of choice for listening to music, a much-consolidated industry was able to reassert its dominance by leveraging access to its back catalog of recorded music in exchange for the vast majority of revenue from streaming services, as well as stock equity. Furthermore, corporate venture capital is now a key strategy of the music conglomerates, which do not need to share these revenues with the musicians who create the value of the company.

SEED: An essay challenging the popular narrative that digital piracy destroyed the music industry could cite this alternative financialization thesis.

Hollywood has been restructured many times over the past century, with ebbs and flows of cultural diversity and vitality. The current age of streaming and increased production may appear dynamic at first glance, but I argue that finance has facilitated a new wave of consolidation, power, and reduced capacity.

Chapter 5, “Derivative Music and Speculative Hip Hop,” shifts to textual analysis in order to analyze the impact this financialization has on the formal characteristics of culture produced in this era. The first of three case studies is hip hop, a once radical form that has become the quintessential cultural product of the financial era: entrepreneurial, speculative, referential, intermedial, and derivative, in many senses of the word.

XREF: Connects to broader discussions of finance capital shaping culture and media industries.

The first two case studies analyze derivative texts at the level of the lyric and the scene, respectively, but here, the level of analysis is the storyworld. In franchise films like Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Space Jam, The Matrix, Ready Player One, The Lego Movie, and Wreck-It Ralph, narrative and character are largely set aside. Instead, worldbuilding is privileged, and franchise aspirations, licensing contracts, and IP management are given precedence. The storyworlds of these “brandscape blockbusters” are assembled out of dozens, even hundreds, of licensing agreements that patch together pop culture references and paid promotions into a quilt of references, brands, and nostalgia. The audience experiences a sort of road movie through a futuristic brandscape, but these films achieve an odd sense of realism unseen in other forms. Ours is a time of unending brand assault, with advertisers offered entrance to so many aspects of our lives. Stories often offer us escape, whereas these films confront us with the endgame of allowing corporate interests to fully determine our shared culture. Licensing given life and merchandising made material, derivative film presages the dystopian virtual reality, metaverse, and artificial intelligence systems that are now being offered by Silicon Valley.

DEFINE: Introduces the term 'brandscape blockbusters' — franchise films that privilege worldbuilding and licensing agreements over narrative and character.

The key insight is that financial reform is also media reform—popular, actionable legislative changes to taxes, capital gains, carried interest, antitrust, and executive pay could reform the financial and corporate sector, which would have the effect of reforming the media sector. Rather than channel massive profits to the wealthy, the cultural industries could provide a living wage to hundreds of thousands of workers. With this diversity and decentralization, there would likely be far more stories and songs that speak to the pressing issues of climate, racialization, inequalities, injustice, and democratic decline.

SEED: Could be an essay angle connecting corporate tax policy to cultural output and media plurality.

The cultural industries feed this interest with “behind-the-scenes” content and countless stories set in the world of entertainment. The “creative world” depicted on screen and in song is typically romanticized, a demanding but ­rewarding workplace wherein conflicts are overcome with energy, intensity, abundance, transparency, and community. Unfortunately, this romantic image of how media is created has framed our understanding—even our critical understandings—of how media is produced. For an audience. By a team. Working for a company. Usually a big corporation.

XREF: Connects to broader critiques of romanticized labor across creative fields, and to audience misunderstandings of corporate production realities.

The media system does not exist in some separate economic universe; it has its own features, and each type of medium and cultural form has its own narrower features, but it is subject to the dynamics of the rest of the political economy under capitalism. Of course, establishing a context as wide as capitalism is an impossible task. In the story of capitalism and media told here, the big corporations that dominate the cultural industries are themselves mere minnows in an ocean with much bigger ­predators. The sharks are financial firms and the ocean is a capitalism far removed from commonly held conceptions about free markets, competition, and productivity.

This chapter provides this capitalist context through a brief, illustrated history that brings together deep-rooted ideas and tendencies within capitalism that blossomed in the post–World War II political economy of the United States, particularly in the (re)emergence of financialization. It compiles a number of charts to demonstrate the broad outlines of a capitalism in decline. (The new forms of financialization and violence that are maturing in this young century are the focus of the next chapter.) The cultural industries are being reshaped by these larger shifts in the political economy—such as profit rates, investment rates, tax policies, wealth disparities, and financial instruments—and understanding their long-term trajectories is essential.

Capitalism is not a dispassionate system of exchange. It is premised on cruel, racialized, long-term asymmetries of power, such as the aggressive, escalating exploitation of the Global South by the Global North. “Drain,” or the unequal exchange of resources that is compelled by the Global North via geopolitical pressure and financial engineering, has totaled $62 trillion from 1960 to 2018, or $152 trillion if lost growth is included, an unimaginable scale of deprivation and violence. The climate crisis is largely the Global North’s doing, but the Global South bears the brunt of the suffering. … For Fernand Braudel, the market economy of supply, demand, and prices is merely the middle layer of our hierarchical society, above the material life of the non-economy, but below the anti-market, the top layer and the real home of capitalism, where “the great predators roam and the law of the jungle operates.”

XREF: Echoes dependency theory and world-systems analysis from Braudel, Wallerstein, and contemporary degrowth/ecological debt arguments.

It is necessary to dispel this foundational myth of capitalism immediately in order to dispel a similar foundational myth of the cultural industries: that there is a media economy in which competition is high, cultural products are expensive to produce, audiences decide what is popular, and since most products fail to recoup their expenses, big companies naturally arise to build catalogs, profiting handsomely from hits and thereby covering their losses. … It is all untrue. Just as there is no naturally occuring economy, there is no naturally occurring media economy. There is only political economy, a system of social relations constituted through law and institutional behaviors, one that is currently arranged hierarchically and could just as easily be arranged differently. The one we have is driven by power, not exchange of goods and services.

XREF: Connects to critical political economy of communication scholarship (McChesney, Mosco) and institutionalist accounts of media concentration.

Resources are limited. "The economy" is allocating them in ways antithetical to our very survival. Neither will "the political" be the realm in which this calamity is fixed. We can't simply vote out a political economic system that is structured to accumulate and—more importantly—structured to break down, violently if necessary, any barriers to that accumulation.

XREF: Connects to critiques of capital accumulation and political economy (e.g., Marx, degrowth literature), positioning the economic system as structurally self-destructive rather than merely flawed.

However, neoliberalism has also become a catchall for a number of related but discrete phenomena: political projects (particularly the tax-cutting and safety-net-slashing governments of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan), economic thinkers (Friedrich Hayek and the Austrian School, Milton Friedman and the Chicago School), capitalist ideologies (individualism, market fundamentalism, human capital), policy prescriptions (privatization, deregulation, austerity, globalization), negative outcomes (labor precarity, wealth inequality, environmental destruction), and other reconfigurations that have accelerated since the 1970s. As the term has expanded in meaning, neoliberalism has provided a necessary clarion call but has lost its precision as an analytical framework. At worst, use of the term neoliberalism, rather than capitalism or class struggle, risks depicting recent shifts as mere aberrations in need of political reform, a fantasy that this "bad capitalism" could be tamed, that the golden era of postwar prosperity can be reestablished if we just pursue the right policies.

XREF: This connects to broader critiques of catchall academic terms that lose conceptual rigor as they gain popular currency.

The era of consolidation and homogenization in film, television, and popular music documented in this book is an outcome of the broader political economy and its current material realities. … Because the increasing power of financial capital is so important to the past, present, and future of our political economy, as well as the media system within it, its history is our focus.

XREF: Connects to political economy of media scholarship — theorists like Chomsky/Herman, McChesney, or Ben Bagdikian on media ownership concentration.

These systemic cycles of transition have been further refined by Giovanni Arrighi in The Long Twentieth Century, outlining an evolutionary pattern of capitalist regimes that increase in size and complexity, yet decrease in duration. Like Braudel, Arrighi charts this trajectory through Genoa, Amsterdam, and Britain, but then extends his analysis to an American hegemony that has lasted from the late nineteenth century to its financial expansion, beginning in the 1970s, and into its current crisis and apparent disintegration. The dot-com bubble in 2000 and 2001, military failures since 9/11, and financial meltdown in 2008 are further proof of what he suggests is a case of power "suicide." Though the U.S. retains its military strength, the economic center of the global economy has begun to shift to East Asia, particularly China.

XREF: Connects to Arrighi's The Long Twentieth Century and Braudel's historical cycles — hegemonic transition theory in world-systems analysis.

The bipartisan procession of deregulation included domestic legislation such as the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act of 1980, the Garn–St. Germain Depository Institutions Act of 1982, the Futures Trading Practices Act of 1992 (which deregulated the speculative derivatives markets and opened them up to a much wider group of investors), the Telecommunications Act of 1996, and the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999, which had separated investment banking from commercial banking since 1933.

XREF: Connects to ongoing debates about financial regulation and the 2008 crisis origins.

Many popular, shortsighted accounts of the financial crash in 2007–8 portray the collapse as merely the combination of improper mortgage sales and overleveraged investment banks. Historian Robert Brenner traces the root causes deeper, to the “huge, unresolved problems in the real economy that have been literally papered over by debt for decades.” What may have appeared as broad-based prosperity for many during the 1990s and 2000s was actually an ever-greater buildup of debt, as the engine of growth continued to slow. This is what Brenner calls “the long downturn—the extraordinarily extended phase of reduced economic dynamism and declining economic performance, persisting through the end of the millennium and into the new.” Brenner’s explanation is that industrial overcapacity has stalled the manufacturing growth engine, and none of the attempted alternatives (service economy, digital economy, knowledge economy, finance economy) have provided enough growth to make up for that decline.

XREF: Connects to Brenner's long-downturn thesis and critiques of superficial financial-crash explanations. SEED: Potential angle: examining whether today's apparent prosperity is again debt-masked slowdown rather than genuine growth.

One result was the dot-com boom and bust from 1995 to 2000, as venture capital and financial speculation fueled the growth of fifty thousand companies looking to capitalize on the popularization of the internet. When overvalued companies could not produce the profit that was promised, investors fled the sector and the bubble popped in 2001. However, the cheap credit continued, fostering conditions for a new bubble to inflate, this time in the housing sector.

XREF: Links to lessons on speculative cycles and how cheap credit migrates between asset classes after a bubble bursts. SEED: Could seed an article about how speculative capital flows from one sector to the next, with the dot-com-to-housing transition as a case study.

This was a new model of growth: not Keynesianism, in which direct government investment in employment and infrastructure can stimulate the economy, but what Brenner calls “asset-based Keynesianism,” indirect government-facilitated investment in assets and equities in an attempt to kickstart the economy.

DEFINE: Contrasts two economic models: direct government investment versus indirect facilitation of asset and equity investment. XREF: Connects to rentier capitalism and financialization debates about how growth is distributed.

The Federal Reserve facilitated $7.7 trillion in liquidity for banks, but nothing for homeowners. Most importantly, according to Nick Srnicek's account, is that key interest rates suddenly dropped around the world. This "easy money" era is visible in figure 1.10, which illustrates the long-term interest rate environment in the U.S. When interest rates at zero weren't enough, central banks engaged in "quantitative easing," in which central banks buy government debt and bonds, increasing the demand for other financial assets, easing credit, and raising asset prices, thereby stimulating the wider economy. … "While quantitative easing (QE) may have stabilised the financial system," according to Ann Pettifor, "it inflated the value of assets like property—owned on the whole, by the more affluent. As such, QE contributed to rising inequality and to the political and social instability associated with it."

XREF: Connects to broader critiques of monetary policy and wealth inequality debates in economics and political writing.

It didn't have to be this way. A Keynesian approach could have used the cheap credit and available workforce to build much-needed infrastructure, public housing, and renewable energy. Instead, asset-based Keynesianism gave us a housing market unaffordable for most, ad tech surveillance, the gig economy, and a thousand forgettable shows on Netflix.

XREF: Connects to critiques of financialized capitalism and the 2008 crisis literature, which also trace how cheap credit was routed into asset bubbles rather than productive investment.

In 2020, the longest bull market in U.S. history came to a sudden halt due to COVID-19. The Federal Reserve once again stepped in, this time providing loans to nonfinancial corporations for the first time since the 1930s, stabilizing the corporate bond market, which was at risk of collapsing. … Meanwhile, in Congress, over $4 trillion of the $6.2 trillion CARES Act, the vast majority, went to the country's biggest, wealthiest companies. "The equivalent of two and a half times U.S. annual corporate profits, or about 20 percent of U.S. annual GDP," Brenner notes, "was authorized to be dispensed without undue surveillance and with no strings attached." Meanwhile, the four hundred richest Americans increased their wealth by 40 percent, adding $4.5 trillion to their coffers.

For most of the twentieth century, understanding the structure and practices of the U.S. cultural industries required vocabulary like commodity, supply and demand, ownership, and market research. The derivative media of today are driven by new financial forces with another set of terms: asset management, speculation, diversified portfolios, and securitization.

An early, narrow definition of financialization was provided in 2002 in Randy Martin’s Financialization of Daily Life, in which he looks at how finance “insinuates an orientation toward accounting and risk management into all domains of life.” A broader, influential definition of the term came in 2005, when Gerald Epstein posited that financialization refers to “the increasing role of financial motives, financial markets, financial actors and financial institutions in the operation of the domestic and international economies.”

DEFINE: Provides Gerald Epstein's broad definition of financialization as the growing role of financial motives, markets, actors, and institutions in domestic and international economies.

While ownership of corporate equities is increasingly dominated by the few and the powerful, the corporations themselves are increasingly dominated by a few companies in each sector as well, using their market power to prevent competition. In figure 2.5, we see the overall decline in the number of firms listed on U.S. stock exchanges, with an inverse relationship to the market valuation of the companies remaining, which continues to climb steadily. In other words, the overall trend is toward fewer, more powerful, and more profitable companies. In figure 2.6, we see one of the key strategies that companies pursue to reach that scale: mergers and acquisitions, which have skyrocketed to over fifty thousand deals annually across the globe, reaching $5 trillion in value.

Well-founded worries about the unchecked power of Big Tech motivates a lot of this debate, but the media system should not be overlooked. It is well known that the Big 5 tech companies (Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet/Google, Meta/Facebook), with high valuations on the stock market and thus easy access to credit, bought their size and scale through constantly acquiring competitors. Microsoft excelled (no pun intended) in this strategy in the personal computing sector, while the Google/Facebook duopoly bought up the vast majority of firms in the AdTech market, up and down the value chain. In total, as seen in figure 2.7, the Big 5 tech companies have gobbled up at least eleven hundred other companies. Less well known is the fact that the Big 5 media companies actually surpass Big Tech in terms of mergers and acquisitions, approaching fifteen hundred by my calculations, as seen in figure 2.8.16 The biggest acquisitions—like Comcast buying NBCUniversal, or Disney’s string of acquisitions in the 2010s that included Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, and Fox—are mere drops in a very large bucket. Consolidation has been a recurrent feature of the film, television, and music industries for decades, but media companies are increasingly expanding their dominance across the globe and across multiple sectors. The next two chapters explore the dominant companies within the music industry and the film and television industries, respectively, but at this point we can note that although consolidation is not a new phenomenon, it is supercharged by financial capital.

XREF: Connects to broader discourse on corporate consolidation and antitrust in tech vs. media.

A dividend is merely a distribution of profits from a company to its shareholders, paid in cash or additional stock. It is a way for companies to reward their investors during profitable quarters, which in turn attracts more investors. Dividends demonstrate a firm’s confidence in their performance and are, of course, welcomed by investors. Though they may appear benign, any profits paid out in dividends are not reinvested by the company into productive means. In the case of media companies, that means profits that could have been reinvested in creators, performers, and other laborers in the form of wages or new hires; instead, they are distributed to investors who, as we’ve just seen, are disproportionately already wealthy.

Why has CEO pay skyrocketed? Their pay is set by a company's board of directors, which is stacked with other CEOs and CFOs (chief financial officers), who are all acting in their class interests. For example, current or former chief executives make up ten members of Warner Bros. Discovery's twelve-member board, ten out of eleven members at Disney, and eight out of ten at Comcast. As Duménil and Lévy claim in their analysis of the disciplining functions of neoliberalism, "top management is metamorphosed into financial management."

XREF: Connects to the broader theme of corporate governance capture and how interlocks between executives entrench compensation inequality.

In the 1980s, these institutional investors started delegating their investment responsibilities to for-profit asset managers, a new sector that swelled with the introduction of privatized retirement funds in the 1990s. The asset management sector is now highly consolidated. The largest 1 percent of asset managers control 61 percent of assets managed. Three asset management firms in particular—BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street, known as the "Big 3"—have found outsized influence by cornering the market in exchange-traded funds (ETFs). The latter investment instrument is similar to a mutual fund, in that it bundles a number of different assets, but is more liquid and has lower fees. Over a long period, active investment management and stock picking rarely outperforms a diversified index fund, and many investors, institutional and personal, have shifted to index funds as a result. Vanguard, the largest provider of mutual funds and the inventor of the index fund, holds more than $8 trillion in assets under management. BlackRock, the developer of Aladdin, a risk-management software system that is used by it and its rivals, manages more than $10 trillion of assets. As of 2017, if counted collectively, BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street are the largest owners of equity in 88 percent of the companies listed on the S&P 500 (an index of the five hundred largest U.S. publicly traded companies as determined by market capitalization), up from 25 percent in 2000.

Knowing that common ownership in other industries results in decreased competition and increased prices, we should expect the same in the media industries, even though specific outcomes and effects on content are difficult to isolate. The propensity for joint ventures (e.g., Hulu, The CW, Epix, Vevo) and joint franchises (e.g., Harry Potter, Terminator, Lego, James Bond, Lord of the Rings, Spider-Man) is the kind of cartel-like behavior we can expect from common ownership. … While difficult to track on the ground—as with climate change, in which any one extreme weather event may not be conclusively attributable to human-caused climate change but the overall probability of extreme weather steadily rises—the overall trend in the derivative media era is toward increased consolidation, layoffs, CEO raises, and minimal competition within a climate of financialization and common ownership.

XREF: Connects to broader antitrust/corporate-concentration literature and the climate-change probabilistic causation analogy the author draws.

This description of the private equity (PE) industry in Succession may be crude, but it is not inaccurate. The violence suggested by this metaphor is well earned: private equity is an extractive financial technique that leaves behind it many bankruptcies, layoffs, and unpaid bills. Its reputation was so tarnished by exploitative behavior in the 1980s and 1990s that it was rebranded from "leveraged buyout firms" to the more opaque term used today, private equity.

DEFINE: Explains that 'private equity' was a rebranding from the earlier, more candid term 'leveraged buyout firms' following reputational damage in the 1980s-90s. XREF: Connects the extractive characterization to the HBO series Succession, where the PE industry is dramatized through the metaphor of violent extraction.

A leveraged buyout is when a PE firm acquires a company owned by public shareholders by using the target company's own assets as collateral to secure debt, which it uses to pay a premium for all of the company's shares. In other words, the public company that is acquired is taken private and is then responsible for paying back the debt that was used to purchase it. This technique is considered "leveraged" because the PE firms are using borrowed capital, which increases their scale and thus their potential return on investment. Following the acquisition, the PE firm then restructures the company over the next several years, pays itself dividends and fees in the mean time, then "exits" the investment by selling the streamlined property or taking it public. While the company is private and controlled by the PE firm, it is not bound by SEC regulations requiring disclosures and prohibiting highly speculative strategies.

DEFINE: Clarifies the mechanics of a leveraged buyout, especially the counterintuitive detail that the acquired company becomes responsible for the debt used to purchase it.

Though they invest only 1–2 percent of the equity in the private equity fund, the PE firms retain 20 percent of the profit if the rate of return achieves a certain threshold (usually 8 percent). With these massive funds (as high as $20 billion), PE firms target companies ripe for exploitation through financial engineering: paying themselves a special dividend, forcing layoffs, reducing wages, increasing debt, offshoring, exploiting bankruptcy, exploiting tax loopholes, selling assets for profit, eliminating pensions, and other nefarious methods (outlined in table 2.1). Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner, in their book These Are the Plunderers: How Private Equity Runs—and Wrecks—America, document the wreckage: 20 percent of companies taken over by private equity filed for bankruptcy, compared to just 2 percent in other acquisitions; employment decreased by 13–16 percent; and some six hundred thousand layoffs in retail alone. With little to lose if the company’s debt drives it into bankruptcy and much to gain if the investment can be exited from successfully, private equity is a textbook case of “moral hazard,” as someone else bears the cost of their risks.

XREF: Connects to general knowledge about moral hazard in finance and the incentive misalignment between fund managers and limited partners.

How is this clearly predatory behavior legal, you might ask. It’s called the “carried interest loophole.” Because the acquisitions are structured as investments, PE firms can treat the profits as investment income, which are taxed at the much lower capital gains rate, permitting the whole racket to occur. Closing this loophole is a recurring, popular, bipartisan campaign promise (Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden all promised to end it), but lobbying by the financial sector, as well as the revolving door between government and big business, have ensured the survival of this destructive loophole.

XREF: Connects to broader literature on financial-sector lobbying and the revolving door between government and business.

Though earlier examples exist (e.g., Blackstone helped finance Sony's acquisition of CBS Records in 1988; both Blackstone and Apollo invested in Sirius in the late 1990s; KKR and others acquired Regal Cinemas in 1998), the year 2004 is a fitting marker for the start of sustained financialization in the media sector as multiple companies—MGM Studios, WMG, AMC Theatres, Cinemark, and Odeon Cinemas—were acquired by PE firms. Since then, weaker sectors of the industry, such as record labels (EMI) and radio (Cumulus, Clear Channel/iHeartMedia) have been common targets for PE profit extraction, while talent agencies have been the most recent acquisitions, with four major agencies (CAA, WME, IMG, and ICM) now owned by private equity.

DEFINE: Establishes 2004 as the marker year for sustained PE financialization in media, with earlier examples treated as anomalies. XREF: Connects to broader trends of financialization and private equity ownership across cultural industries.

Conventional wisdom holds that the cultural industries were historically not targeted as investment vehicles for two reasons: fickle audiences meant high rates of failure, and the Hollywood and music oligopolies maintained their grip on the necessary talent, distribution, and marketing networks. Over the past two decades, however, film, television, and music have lost much of their cultural centrality as a multitude of new options for entertainment and leisure activity have arisen, such as video games and social media. Meanwhile, Silicon Valley's entrance into the cultural industries has developed the data analytics to help alleviate the riskiness of audiences, while also destabilizing legacy media's grasp on the foundational components of talent, distribution, and marketing. Private equity has noticed this disturbance and has sought to capitalize on it since 2004.

Private equity firms and hedge funds share a couple of key features: both are investment firms that cater to wealthy clients, and both charge hefty fees for their ability to extract profit from publicly traded corporations in order to produce “alpha,” an excess return above a benchmark index. In other words, investors are willing to pay higher fees because they are promised higher returns than can be achieved through safer investment strategies. While a PE firm’s primary strategy is the leveraged buyout of a public firm, a hedge fund uses financial instruments and pressure tactics. The term hedge fund dates back to the 1940s, when it described a trading strategy that “hedged,” or limited, risk by betting against market fluctuations, using instruments such as short selling (betting that an asset will decline in value). The term has since been appropriated by speculators for whom leveraging risk (using borrowed capital to increase potential return), and lots of it, is the dominant strategy. In other words, hedge funds dramatically increase risk, rather than limiting or hedging it.

DEFINE: Defines 'hedge fund' by contrasting its original 1940s meaning (limiting risk through short selling) with its modern practice of leveraging risk.

Because the SEC does not require detailed disclosures about buybacks and because hedge funds have close relationships to senior executives, it is fair to assume that the selling of shares by hedge funds is timed for maximum profit extraction.

XREF: Relates to insider trading literature and studies on executive-hedge fund relationships in financial markets.

Hedge fund activists claim they are merely aiming to improve a company’s operations or financial stability, but they have no incentive to produce value, only extract it. They have two goals: increase cash flow over which the company has control and extract that cash flow. Similar to the financial engineering strategies of private equity, hedge funds pressure their targets to utilize mass layoffs, corporate tax evasion, price gouging, corporate asset sales, and acquisitions of cash-rich companies. Extracting the cash is then accomplished through dividends and stock buybacks.

XREF: Connects to the financialization critique and the parallel drawn with private equity's financial engineering strategies described in the same passage.

One of the core problems with hedge funds is that they are the new home for the corporate raider, now rebranded as an “activist investor” or “hedge fund activist.” In the late 1980s, corporate raiders were curtailed by public scrutiny, anti-takeover legislation, and defensive corporate strategy (such as various shareholder actions, called “poison pills,” that go into effect when a hostile takeover is attempted). Pressured by lobbyists, including an organization launched by infamous corporate raider T. Boone Pickens, financial deregulation at the SEC in 1992 permitted new forms of communication between investors (resulting in investor cartels), between investors and company management (no longer considered insider information), and between investors and the public (announcing voting intentions in order to sway other voters). Corporate raiding could now occur under new auspices; a “wolf pack” of investors, garnering the support of institutional investors, can collectively intimidate corporate management and make demands.

XREF: Connects to the broader narrative arc of the book tracing how deregulation enabled extractive finance practices. DEFINE: Clarifies 'wolf pack' and 'poison pills' terminology while explaining how rebranded 'activist investors' execute pressure tactics.

Many of the biggest hedge funds in the world have taken sizable positions in media companies to dramatic effect. In figure 2.19, a snapshot of corporate equities in the media sector held by hedge funds at the end of each year, we see a dramatic spike in the 2010s. For example, Elliott Management, an activist hedge fund with over $50 billion in assets under management as of 2021, sued Universal Studios in 2013 over a slate of films it helped finance, purchased nearly two million shares of Comcast in 2015, and took a $3.2 billion position in AT&T in 2019. Its “activist campaign” included the release of a widely publicized letter that pushed the company to divest assets, castigated its CEO, criticized its acquisition of Time Warner and DirecTV, and demanded layoffs—sorry, my mistake, it recommended “improved operational efficiency” by “eliminating . . . duplicative layers,” to take advantage of a large “opportunity for rightsizing and simplification” through “workforce planning” and “strategic outsourcing.” It also demanded more dividends and share buybacks. Despite outcry from AT&T’s main labor union, the Communications Workers of America, lamenting an “archetypal ploy of vulture capitalists,” AT&T did what it was told: it fired CEO Randall Stephenson; it fired over forty-two thousand employees; it increased dividends and buybacks; it spun off Time Warner into a merger with Discovery; it spun off DirecTV and sold a 30 percent stake to the private equity fund TPG; it sold its anime service Crunchyroll to Sony, giving it a monopoly, as Sony already owned the other major anime service, Funimation; it sold prominent gossip outlet TMZ to Fox Corporation; and it sold Xandr, its advertising technology company, to Microsoft, which it would later use in its partnership with Netflix.

The impacts of institutional investors, asset managers, PE firms, and hedge funds can be considered external forces of financialization acting on the cultural industries, by companies such as BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, Bain Capital, KKR, Carlyle, TPG, Elliott Management, Pershing Square, and Third Point. While their executives and managers have direct effects on the actions of media production, there is also a corresponding internal force of financialization in the form of ­corporate venture capital (CVC). For large media companies, investment in tech startups through their own CVC arm has many functions: earning profits that do not need to be shared with talent, obtaining research on the latest technological and consumer developments, preventing new competition from gaining a ­foothold, and maintaining an oligopoly.

While financial gains are of course an element of this investment strategy, studies show that strategic goals are also a key reason for corporate venture capital. Massive corporations become less agile and able to respond to market changes; CVC allows them to engage in research and development by proxy, acquiring resources and intellectual property from their ventures. This strategy allows big companies to gather information on new markets and technologies, monitor their growth, and enter them more easily. “It’s like a radar for the company,” as one venture capitalist working at a major media corporation told me. Identifying and assessing potential acquisition targets is another key function of CVC; the investment can even be made with an option to acquire the portfolio company if certain metrics are reached. CVC is also used by corporations to hedge their bets, ensuring that they are strategically placed in regard to emerging technologies, ready to act when the dominant design prevails.

XREF: Parallels ambidexterity and open innovation literatures on large-firm exploration. SEED: Could write an article on how CVC functions as organizational radar for large firms.

A successful (and fittingly derivative) example would be Pluto TV, a startup founded in 2013 that received early CVC investment from Universal Music Group, Sky, and UTA Ventures, among other traditional VC firms. Pluto TV’s “innovation” was to recreate the linear cable television interface of curated channels but with streaming video. In 2019, it was acquired by Paramount (then Viacom) for $340 million.

At this scale and scope, it is necessary to consider that we may be witnessing, as LiPuma and Lee argue, “a planetary shift in power away from national state political systems, or perhaps political systems of any kind, and toward the global financial markets.” As the structural form that circulates and globalizes risk, derivatives are a key determinant in this paradigm shift. This destructive power is perhaps most evident in the many countries of the Global South that have felt the wrath of derivatives markets. For example, the election of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of the Workers’ Party in Brazil in 2002 set off a wave of depreciation of Brazil’s currency driven by the derivatives markets. The Brazilian real fell by 30 percent compared to the dollar and euro, swelling Brazil’s debt obligations and severely limiting Lula da Silva’s ability to remedy the country’s economic and social injustices, the platform for which he was elected.

FICTION: A storyline where a populist leader's election is sabotaged by financial markets before they can enact reforms offers rich dramatic and political tension.

If the logic of the derivative orients around malleability and blendability, is it any wonder that the digital cultural text is increasingly malleable and blendable, remixable and shareable?

SEED: The parallel between the 'derivative' in finance/code and cultural remixing could anchor an essay about how platforms enable blending of creative works.

There is nothing new or controversial about textual influence, of course, both conscious and unconscious, but the sheer brazenness and repeated, reliable profitability of much of Hollywood's “derivative” product suggests a concrete bankability to the once-radical concept of intertextuality.

SEED: Could develop into an essay about how intertextual theory became a financial strategy in Hollywood production.

“Derivative media” captures not just the financial, legal, and textual characteristics of contemporary cultural production and circulation, but the manner in which these are self-reinforcing mechanisms. The broader financial economics of cultural production seek to capitalize on disassembled, tradable assets that it can exploit; likewise, the corporate media text increasingly derives its textual material in a fashion that lends itself to disassembly and rebundling. Each function serves the other.

DEFINE: Defines 'derivative media' as a self-reinforcing intersection of financial and textual strategies in cultural production.

Because risk is so prevalent in the film and television industries, with unpredictable audiences constantly changing in their behaviors and tastes, successes must make up for the inevitable failures. In order to ensure future success, every effort is made to leverage past success, exposure, and pre-owned intellectual property. On the occasion of success, contracts with talent secure the option for more derivative content in the future. On the occasion of failure, resources are redeployed and intellectual property is reserved for possible “reboot” in the near future.

The true dynamism of the derivative media, however, is what happens in between these successes and failures, in the constant textual negotiation of influence and reference. Derivative media operationalizes intertextuality. On one end of the spectrum, figurative devices such as allusion, parody, satire, and homage create constellations of textual reference and influence; on the other, commercial devices such as product placement, brand integration, branded entertainment, and native advertising deliver consumer influence. The latter typically involves a direct transfer of money, while the former often enacts an indirect exchange of cultural capital. The key to this exchange is the interplay between these two forms of “derivation,” the textual and the financial.

“The central, universal characteristic of derivatives,” according to Dick Bryan and Michael Rafferty, “is their capacity to ‘dismantle’ or ‘unbundle’ any asset into constituent attributes and trade those attributes without trading the asset itself.” Neither possession nor ownership of the underlying asset is required to configure its attributes into universally recognizable and thus tradable elements. The derivative dismantles or unbundles any asset into individual attributes and trades them without trading the asset itself; this operating logic finds its way into the cultural text when the fluid conversion between assets is exploited by conglomerates with holdings in a variety of intellectual property. To think of textual reference in such a manner would be to price the constitutive elements of a “mosaic of quotations,” to dismantle and unbundle its textual assets.

XREF: Connects to financialization of culture and how conglomerates treat intellectual property as liquid assets convertible into other forms.

Having successfully disassembled assets in order to price and trade their attributes, derivatives have two key functions, according to Bryan and Rafferty: binding and blending. Particularly through options and futures, derivatives “bind” the future to the present through pricing relationships; with swaps, they “blend” different forms of capital, through corresponding asset forms, into a single unit of measure. “It is . . . the capacity for derivatives to [be] commensurate [to] capital in different forms, locations and time horizons that adds greater competitive discipline to the processes of calculation and decision making.”

DEFINE: Explains Bryan and Rafferty's two core functions of derivatives: binding (options/futures linking future to present pricing) and blending (swaps commensurating different capital forms into a single measure).

Often missing from these structural assessments is the role of financialization. In other words, Madison Avenue and Silicon Valley are well represented, but Wall Street remains comparatively underexplored.

DEFINE: Explains financialization as a structural force — Wall Street's role — that is distinct from the advertising (Madison Avenue) and tech (Silicon Valley) influences typically studied.

Turning our attention, then, to finance and consolidation, what exactly is being financialized and consolidated? As scholars have noted often over the years, there is no music industry singular, and invoking it as such carries many drawbacks. By implying a homogeneous industry and conflating it with the recording industry, the term music industry does a disservice to the complexity and diversity of what John Williamson and Martin Cloonan suggest should be called the music industries, plural. The recording industry and its associated lobbying organizations—namely, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the International Federation of Phonographic Industries (IFPI)—have much to gain from this conflation: their vested interests are better served by portraying an entire industry in crisis. “It is not a single ‘music industry’ which is in ‘crisis,’” explain Williamson and Cloonan, “rather it is one of the music industries which is struggling to come to terms with the new business environment which has been created by technological and communications advances.”

DEFINE: Introduces the distinction between the singular 'music industry' and the plural 'music industries,' attributed to Williamson and Cloonan, as a corrective conceptual framework.

In the book Spotify Teardown: Inside the Black Box of Streaming Music, Vonderau and his coauthors continue this analysis, "following the hype" of Spotify's successful attempts at raising venture capital through speculative storytelling, as well as its use of arbitrage (exploiting price discrepancies) and programmatic advertising. The aim of this chapter is to build on this analysis, moving beyond a single company and applying a consideration of financialization to the sector as a whole, mapping the many ways financial engineering enters into the music industries.

XREF: Connects to Vonderau's Spotify Teardown work, extending single-company analysis to sector-wide financialization.

As discussed in chapter 2, private equity (PE) firms raise investment funds to purchase companies, using large, leveraged levels of debt, borrowed against the assets of the target company. After the company is acquired, it is restructured and financially engineered, then sold, hopefully at a profit. Private equity often seeks out "distressed assets"—companies that are facing financial or operational difficulty and are thus more susceptible to a leveraged buyout. Due to file sharing, a recession, changing consumer behavior, and other factors, many music companies fell on hard times in the early 2000s and were subsequently targeted by private equity.

Four major examples (WMG, EMI, iHeartMedia, and Cumulus) of PE will be documented in this section, though there are also earlier examples (Blackstone's investment in Sony in 1988, Blackstone and Apollo's investment in Sirius in the late 1990s) and many other contemporary examples: BlackRock's investment in Primary Wave in 2016; Blackstone's acquisition of SESAC in 2017 and eOne Music in 2021; KKR's acquisition of a rights portfolio from Kobalt in 2021; Apollo's investments in Concord and HarbourView Equity, New Mountain Capital's acquisition of BMI, and STG's acquisition of Avid, all in 2023; and Francisco Partners' investment in Native Instruments, Muse Group, Eventbrite, and Kobalt Music. However, the first major PE acquisition in the music sector—and a clear-cut example of private equity's key strategies of profit extraction and labor reduction—occurred in 2004, when WMG was acquired for $2.6 billion by Bain Capital (cofounded by former presidential candidate Mitt Romney), along with two other PE firms (Thomas H. Lee Partners and Providence Equity Partners) and Edgar Bronfman Jr. (former CEO of Seagram and vice chairman of Vivendi Universal). … The day after the sale to the PE firms cleared, the new owners cut 20 percent of WMG's workforce, roughly a thousand employees. By year's end, they had fired two thousand of its sixty-five hundred employees, trimmed its global operations, and reduced costs by $250 million. They also moved quickly to restructure the conglomerate, firing many executives, reducing the roster of artists, and combining labels and divisions in order to improve efficiency. Bronfman was not shy in describing his financial approach to the music business, treating artists "almost like a venture-capital business," acknowledging that "when it comes time to renew, if the price is too high and the economic burden too great, we will simply pass."

Shortly after the sale, the new owners paid themselves a dividend of $350 million of Warner's cash; later that year, they assembled more debt and paid themselves another $680 million. Since the acquisition included $1.25 billion of equity capital, the investors had already recouped most of their investment within a year. When taking the company public in 2005, Bain and the others had sold enough shares to have effectively tripled their original investment. In 2011, the PE firms earned one final bonus when they exited their investment by selling WMG for $3.3 billion to Access Industries, which has holdings in natural resources, chemicals, telecommunications, and real estate, as well as equity stakes in the streaming platforms Spotify and Deezer … Bragging about their profit and success in the Wall Street Journal, two Bain executives claimed to have "paid down debt and dramatically increased cash flow and earnings" at WMG, failing to mention what they eliminated in order to achieve that cash flow: the livelihoods of thousands of musicians and staff members, as well as the productive capacity of the many historic labels owned by WMG.

Typical of a PE firm, Terra Firma used debt financing to acquire EMI in a $4.7 billion deal, with the intent of extracting value by selling off its revenue streams to investors. However, the then roiling financial crisis limited any potential buyers. Terra Firma then opted for dramatic restructuring: it fired the existing management and two thousand employees (45 percent of the workforce), while relentlessly focusing on maximizing profits and minimizing losses. Its strategy was characterized as seeking to “disempower the irresponsible 'creatives', and impose financial discipline.” Many of those so-called irresponsible creatives decided to take their business elsewhere, including Paul McCartney, the Rolling Stones, Robbie Williams, and Radiohead. Unable to restore revenues in an industry struggling with the digital transition and unable to make payments on its loans, Terra Firma forfeited control of EMI to its primary lender, Citigroup, in 2011. Its losses on the investment totaled $2.7 billion, considered the largest known PE investment write-off in history.

XREF: Connects to broader patterns of private-equity buyout failures during the 2008 financial crisis.

Though terrestrial radio no longer has the most influence in shaping music culture, it remains highly profitable. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers in 2019, the radio sector is projected to continue being more profitable ($48.2 billion) than either the live-music ($31.5 billion) or recorded-music sector ($33.7 billion). Unlike in other countries, radio companies in the U.S. are required to share only minimal revenue with musicians (who are supposed to be happy with the promotion) and they remain a highly lucrative business for advertising. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 dramatically deregulated the radio industry, no longer limiting the number of radio stations one company could own. Clear Channel, for instance, spent $30 billion to acquire more than twelve hundred radio stations, resulting in ownership of as many as seven stations in a single market, 60 percent of the rock radio market, and equity stakes in 240 international radio stations.

XREF: Connects to general media consolidation trends and the Telecommunications Act of 1996's broader deregulatory effects.

Bain and THL saw an undervalued asset and, in 2006, initiated one of the largest leveraged buyouts in history with a $24 billion offer for Clear Channel. The buyout was completed in 2008, and the layoffs followed shortly thereafter. Cutting roughly 10 percent of the workforce was just the start: three more rounds of layoffs followed in subsequent years. Smaller-market radio stations were sold off, and focus was shifted to the most profitable stations. Local programming was reduced and replaced with syndicated regional and national programming. Instead of explicit attention to local concerns, in which terrestrial radio has long excelled, top talent would prerecord custom breaks and token localized content.

XREF: Connects to broader discourse on private equity stripping local media and services after leveraged buyouts, a pattern seen in journalism and healthcare too.

In 2014, Clear Channel renamed itself iHeartMedia, a rebranding effort officially meant to signal its broader digital media goals, but most likely an attempt to disassociate from its poor performance. Despite being the country's largest terrestrial radio network, with a growing digital presence, iHeartMedia hasn't turned a profit since 2007 because interest paid on its debt eats up a quarter of its yearly revenues, having been saddled with $20 billion of debt by its PE owners as part of the buyout. In 2018, iHeartMedia filed for bankruptcy to restructure its debt. Further job cuts and even more dreary, homogeneous programming have resulted from meeting its debt obligations.

XREF: Connects to broader patterns of private equity buyouts draining media/journalism industries, not just radio.

The second largest radio operator in the country, Cumulus, has experienced a similar decade of private equity, consolidation, debt, streamlining, and homogenization. Again, Bain Capital and THL play a role, along with Blackstone, the country's largest PE firm. Entering a partnership with Cumulus in 2005 to acquire Susquehanna Radio, these three firms extracted capital and exited their involvement in 2011; Cumulus then brought on new PE firms, Crestview Partners and Macquarie Group, as well as $3 billion in debt financing from banks that helped Cumulus finance a deal to buy Citadel for $2.5 billion. Following a troubled merger with Disney's ABC Radio, Citadel had recently emerged from bankruptcy, its shares ending up in the hands of debtholders, PE firm TPG Capital, JPMorgan Chase, and hedge fund R2 investments. Similar to iHeartMedia, private equity financed the radio group's massive scale but left it with a heavy debt load and declining profitability. Terrestrial radio continues to reach 93 percent of adult consumers, a pool of 240 million people that remains attractive to advertisers, but the large radio companies have become so highly leveraged by a decade of financialization that profit and growth seem unlikely. All in all, the private equity experiences of WMG, EMI, iHeartMedia, and Cumulus—four of the largest conglomerates in the music industries—demonstrate that the story of private equity is not just the rapid looting of profit in its successes, but also the debt-saddled wreckage it leaves in its failures. Wealthy investors escape; struggling musicians suffer.

XREF: Parallels the iHeartMedia case and other music industry conglomerates (WMG, EMI) described in this same work, showing a pattern across the sector.

In 2012, the minimally competitive recording and publishing industries were concentrated even further when Citigroup, having recently taken control of EMI from Terra Firma after it failed to make payments on its debt, sold EMI for parts. … During the Universal-EMI antitrust hearings, an attorney estimated that the combined entity would control 42 percent of American recorded-music revenue, transforming the market from “moderately concentrated” to “highly concentrated” as defined by the Horizontal Merger Guidelines issued jointly by the DOJ and the Federal Trade Commission . Using 2011’s charts, UMG would have owned more than half of the titles on the Billboard Hot 100. Nevertheless, the merger was approved—and the diversity of major companies in the recording industry has dwindled from six in the late 1990s to just three multinational corporations today.

In hindsight, the threat of piracy was not only exaggerated by the big music companies and its lobbying organizations, but exploited in order to tighten the cartel’s control.

XREF: Parallels common corporate strategy of manufacturing external threats to justify anticompetitive consolidation, seen in other industries like telecom and streaming.

Waging an aggressive public relations campaign well before the effects of Napster, the vested industry players were able to deliver concrete policy results in their favor: the Audio Home Recording Act (AHRA) in 1992, which established royalties, anti-circumvention provisions (breaking the technological barriers set up to protect copyright), and anti-copying provisions on digital recording devices; the Digital Performance Right in Sound Recordings Act (DPRA) in 1995, which established digital public performance rights; and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in 1998, which vastly expanded anti-circumvention and copyright infringement penalties. "The music cartels," according to Aram Sinnreich, "artificially limited the functionality of digital music to emulate the inherent limitations of twentieth-century distribution platforms, thereby preserving the integrity of economic and institutional models premised on those limitations."

XREF: Connects to broader histories of how incumbent industries use lobbying to shape technology regulation, e.g., early radio and film copyright battles.

Just as the theatrical release of a Hollywood film is merely the first stage in a long advertising campaign and functions as a predictor for its success in lengthier, more lucrative release windows and its eventual value in the catalog, the recorded music business holds symbolic significance for how a musician will fare in the larger ecosystem of live performance, licensing opportunities, and radio play.

A central strategy the Big 3 recording cartel utilizes is leveraging their catalogs of recording copyrights in licensing negotiations with on-demand subscription platforms such as Spotify, Apple Music, Soundcloud, Vevo, Tidal, Deezer, and other companies that require access to major-label catalogs to function. … A generation of young consumers that came of age sharing MP3s and amassing large collections on iPods and other devices certainly contributed to this consumer behavior, but if one considers the political-economic implications of near total catalogs, and the opportunities for market domination that arise when catalogs have been consolidated, then the Big 3 labels have much to gain from such a minimally competitive market.

Lastly, a key feature of the leaked contract was a “most-favored-nation clause,” meaning that Sony was entitled to increased payment if any other labels negotiated better deals and the right to conduct an audit as proof. There is perhaps no clearer signal of the imbalance in the recording industry than the fact that the major labels have the right to perform audits to extract more money, while artists are unable to perform audits in order to find out why they make so little.

Furthermore, this 75 percent cut is not even the end of the big labels’ extraction process—they take a cut of the other categories as well. They have a big stake in the 10 percent that goes to publishing rights. Artist payouts, as small as they are, are often subject to recoupment, in which an advance is given and the label later bills substantial recording, touring, and marketing expenses to the musician, a notorious black hole for unaccounted expenses. Recoupment has been around for decades, but the Big 3 have recently developed a particularly devious new method of exploitation that does not require them to share anything with their artists. The original 20 percent that the platform keeps as its own revenue is partially flowing to the labels as well, due to the most incriminating demand of the Big 3’s negotiation with streaming services: equity stakes in each new platform. The labels have such excessive leverage because of their consolidated catalogs that they can demand to own a percentage of each new company. Though the value of that catalog only exists because of the musicians, the artists are not entitled to any portion of this ownership stake or any future profits that might result from it. The resultant position of the label is to sell music to a platform that it partially owns. As both the seller and the partial buyer, it has reason and ability to lower the overhead on each side of the equation to maximize profit. The overhead in this case is paying artists their fair share.

QUESTION: How do indie labels and artists' unions respond to this equity-based extraction model?

The Big 3 labels extracted 18 percent stock equity in Spotify, which profited them a tidy sum when Spotify went public in 2018 and its market capitalization reached $29.5 billion. This was to be another massive payday for the labels, which they were not obligated to share with their artists. After public outcry about this theft, Sony and Warner, and later Universal, announced that they would share some of the proceeds. However, with no legal language in their contracts with artists to necessitate this sharing, nor any third-party audit, what resulted was likely little more than token gestures to only their biggest artists with enough clout to demand it. There are many more examples of the major labels extracting equity stakes. Soundcloud was being evaluated in 2014 for acquisition by Twitter, and the latter hesitated because the platform did not have licenses from the big labels—equity stakes, of course, ended up being the cost of those licenses. Vevo, the music-video company partly owned by Google, is another startup in which the labels have equity. These are not one-off deals, but a distinct pattern of leveraging catalog for equity, utilizing a strategy similar to venture capital.

A lawsuit brought by 19 Recordings (an American Idol–affiliated record label representing artists such as Kelly Clarkson and Carrie Underwood) alleged that Sony acquired its equity stake and advertising income from Spotify in lieu of negotiating fair-market royalty rates. The allegations have broader implications, the lawsuit suggests, because "those other record labels have engaged in the same self-dealing as Sony with respect to the diversion of payments to them, and the below market streaming royalty rates to artists. Together, and individually, Sony and the other major record labels therefore have significant power to exert control over Spotify in order to not only dictate how revenue will be paid, but wrongfully and in bad faith divert money from royalties that must be shared to other forms of revenue that they can keep for themselves." In essence, the Big 3 have a compelling financial incentive for accepting low royalty rates for their artists: it benefits the streaming services, which the labels have equity stakes in. Rather than sharing profit with their artists directly through royalty rates, they wait for a large payout through IPO or acquisition, which will not need to be shared with the artists. As is often the case in these matters, the lawsuit was settled out of court, preventing a broader legal ruling or precedent that might have helped others.

QUESTION: How much equity do Sony and other majors actually hold in Spotify? Settled out of court, so the details remain private.

A core paradigm shift emphasized by big data is the turn away from thinking about audiences, which aligned with a physical-product-based music industry, to considering users, as befits a rising softwareand service-based music industry in a world of ubiquitous networks. Without the mass-produced physical good for the industry to orient and organize around, an instability permeates through the industry amid a plethora of new revenue streams. Big data eases that instability by harnessing, structuring, and exploiting the user's engagement. Rather than a passive audience to unidirectionally sell product to, the user is an active participant in a database-driven system and an integral part of the design and architecture of new media ecosystems. As Tim Anderson notes, “the surveyed and exchanged end user has become the basic unit of analysis, of the many sites and services that are part of the new music business ecosystem.” Just by accessing and interacting with media, users provide their unpaid data-labor that continually generates information to improve the design of the system.

DEFINE: Distinguishes 'audience' (passive, physical-product-based) from 'user' (active participant in database-driven systems). XREF: Connects to user-data-labor concepts similar to Dallas Smythe's audience commodity and broader surveillance-capitalism discussions.

These firms amass capital to purchase copyrights, ranging from hit songs to entire catalogs. With massive war chests of capital, they pay musicians a large lump sum for their copyright, which they can then license or resell. Songwriters are the typical target, since publishing rights are not as contractually complicated as recording rights, which are dominated by the Big 3 labels. For musicians, these buyouts can be enticing: the new streaming regime pays little to any but the most popular musicians, a disordered global system of digital services makes tracking down payments difficult, and new tax proposals are advising higher tax rates on capital gains.

XREF: Relates to broader patterns of financialization and copyright-adjacent speculation discussed in music-rights literature and IP economics.

Transforming music royalties into an investment strategy is not a new idea; David Bowie even sold "Bowie Bonds" to investors in 1997, based on income generated from his back catalog. "For the music industry the age of manufacture is now over," Simon Frith claimed back in 1988, as music companies were "no longer organised around making things but depend on the creation of rights." What is new is that those rights are now much more lucrative and have attracted much bigger financiers. As opposed to physical media, which was typically purchased only once per format, listening to music on a streaming service produces a financial transaction every time a song is played, dramatically increasing the value of older music. On streaming platforms, "catalog music" (older than eighteen months) is gaining a greater share each year, from 65 percent of total listening in 2020 to 73 percent in 2023.

SEED: Potential article angle: the financialization of music catalogs as both a cultural and economic phenomenon, and how rights-based value supersedes manufactured goods.

The most successful "song management" firm is Hipgnosis, founded and run by Merck Mercuriadis, formerly employed as a manager by Beyoncé, Elton John, and Guns N' Roses. Hipgnosis owns or partially owns more than sixty-four thousand songs, a thousand of which are No. 1 songs, and many of which were acquired when it purchased Kobalt Music Group. As of 2023, Hipgnosis is valued at over $2 billion. In 2021, it received backing from Blackstone, the largest private equity company, to invest another billion dollars in acquiring catalogs and copyrights. … When appearing in public or in the press, Mercuriadis is often seen with his partner, Nile Rodgers (legendary songwriter/guitarist/producer/singer of Chic fame), emphasizing the positive impact Hipgnosis will have for the songwriting community. When addressing investors, his tone changes: "I founded Hipgnosis to give the investment community access to extraordinarily successful hit songs by culturally important artists and to establish songs as an uncorrelated asset class with attractive risk adjustment returns." This is finance-speak for transforming music into a relatively low-risk grouping of investments ("asset class") that can help diversify an investment portfolio. "Uncorrelated" with macroeconomic trends such as recessions because people will continue to listen to music, this is a way to abstract economic value away from music production and into the realm of financial circulation and speculation.

QUESTION: What are the long-term costs to songwriters and the music community when catalogs become financialized instruments? XREF: Connects to broader discussions of financialization and assetization of culture, along the lines of works critiquing how private equity extracts value from creative sectors.

In a candid conversation I had with a venture capitalist at one of the Big 3 record labels (under condition of anonymity), he gave a deceptively direct and distilled description of how the contemporary music industry works: “A music company doesn’t need to go out and make money. People make music; they aren’t going to stop making music. People listen to music; they aren’t going to stop listening to music. All a rights holder like Sony, Warner, or Universal has to do is say, ‘Fuck you, pay me.’”

XREF: Connects to critiques of the music industry's rentier model and debates about artist compensation under streaming economics.

The directive that ends this eloquent summary of music business practices is a reference to the classic mafia film Goodfellas (Scorsese, 1990). Henry Hill, the protagonist, is describing how the mafia extorts small businesses in exchange for protection, extracting profit without regard for the health of the business: “But now the guy’s gotta come up with Paulie’s money every week, no matter what. Business is bad? ‘Fuck you, pay me.’ Oh, you had a fire? ‘Fuck you, pay me.’ The place got hit by lightning? ‘Fuck you, pay me.’” The comparison is apt; with only three labels and four tech companies, the extortion of rent on extensive catalogs of music, particularly from streaming platforms, is akin to a cultural cartel enacting mass theft of creativity.

In 2022, Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino had the biggest paycheck and the widest CEO-to-worker pay gap of any Fortune 500 executive, with $139 million, 5,414 times as much as his firm's median pay.

Amid this inequality in a gilded age of music, listener data are showing a reduction in the diversity of music across many vectors of gender, class, and ethnicity. A report on Spotify's most-streamed artists in 2018 indicates that all of the top artists are men. A deeper analysis of six hundred Billboard Hot 100 songs from 2012 to 2017 found an average of 16.8 percent female performers, 12.3 percent female songwriters, and only 2.1 percent female producers. A UK study found that only 12 percent of musicians in 2019 were from a working-class background, down from 20 percent in previous years; women and people of color were further disadvantaged. In Canada, female artists make 82 cents for every dollar made by male artists, while Indigenous artists make only 68 cents on the dollar. Power in the music industries is increasingly held by financiers with no incentives other than a return on investment, and the diversity and heterogeneity of our musical culture is under threat.

Jonathan Sterne may be right to proclaim "there is no 'music industry,'" but not because there are "only many industries with many relationships to music." Maybe there is no music industry because there's just a hedge fund.

SEED: An essay angle: the financialization of culture, examining how hedge funds have absorbed creative industries' functions.

Fittingly, considering the U-shaped financial history previously discussed, the source of this phrase is likely Louis Brandeis's influential book from 1914, Other People's Money and How the Bankers Use It, a critical analysis of banking, monopoly, and the "financial oligarchy."

XREF: Links to the earlier discussion of the U-shaped financial history, connecting specific language to that broader arc.

This colorful characterization begins a strangely sexual film about a successful corporate raid, or hostile takeover, in which a firm or financier acquires control of a company through shareholder manipulation or a "leveraged buyout" (raising debt to finance the acquisition), often to individually sell off its assets for profit (known as "asset stripping").

DEFINE: Explains hostile takeover, leveraged buyout, and asset stripping in one compact passage.

Another prominent media company acquired during the private equity boom, in 2006, was Nielsen, then the Dutch publishing company VNU NV, owner of key industry data-source Nielsen Media Research and venerable industry trade-press publications Adweek, the Hollywood Reporter, and Billboard. Again, we can witness the private equity formula: a consortium of PE companies (in this case, KKR, THL, Blackstone, Carlyle, Hellman & Friedman, and AlpInvest Partners) acquires the company for an enormous price ($9.7 billion), saddles it with excessive debt (still $8.6 billion five years later), strips its assets (the iconic publications) for capital extraction, slashes its workforce (in a four-thousand-person “restructuring”), and exits the investment with a profit achieved through financial engineering. In 2011, after Nielsen went public with an IPO, the PE consortium’s return was estimated at 10 percent, far higher than typical investments over that period. In 2022, the cycle started again, with a new consortium of PE investors (including Brookfield Business Partners and Elliott Investment Management, the activist hedge fund that had been pressuring it to cut costs) taking the company private again.

XREF: Connects to the general pattern of leveraged buyout financial engineering across the private equity boom.

In 2020, Eldridge and Penske combined all these trade-press publications into PMRC, a joint venture between PMC and MRC, thus eliminating any sense of remaining competition.

As the film, television, and music industries are ravaged by the predatory behavior of hedge funds and private equity firms, the PE-based trade press is disincentivized to provide critical coverage of the devastation.

QUESTION: What specific mechanisms or examples prevent critical coverage — direct editorial pressure, ownership conflicts, or advertising leverage?

Following the financial crisis in 2008, many financial elites sought to take advantage of low interest rates and a landscape of distressed assets. Two PE firms, Silver Lake Partners and TPG Capital, took a particular interest in Hollywood and have since assembled their own versions of film and television conglomerates. Hollywood's talent agencies were the primary targets, the first of which was TPG's investment in CAA, one of the industry's two most powerful agencies. In 2010, TPG spent about $165 million for a 35 percent stake in the company, then invested another $225 million in 2014 to give it a 53 percent stake. In 2022, CAA acquired one of its main rivals, International Creative Management Partners, laying off about 20 percent of its employees. Similarly, Silver Lake Partners acquired a 31 percent stake in William Morris Endeavor, the industry's other dominant talent agency, for $200 million in 2012, then followed that with a $500 million investment in 2014 to give it the largest ownership stake. With Silver Lake's funding, WME acquired sports and media group International Management Group for $2.4 billion in 2013; the combined WME-IMG was larger than its rival CAA in scale, with a market capitalization of roughly $5.6 billion.

XREF: Connects to broader post-2008 trends of financialization, where PE firms capitalized on distressed assets across industries.

In recent years, the talent agencies became bolder in flouting the rules against production. CAA operated Wiip, a television production company known for the HBO hit Mare of Easttown and the Apple TV+ series Dickinson, among many others. Endeavor operated both IMG Original Content, which had more than fifty series and specials on its roster, and Endeavor Content, which had financed, packaged, or sold more than one hundred films and TV shows since 2016, including Academy Award winners Arrival (Denis Villeneuve, 2016), La La Land (Damien Chazelle, 2016), and Manchester by the Sea (Kenneth Lonergan, 2016), as well as Emmy-winner Killing Eve (BBC, 2018–present). Known in industry jargon as "double-dipping," the involvement of talent agencies in production was expressly banned by the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) for nearly sixty years, but its legality was in limbo since an agreement between SAG and the talent agencies expired in 2002. This flagrant conflict of interest caused strife with the WGA, which began flagging the practice as early as March 2018, claiming that "agencies have little incentive to defend or improve quotes (writers' previous pay) because their compensation is not tied to the well-being of their client."

XREF: Connects to the broader media consolidation and gig-economy labor conflict landscape; the WGA strike context.

In 2021, Endeavor became a public company through an IPO, valued at just over $10 billion. CEO Ari Emanuel's payday included a $308 million bonus, while his employees claimed they were shortchanged. Silver Lake's stake and the amount of shares it sold were undisclosed, but would have been in the billions. CAA, meanwhile, was acquired in 2023 by Groupe Artémis, the investment firm of the Pinault family, who operate a luxury goods empire and are one of the wealthiest families in the world. TPG's profit in its investment is undisclosed, but it was reported to be a rate of return of more than 30 percent. Both shadow studios, fueled by shadow banking, are yet another example of the private equity racket: facilitating consolidation, running roughshod over labor, enriching the wealthy, and profiting handsomely in the process.

Though they lost the battle with the WGA, the talent agencies could afford to be in open conflict with the WGA, in part because film and television talent is no longer their sole focus. The expansion into other talent sectors such as sports, fashion, and fine art is one example of this diversification, and another is the move into corporate venture capital. CAA Ventures, for instance, invests in early-stage startup companies, including Uber (transportation networking), Meerkat (mobile live streaming), Funny or Die (comedy-focused website and production company), and WhoSay (social media services and branding for celebrities). Evolution Media, another investment subsidiary within CAA, also provides seed funding to startups with capital from TPG's fund, as well as negotiating and structuring over $37 billion in sports media deals since 2015.30 Endeavor also has a pair of investment subsidiaries, the aforementioned Raine and WME Ventures, that offer access to an even broader network, including film, television, digital media, fashion, music, sports, brands, and events. Because they are housed within talent agencies owned by PE firms, these corporate venture capital firms offer their investment companies not only seed capital but also unique and valuable consultation on navigating Hollywood's singular culture and connection to the agency's talent roster.

XREF: Connects to broader private equity and media consolidation literature; the PE ownership of talent agencies parallels other industry vertical integration trends.

Another dimension of the financialization of Hollywood is a new era of “independently wealthy film and television.” Between 1996 and 2020, more than sixty American production and distribution companies (I call them “billionaire boutiques”), each funded by a wealthy benefactor, often an heir to a massive fortune (I call them “plutocratic patrons”), arose and saturated the mid-level indie market with a financialized form of television and indie films (or “findies”). Figure 4.2 tallies the total numbers of productions developed by billionaire boutiques each year, showing this phenomenon’s start in the late 1990s and acceleration in the early aughts, just as the studio-affiliated specialty sector is declining and wealth inequality is increasing. Over 2,500 films and television shows were traced to this kind of production.

XREF: Connects to broader discussions of wealth inequality and the concentration of media ownership.

A more simplistic framework is establishing itself, an increasingly limited, binary option: either the studio model, mostly focused on pre-sold intellectual property and franchise blockbusters, or the financialized model, in which wealthy investors seek profit or status or both by sponsoring filmmakers who fit their objective. In an era of low interest rates, high wealth inequality, financial liquidity, and Wall Street speculation, the structure of the industry is transforming, including its margins.

DEFINE: The studio model and financialized model are the two frameworks being named and contrasted.

Following the success of Sex, Lies, and Videotape (Steven Soderbergh, 1989) and the commercialization of independent film, the term indie started being used to encapsulate the symbiotic relationship between Hollywood studios, "mini-majors," "major independents," and smaller firms. In the "Sundance-Miramax era" of the 1990s, many of the entertainment conglomerates formed or acquired subsidiary divisions that specialized in small or mid-tier films that appealed to adult audiences through attributes like quirkiness, cool, cult following, prestige, and awards. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, indiewood was used to describe a more fully institutionalized relationship, in which co-optation was complete and conglomerates began to shed their specialty divisions.

DEFINE: Traces the shifting meaning of 'indie' from independent production to the institutionalized studio-affiliate symbiosis of the Sundance-Miramax era.

Often missing from these accounts is an attention to the industry's structure beyond the studio/independent spectrum and what replaced the shuttered Fine Line (2005), New Line (2008), Warner Independent (2008), Picturehouse (2008), Miramax (2010), and Paramount Vantage (2013). Tzioumakis describes this period as an "extensive shakeout" of the American specialty film market, following the 2008 financial crisis, while Alisa Perren suggests that the decline of DVD sales contributed to the "near collapse of the specialty sector" in those years. Though their roots can be traced back to at least 1996, it was in this period around 2008, when the studios abandoned indiewood, that billionaire boutiques sought to fill the gap with findies and financial engineering.

XREF: Connects to the broader history of indie film distribution and the studio specialty film crash around 2008.

Financialization, intergenerational wealth, tax evasion, capital extraction, reputation laundering, and corrupt philanthropy are now essential characteristics of the industrial structure of contemporary independent and indie film.

SEED: Could angle an essay on how 'indie' authenticity is undermined by its own financial machinery, contrasting the rhetorical ethos with the industrial reality.

When considering the sustainability of independent film, the increasing level of subservience to plutocracy stands out as a dangerous development. Filmmakers have always faced constraints when creating challenging work in Hollywood, of course, but to rely on the generosity of the progeny of the wealthy elite has a number of downsides. Nineteen of these affluent scions are young men, almost all white, whose biographies often read like a contemporary version of Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941), minus the early, rural childhood spent in a boarding house.

XREF: Links to ongoing debates about the influence of private wealth and patron-class funding on artistic output, echoing criticisms of gallery and museum dependence on plutocratic donors.

The company is run by Marc Turtletaub, who inherited his father Alan's mortgage-lending company, The Money Store, which helped pioneer subprime mortgages (predatory loans given to homeowners with low credit scores and little means to pay back the loan). Suspiciously, Turtletaub sold The Money Store for $2.1 billion just a month before the subprime industry imploded; new owner First Union Corporation closed The Money Store two years later at a loss of $2.8 billion. With his profits, Turtletaub bought a home in Hawaii and started Big Beach to "make films that have some kind of redemption," as Marc wants to "touch people" and "change people."

SEED: This setup—profits extracted from predatory lending laundered into earnest 'redemption' films—is a damning and striking contrast worth an essay on the moral accounting of cultural philanthropy. DEFINE: Defines subprime mortgages as predatory loans to low-credit, low-means homeowners.

But Megan Ellison is the more interesting sibling here, since she was anointed by Variety as "patron of the auteur," including filmmakers like Kathryn Bigelow (Zero Dark Thirty, 2012; Detroit, 2017), P. T. Anderson (The Master, 2012; Phantom Thread, 2017), Spike Jonze (Her, 2013), David O. Russell (American Hustle, 2013; Joy, 2015), Barry Jenkins (If Beale Street Could Talk, 2018), and others. … Having inherited $2 billion on her twenty-fifth birthday, Megan established Annapurna in 2011 with a mission that "isn't looking for fame, but is simply motivated to support talented filmmakers." Even if Ellison did have the best of intentions upon starting this company, the long-term result has been the weakening of the overall infrastructure for independent film as it becomes ever more closely linked to the whims of the wealthy and the vagaries of finance.

XREF: Connects to broader patterns of billionaire patronage in other creative/artistic fields, and critiques of concentrated funding.

Annapurna works primarily with directors signed to CAA, the famed talent agency acquired by TPG in 2014, which has since been assembled into a vertically integrated "shadow studio," as discussed above. Annapurna has worked closely with The Weinstein Company, bankrolled by Goldman Sachs. Another of Annapurna's partners is MGM, the once iconic studio that was taken over by PE firms in 2004, filed for bankruptcy in 2010, sold to a different consortium of PE firms, and has since been acquired by Amazon.

XREF: Connects to the broader theme of private equity's reshaping of the film industry, including how ownership changes ripple through production incentives.

In 2019, there were reports of "restructuring" at Annapurna amid bankruptcy rumors after burning through $350 million of credit and a series of films that failed to turn a profit. Larry Ellison leveraged his own relationship with the lenders, including banks such as JPMorgan and Wells Fargo, to pay off the debt at 80–85 cents on the dollar. Banks don't make a habit of angering the eighth wealthiest man in the world. Megan's record of financing over-budgeted, underperforming films and then getting her father to bail her out is not good for the filmmaking community; it deters other investors and artificially raises prices. The independent film infrastructure is fragile at the best of times, reliant as it is on festivals, passionate creators, dedicated workers, and word-of-mouth. Inexperienced heirs throwing around money is destructive to the overall health of the industry.

XREF: Connects to broader dynamics of nepotism and wealth distorting creative industries.

Moving on to Hollywood’s other trendy indie company: A24 has built a brand image similar to that of Annapurna, casting it as an award-winning (over 4,300 nominations, twenty-six for Academy Awards), artist-friendly company that ­specializes in unique, edgy, well-marketed films that cater to hip audiences. Established auteurs are welcome at A24 as well, with Sally Potter (Ginger & Rosa, 2012), Denis Villeneuve (Enemy, 2013), Noah Baumbach (While We’re Young, 2014), Andrea Arnold (American Honey, 2016), and Kelly Reichardt (First Cow, 2020). Cultivating new talent is another aspect of A24’s success, having distributed the debut films of directors including Alex Garland (Ex Machina, 2014), David Eggers (The Witch, 2016), Greta Gerwig (Lady Bird, 2017), and Ari Aster (Hereditary, 2018). Another strategy is helping directors who have a few films under their belt break through to wider audiences and award recognition, such as Yorgos Lanthimos (The Lobster, 2015; The Killing of a Sacred Deer, 2017), Barry Jenkins (Moonlight, 2016), the Safdie Brothers (Good Time, 2017; Uncut Gems, 2019), Lulu Wang (The Farewell, 2019), Trey Edward Shults (Waves, 2019), Joanna Hogg (The Souvenir, 2019), and Lee Isaac Chung (Minari, 2020).

In 1847, Meyer Guggenheim arrived in the United States and began a family mining business that would eventually amass one of the largest fortunes in the world and shape the planet’s supply chain of resources well into the twentieth century. In 1918, Forbes recognized the Guggenheims as the second richest family in the United States. Tin from Bolivia, diamonds from Angola, copper from Chile, and rubber from what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo were key to the political economy of the time. Today, financial capital and philanthropy play the same role, which is why Solomon Guggenheim shifted to collecting art and opening museums, while other descendants of the Guggenheim fortune now operate two global investment and financial services firms, Guggenheim Capital and Guggenheim Partners. The latter manages over $300 billion in assets, which includes the seed money that began A24 in 2012. One of A24’s cofounders was Daniel Katz, whose former role was head of the film finance group at Guggenheim Partners.

XREF: Connects the historical Guggenheim industrial empire to contemporary film finance and A24's origins.

A24 is a key supplier to both Amazon and Apple. In 2013, it entered an exclusive deal with Amazon for its films to stream on Prime Video after its DVD/BluRay window. In 2018, A24 agreed to produce a slate of original films for Apple, a natural fit for each company's prestige brand image. A24 also handles theatrical distribution for some of Apple's films, including The Elephant Queen (Victoria Stone and Mark Deeble, 2020), On the Rocks (Sofia Coppola, 2020), and The Tragedy of Macbeth (Joel Coen, 2021).

Just as Miramax and its ilk developed new audiences with innovative marketing strategies that were eventually funneled into the Disney and Warner empires, distributors like A24 operate as the research and development arms of transnational tech and media companies—though, considering Guggenheim's colonial and imperial heritage, as well as Apple and Amazon's reinvention of these practices, it is more accurate to refer to A24's role as "pioneering" a new audience.

XREF: Echoes media industry scholarship on independent cinema's role as a talent/taste R&D pipeline feeding conglomerates.

If and when A24 sells, there will be little public information about who will earn the lion's share of profit off the backs of these indie filmmakers. Apart from the 10% owned by a group of investors including private equity firm Stripes, the exact nature of the ownership structure of A24 is unknown, as is common with investor-led, privately held companies. Most stories about the company repeat the claim that A24 started with seed money from Guggenheim, without providing any further details. "Neither A24 nor Guggenheim would discuss dollar amounts," an early profile of the company stated, but "Guggenheim invested several million dollars to set up the company on behalf of its investors and manages A24 through its board of directors." These kinds of shell games are routine within the financial world, but independent filmmakers depend on the quasi-transparency of box office returns, film festival acceptances, and critics' reviews to provide some semblance of order in an already harsh business. The increasing lack of public data in the streaming era, combined with the obfuscation of financial capital, adds yet more obstacles for continuing success.

XREF: Connects to broader discussions about streaming-era data opacity and financial obfuscation in the film industry.

Purdue Pharma, the company that developed the prescription painkiller OxyContin, is widely held to be at the root of the crisis. Not only did it bribe doctors and aggressively market the medication to be overprescribed in low-income, suffering communities for illegitimate medical purposes, but it built an “empire of pain” with callous disregard, knowing it caused addiction and abuse. Purdue Pharma dates back to 1892 and has been run by the Sackler family since 1952. OxyContin produced pervasive human misery, many lawsuits (most of which were settled out of court), and $35 billion of revenue. Mortimer Sackler used this wealth to pursue a life of art and philanthropy, plastering the Sackler name around the world on dozens of cultural institutions, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tate Gallery, and the Louvre, as well as universities, such as Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford.

XREF: This connects to the broader opioid epidemic coverage and the recent renaming of Sackler-named institutions like the Louvre's Sackler Wing.

It’s a Hard Truth Ain’t It (2018), which involved Madeleine going to an Indiana prison over five years to interview inmates, was released alongside a fictional film, O.G. (2018), coproduced with George Clooney’s company Smokehouse Pictures for HBO. OxyContin often led users into a vicious spiral: addiction, heroin, crime, and the oppressive war on drugs, with its reliance on racialized mass incarceration. Selling the drug that created addicts and then documenting the stories of addicts inside prison in order to win awards, Madeleine Sackler profited from the misery on both ends. In 2021, Purdue Pharma settled its many lawsuits by dissolving, under the condition that the family was absolved of liability. The fine they paid was but a small fraction of the wealth they made from OxyContin, leaving them among the richest families in the country. As a biographer of the family wrly remarked, “the only member of the Sackler family to spend any time in prison was . . . Madeleine.”

SEED: The hypocrisy of profiting philanthropically and artistically from the very misery one's product created could anchor an essay on complicity and representation.

But with over $3 billion in box office (shared among coproducers and distributors) and over eighteen hundred award nominations (including over seventy for Academy Awards), the business side of the double bottom line is certainly working as planned. Personally approving all scripts himself, Jeffrey Skoll's ego appears to be one of the company's objectives as well; upon the success of An Inconvenient Truth, Skoll claimed that "global warming was now part of the international conversation."

Ortner argues that "the general point that emerges from analyzing these trends resembles the conclusions of critical studies of development and humanitarianism," as "the desires and efforts to do good on the part of billionaires and capitalist enterprises rarely succeed in accomplishing their goals, while often causing a lot of damage in the process, leaving a mess in their wake, or both." What Ortner and Tyron argue here about Participant Media, I would tentatively extend to the entire category of billionaire boutiques, plutocratic patrons, independently wealthy film, and findies. The vast majority of the films produced by these companies are noticeably lacking in anything that challenges the hegemony of capitalism, the causes of our encroaching climate collapse, or the deep roots of any of our many escalating crises, including gendered and racialized injustice, structural wealth inequality, democratic decline, and mediated misinformation, among others.

XREF: Connects to broader critiques of philanthro-capitalism and celebrity humanitarianism; also echoes the author's earlier discussion of Participant Media as a 'boutique' studio.

Again, Bain Capital was the pioneer in this strategy, acquiring LIVE Entertainment, a home video distributor, back in 1997. Later named Artisan Entertainment, it grew its library from twenty-five hundred titles to seven thousand through acquisitions of the rights of Hallmark Entertainment and Republic Entertainment, among others. It also added to its catalog by producing films like the smash hit The Blair Witch Project (Eduardo Sánchez and Daniel Myrick, 1999).

Relativity ended in corruption, two instances of bankruptcy, and a new group of investors failing to resuscitate it, while Legendary was acquired by Chinese media giant Wanda—two more examples of the destructive and consolidating impact of Wall Street finance in Hollywood.

XREF: Connects to broader pattern of private equity and financialization hollowing out creative industries, comparable to news media and music industry consolidation.

Gun Hill I, for example, was the name of a $600 million fund for eleven Sony films and nine Universal films in 2006; one year later, Gun Hill II raised another $700 million for another twenty films. Both funds were backed by Deutsche Bank and performed disastrously for investors. By 2007, every major studio had lined up PE backers for at least one slate.

XREF: Relates to the broader story of Wall Street money flowing into Hollywood before the 2008 crash. QUESTION: Worth investigating how these PE slate deals structured risk between studios and investors.

Whereas the studios had typically relied on passive, revolving lines of credit from banks before, funds were now designed for PE firms, hedge funds, and investment banks to actively participate in financing smaller catalogs of films. An estimated $15 billion was pumped into "slate financing," in which a series of films (upwards of twenty-five) were produced from the same pool of capital, thereby diversifying the risk and return.

DEFINE: Explains 'slate financing' — pooling capital across 25+ films to diversify risk.

As secretary of the treasury under President Trump, Mnuchin turned to a far larger transfer of capital to the wealthy, helping orchestrate the $1.9 trillion Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. By 2027, the bill will actually raise taxes on most Americans, while 82 percent of the benefits will go to the top 1 percent.

DEFINE: Clarifies the delayed effect of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act — that its provisions sunset and shift the burden by 2027.

Mnuchin then turned his vulture capitalist tendencies toward Hollywood. His financing firm Dune Entertainment invested in a catalog of more than seventy films with Fox starting in 2006, and another funding company, RatPac-Dune Entertainment, founded with producer-director Brett Ratner and billionaire James Packer in 2013, formed a seventy-five-picture deal with Warner Bros. Mnuchin has profited handsomely from such megahits as Avatar (James Cameron, 2009), The LEGO Movie (Chris Miller and Phil Lord, 2014), American Sniper (Clint Eastwood, 2014), Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (Zack Snyder, 2016), and Suicide Squad (David Ayer, 2016), as well as, appropriately, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (Oliver Stone, 2010).

The story begins with Mnuchin acquiring IndyMac, a mortgage-lending bank that had failed in 2008 and was seized by the U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). With a group of investors, Mnuchin renamed IndyMac OneWest Bank and then aggressively foreclosed on homeowners for profit, earning the accusation of "widespread misconduct" by the state attorney general's office for repeatedly breaking California's foreclosure laws and forging documents. The investors put $1.5 billion into the bank and sold it for more than $3 billion five years later.

XREF: Connects to broader reporting on predatory lending and the private equity playbook of buying distressed assets and profiting through aggressive enforcement.

Mnuchin fared better in Hollywood than most; despite their sophisticated risk-management strategies, many financiers suffer when they encounter ­“Hollywood accounting,” the dubious, byzantine math by which film financing is engineered asymmetrically so that individual films rarely achieve profit on paper yet the distributors still earn massive fees. Furthermore, the films offered up to slate-financing deals are often the riskiest ones studios have; they prefer to finance the reliable films themselves, particularly their franchises, and retain the bulk of that revenue. Compounding this difficulty, the credit crunch forced many financiers to pull out of these slate-financing deals in 2007 and 2008 and sell their Hollywood assets at a discount of up to 70 percent.

DEFINE: Defines 'Hollywood accounting' as asymmetric math where films rarely show paper profit yet distributors earn massive fees.

Content Partners, for instance, was more than happy to buy these distressed investments. A financial boutique that acquires intellectual property, founded by two financiers who had worked for talent agencies, Content Partners began in 2006 as a sort of payday loan firm for profit participation. They would offer actors, directors, and producers a lump sum of cash in exchange for the revenues associated with the long-term release windows of syndication, physical media sales, and streaming rights. Backed by JPMorgan Chase, Carlyle, and other wealthy investors, Content Partners expanded into larger intellectual property assets, including the discounted slate-financing deals, as well as a 50 percent stake in CBS's lucrative CSI franchise (more than seven hundred episodes are on the air in over two hundred countries) for an estimated $400 million.

DEFINE: Explains the business model of IP acquisition firms like Content Partners: cash advances in exchange for streaming, syndication, and physical media royalties.

Unlike in 2004, when the MGM library proved overvalued, Content ­Partners' library is today proving a lucrative asset, easily exploitable in the gold-rush ­atmosphere of digital streaming distribution led by Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, ­Disney+, Max, Paramount+, Peacock, Apple TV+, and others. Diverse libraries are a crucial lure for attracting digital subscribers to streaming platforms; consequently, PE firms have been securing them as much as possible. In 2010, Disney sought to unload Miramax's famed indie library of over seven hundred films, which include almost three hundred Oscar nominees, among them Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994), There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007), and No Country for Old Men (Ethan Coen and Joel Coen, 2007). Tom Barrack, CEO of PE firm Colony Capital, along with investment from Tutor Perini, a construction magnate, acquired the library for nearly $700 million. Colony Capital barely added any new productions to the library while it was owner; ­nevertheless, it was able to sell the library in 2016 to Qatar-based broadcaster BeIN Media Group and earn 3.5 times its equity investment, demonstrating the increasing value of content libraries.

The result of asset management firms, corporate venture capital, private equity, and financial engineering in Hollywood is a surge in the consolidation that has been transforming the media sector since the 1970s. Financialization is facilitating an increase in scale in a global marketplace and permitting big media companies to take on massive debt to enact mergers and acquisitions, as shown in table 4.4. Telecommunications companies have targeted content companies to expand beyond their traditional role as mere providers of network access, in such massive deals as Comcast's purchase of NBCUniversal and AT&T's acquisitions of DirecTV and Time Warner. Content companies, meanwhile, have sought out sources of intellectual property to expand content catalogs, as the sector transitions to streaming technology in which viewers privilege access over ownership.

XREF: Connects to broader financialization-of-industry literature and media consolidation debates.

As it does elsewhere in the gilded economy, such consolidation results in stagnation, fewer jobs, reduced capacity, homogeneity, and higher prices. Total movie ticket sales are on a steady decline, although profits have been propped up by increasing ticket prices, particularly 3D and IMAX surcharges, as well as continued expansion into global markets, especially China. Hollywood is not yet the oligopoly of three (Universal, Warner, and Sony) that the recorded music industry has become, but if that industry's experience with private equity and financialization is any indication, further concentration and inequality in Hollywood is on the horizon.

XREF: Parallels recorded music oligopoly and broader gilded-economy consolidation patterns.

Hollywood shares another parallel with the music industry in that a new streaming technology platform with considerable financial backing is transforming its distribution model. Just as Spotify is leading to a sea change in the economics and consumption patterns of recorded music, Netflix is pioneering a transition in the film and television industries. … Netflix has moved aggressively into this precarious situation, transitioning from a DVD delivery service into a global streaming video platform, content producer, and the belle of Wall Street. Crossing the one hundred million subscriber mark in 2017, then the two hundred million mark in 2021, Netflix shares rose 13,000 percent in its first fifteen years since its IPO in 2002, making for the second highest returns on the S&P 500.

XREF: Parallels noted between Spotify's disruption of music and Netflix's disruption of film/TV — connects to discussions of platform disruption across creative industries.

Around 2015, legacy media executives began to hint openly at a joint effort to limit Netflix's ascent. Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes argued against undercutting its own business "by having somebody else [Netflix] pay a fraction of the cost and create a better inventory on the various shows you yourself invented," while Discovery CEO David Zaslav proclaimed that "it's just not rational that . . . [we] have allowed [Netflix] to gain so much share and offer it without our brands." FX president John Landgraf indicated a "concerted effort not to only sell to Netflix," and Fox CEO James Murdoch declared that "the business rules around how we sell to [subscription video-on-demand] providers is changing."

XREF: Connects to broader narratives about cord-cutting, the streaming wars, and how incumbents respond to platform disruption.

This is not the first time legacy Hollywood companies have been challenged by new technology; as mentioned, Hollywood's history is one of initially resisting but eventually profiting from every technological advancement, from synchronized sound to television syndication to home video formats and into the digital age. Disney+, Max, and Peacock have now joined Hulu and CBS All Access (renamed Paramount+) as legacy Hollywood moves belatedly but aggressively into direct-to-customer (D2C) streaming distribution. History would suggest that streaming technology will be merely one more entertainment format that the Hollywood conglomerates eventually dominate, except this time, the challengers are well-funded by a financial sector that is chasing dwindling investment opportunities in a hollowed-out economy.

XREF: Ties to broader media-industry histories of format transitions, from sound to home video to streaming.

By the end of 2023, these five companies together held a market capitalization of $7.4 trillion, a value bigger than the gross domestic product of all but two countries; only the U.S. and China are bigger than FAANG. However, total net income for the FAANG companies in 2023 was only $225 billion, a lot of which came from Apple's lucrative iPhone sales, so the massive market capitalization of FAANG is an extreme form of investor speculation.

XREF: Plausibly connects to market valuation theory and the ratio of price to underlying earnings.

Both cable television channels and scripted television productions have dramatically expanded in the past decade, which FX president John Landgraf famously coined "Peak TV." One might assume that if supply is being increased so acutely, demand must be growing as well, but "cord-cutting"—in which pricey cable and satellite television subscriptions (averaging over a hundred dollars a month) are exchanged for more affordable video-on-demand internet services (averaging ten to fifteen dollars a month) or free, over-the-air broadcast television—continues to accelerate, reaching nearly 10 percent annual decline in 2022.

QUESTION: Why does cord-cutting accelerate even as scripted production expands? The demand-supply paradox here could be worth exploring.

In 2022, amid macroeconomic headwinds (a market correction, interest rates rising, and Wall Street investors demanding profits), the media business had its worst year in three decades. Shares in the largest U.S. media companies fell by more than 50 percent over the year, led by Warner Bros. Discovery’s 61 percent drop and Netflix’s 58 percent fall. The broader market has not fallen as deep; industry analysts suggest investors are finally doubting that the rise of streaming will replace the decline of cable and satellite TV. … James Dolan, executive chairman of AMC Networks, upon announcing large-scale layoffs in late 2022, offered this blunt assessment: “It was our belief that cord-cutting losses would be offset by gains in streaming. This has not been the case . . . [and] the mechanisms for the monetization of content are in disarray.”

QUESTION: If streaming subscriptions aren't replacing cable revenue, what business model will media companies pivot to next?

Word choices within lyrics are converted into fungible assets; multiplied by hundreds of rappers in thousands of songs, the textual marketplace becomes speculative. Opportunities arise within film and television as well. The goal of this section is to begin imagining and interrogating the scale of this cultural stock exchange that merges the formal and the financial.

SEED: The conceit of treating rap lyrics as a cultural stock exchange offers an essay angle exploring how language becomes financialized across media.

In 2006, after Jay-Z and many other hip hop artists had made the champagne brand Cristal a symbol of luxury in the Black community during the previous decade, a manager at the champagne house that produced Cristal was asked by The Economist about rappers name-checking their brand. “We can’t forbid people from buying it” was his snide response. Both classist and racist, this comment was rightfully considered an insult by the hip hop community and denouncements were swift. Jay-Z joined in the chorus, but also sought to capitalize on the situation. Ace of Spades, Jay-Z’s champagne alternative, would eventually net him more than $300 million in 2021 when he sold half of it to LVMH, the French luxury goods conglomerate. Notably, the value of Ace of Spades was not established by Jay-Z’s efforts as a traditional spokesperson; in fact, for years it was unclear whether he was officially involved with the company or not. Emblematic of the financial logic now embedded within cultural texts in the era of derivative media, Jay-Z earned that big payday through lyrical speculation. It was clever wordplay, narrative use of the gangster genre, visual incorporation into music videos, political critique (such as reclaiming the slur spade), and other formal and thematic means of investing Ace of Spades with value.

XREF: Connects to the broader concept of derivative media and cultural speculation in the author's argument about financial logic embedded in cultural texts. SEED: Potential article angle: how artists monetize brand mentions through ambiguity rather than traditional endorsement deals.

Financial logic, I argue, is embedded not just within the organization and management of the cultural industries, but within the very form of cultural texts. Derivative media is structured by speculation. It is no longer the case that products and brands are simply incorporated into popular media texts, commodifying the text, a process that has been occurring for over a century. In the era of financialization, the text is now designed to facilitate the speculative process of buying and selling product placements, branding opportunities, cross-promotion, corporate synergy, and other economic relationships. Intertextuality creates supply and demand, which facilitates so many opportunities for exchange and investment that a speculative marketplace is formed. The text is, in effect, securitized through intertextuality, as discussed below.

DEFINE: Introduces 'derivative media' - media structured by speculation rather than mere incorporation of brands. SEED: Could explore how intertextuality operates as a speculative marketplace, comparing media production to financial trading.

Though the field of media studies has been slow to utilize digital tools in comparison to other fields, there is a growing body of work demonstrating the value of supplementing traditional methods with digital affordances. Spanning from historical data-mining to shot-counting to visualizing international distribution flows, the content of these projects ranges widely, but most are rooted in the scale that database technology provides. … However, before a database can be assembled, difficult and inevitably biased decisions must be made about the content of the database, for as Lisa Gitelman's elegant book title asserts, "Raw Data" Is an Oxymoron.

XREF: Connects to Gitelman's 'Raw Data' Is an Oxymoron and general scholarship on data as socially constructed rather than neutral.

In the spirit of this nonrepresentational, interpretation-based model of humanistic data formation, I have undertaken a series of database-informed analyses of derivative media. Influenced by the concepts of “distant reading” and “cultural analytics,” I aim to investigate questions of intertextuality and economy on a scale that would not be possible without computation. Software is used to digitally catalog and visualize cultural data, harvested from online databases such as Genius (a website that catalogs and offers quantitative access to popular music lyrics, primarily hip hop) and IMDb (the Internet Movie Database, which contains various types of data for most television shows and films). These crowdsourced databases are some of the most extensive catalogs of the intertexts, references, metatexts, paratexts, and product placements that comprise derivative media. For my purposes, I catalog and visualize this intertextuality to lend a degree of scale to my otherwise historical, theoretical, and interpretative approach. With the assistance of digital tools, I’m able to both dig deep into solitary texts, discovering and quantifying micro-relationships, while also mapping broad, macro-cultural dynamics as a result of this wide-ranging data. Ultimately, the political economy of intertextuality is mapped via the database form and expressed via data visualization.

SEED: Possible angle: a methodological essay on using crowdsourced databases (Genius, IMDb) to map micro and macro cultural references. XREF: Connects to 'distant reading' (Moretti) and 'cultural analytics' concepts in digital humanities.

Materialism and consumerism within hip hop is another common issue; condemnations of its materialism have accompanied hip hop throughout its history, particularly in conservative media, while defenses of this overt consumerism often tend toward illuminating the broader context in which rappers, typically young Black men, engage in such ostentatious display. “Their flaunting of wealth,” Ekow Eshun argues, “is intended as provocation against a society that has striven to confine the aspirations of black people.” For Mark Anthony Neal, this materialism contributes to a “hip-hop cosmopolitanism” that is “undergirded by desires for physical, social, and economic mobility” and challenges “stridently parochial notions of masculine identity (and gender) in hip-hop.” Or in the words of one of our greatest critics, Greg Tate, “Hip-hop is inverse capitalism. Hip-hop is reverse colonialism. . . . Hip-hop is the perverse logic of capitalism pursued by an artform. Like capitalism, hip-hop converts raw soul into store rack commodity." Beyond ideological interpretations such as these, however, analyses of the way hip hop’s broader economic and industrial dimensions interact with its cultural aspects are not as common.

SEED: Angle: interrogate the defense of hip-hop materialism as provocation — does the counterargument hold given hip hop's corporate absorption?

The extent of Jay-Z’s financial success is so hallowed that he earned himself a full-length book by a Forbes journalist fawning over his business acumen and claiming that Jay-Z’s “story is the American dream in its purest form, a model for any entrepreneur looking to build a commercial empire.” A telling commentary in and of itself, the book is focused on Jay-Z’s business ventures, not his music.

XREF: Echoes broader cultural pattern of valorizing wealth over craft in hip-hop and celebrity discourse.

Securitization refers to the process by which a financial instrument is created by pooling together multiple types of debt into one security that can then be traded. An infamous example is the mortgage-backed obligation (MBO), a type of derivative formed when individual mortgages with varying levels of risk are pooled together, then parceled into various sub-pools (or tranches), each of which can be traded. This process caused havoc in the financial crisis of 2007–8 when the risk assessment process of many MBOs was corrupted and many banks and investors were overleveraged in the housing market, contributing to the spreading financial contagion. I argue that this financial logic has spread to cultural texts, and securitization occurs through intertextuality. This is not an actual security, of course—you can't invest in this referential market (yet)—but the argument is that the same logic is apparent: take an underlying asset, unbundle it from its direct relationship to labor, rebundle it as an abstracted financial asset, and then buy/sell/trade/speculate it in various ways. Power is diverted from the underlying asset (in this case, the text), away from labor (in this case, the author), and harnessed by a speculative system (in this case, the financialized media system) as a security (in this case, marketplaces of lyrical speculation).

DEFINE: Defines securitization in finance (pooling debt into tradeable securities) before extending it metaphorically to intertextual cultural circulation. XREF: Links financial crisis mechanics (MBO derivatives, overleverage) to postmodern theories of intertextuality, transposing economic logic onto cultural production.

Returning to the Cristal affair that began this chapter, this securitization logic will be demonstrated with an analysis of alcohol branding in hip hop lyrics, showing how a broad market of speculative exchange was developed from the pool of individual lyrics. The digital tool being used here is the online service Rap Stats, a database of hip hop lyrics that allows users to query the corpus and compare the frequency of keywords and phrases. This application is similar to the Google Ngram Viewer, a web platform that allows users to keyword search Google’s five-million-plus, multi-language book corpus ranging back to the year 1500. There are multiple limitations to this type of technology and methodology; simple errors in optical character recognition or automating metadata, for instance, can skew results wildly, not to mention larger issues of what types of sources are included or not included in any corpus. For my purposes, as a humanist rather than a scientist, I’m not looking to use the Rap Stats data to conclusively prove anything, but to isolate small patterns with which questions can be asked and broader interpretations can be suggested.

DEFINE: Clarifies Rap Stats and Google Ngram Viewer as corpus-querying tools and distinguishes their use in humanistic versus scientific inquiry. XREF: Distal reading and corpus methods in digital humanities connect to Franco Moretti's distant reading and similar computational textual analysis approaches.

By 2006, Cristal was already losing its status as the signifier of luxury, but ­figure 5.1 indicates that in the wake of the scandal, two of hip hop’s biggest moguls capitalized on the opportunity. Sean Combs, whose many monikers include “Puff Daddy” and “Diddy” and who consistently tops Forbes’s list of “Hip-Hop’s Wealthiest Artists,” partnered with multinational alcoholic beverage corporation Diageo in 2007 to take over the brand management of the vodka Cîroc in exchange for a 50/50 revenue split. Through lyrical mentions in songs and product placement in videos across his Bad Boy roster and label (owned by Warner Music Group), along with television commercials he starred in, Combs raised sales of the brand from fifty thousand cases a year to nearly two million.

QUESTION: Did Combs's distribution deal and influence cause the sales surge, or did other market factors contribute? Worth checking the causality claims here.

Jay-Z cloaked his investment in Armand de Brignac through a proxy company and denied financial involvement. Rather than a paid brand ambassador, he presented himself as a connoisseur of champagne with the cultural authority within the hip hop community to anoint the true heir to Cristal. By rebranding an inexpensive champagne as “Ace of Spades,” with a much higher price tag, Jay-Z repurposed a racial slur (“spade”) into a high-margin business. By 2009, in his song “On to the Next One,” he was more forthright, both in his indictment of Cristal and in his overt branding: “I used to drink Cristal, the muh’fucker’s racist / So I switched gold bottles on to that Spade shit.” In 2014, it was widely reported that Jay-Z had just bought Armand de Brignac, though deeper reporting suggested that he had an investment stake in the company all along, and had only just increased that investment to majority ownership, once the brand grew to become the profitable symbol of luxury Jay-Z envisioned. “To launch a champagne in the U.S.,” the head of one of France’s largest online wine retailers claims, drolly, “you either need three or four centuries of history, or have a big rapper behind you."

XREF: Relates to broader literature on cultural authority and brand authenticity; echoes Bourdieu-style arguments about cultural capital as economic leverage.

A few brands have maintained their status over the years, such as Hennessy and Bacardi, but for the most part, liquor brands rise and fall in symbolic stature. When segmented, consumer patterns emerge. For instance, in figure 5.2, the malt liquor brands Olde English and St. Ides are seen as popular icons of the “gangsta rap” era, when hip hop authenticity was represented by rugged descriptions of the lived experience of young men in Black neighborhoods, for whom potent, affordable malt liquor was prominent. By the mid-1990s, as the "corporate rap" era began, and the notion of hip hop authenticity shifted to signifiers of luxury, Alizé and Courvoisier rose in popularity.

XREF: Connects to cultural studies of hip hop's commercialization and how era-specific identity shifts drive brand consumption patterns.

A pertinent example, the cognac Courvoisier received its biggest promotion in the form of a hit song in 2002, "Pass the Courvoisier Part II," by Busta Rhymes, Diddy, and Pharrell Williams. Featuring the brand in the title, the heavily repeated chorus, and the music video, the song is considered to have helped raise sales of Courvoisier by 20 percent. A clear example of speculation, Busta Rhymes didn't get paid to write the song, but Russell Simmons's advertising agency dRush had just established a relationship with the advertising agency that marketed Courvoisier. Once the song rose to No. 11 on the Billboard Hot 100, Busta Rhymes was awarded a promotional deal. Examples such as these, dating back to Run-DMC's song "My Adidas" in 1986, which resulted in a million-dollar endorsement contract after the song's rise in popularity, are why entrepreneurial hip hop artists and associates use rap lyrics as speculative enterprises.

XREF: Connects to broader marketing phenomena like product placement and the influence of popular culture on commerce.

Furthermore, Jay-Z defines himself as an immigrant—which, for a descendant of a community forced to "immigrate" on a slave ship, as a Texas textbook once phrased it, is a bold symbol of solidarity. In 2011, immigration policy was a contentious, front-page issue; since then, the allusion to walls and fences has proved even more salient. This political resonance extends beyond just the lyrics; the music video for "Otis" involves Jay-Z and Kanye West disassembling, modifying, and then joyriding in a $350,000 Maybach 57, with a title card stating that the car would be auctioned for East African drought disaster relief. It is thus another example of a luxury automobile being used not just for signification of wealth, but as political commentary. Then again, "Otis" also contains the Jay-Z lyric "New watch alert: Hublots / Or the big face Rollie, I got two of those," glamorizing six-figure watches in a vacuous display of conspicuous consumption. The lavish fabric weaved with these manifold references is conflicted, complicit, and contradictory.

A final, simple, but telling observation to be made about these visualizations of alcohol and automobiles in hip hop lyrics: references rise and fall in stable patterns of discernible supply and demand. Of course, one would expect that shifts in popularity would influence the choice of liquor brands within lyrics, but the smooth, systematic rise and fall of brands, in conjunction with the advent of branding opportunities, indicates the rising speculative potential of intertextuality. Musician-speculators both shape and are shaped by a marketplace of opportunities to sell. When composing music, musicians write lyrics that may or may not mention a brand name; that brand name may or may not involve a current or future financial relationship; and the choice of what brand name to use is both exchangeable and replaceable, decided upon by many factors, including cleverness, popularity, thematic resonance, and possible economic gain. In a financialized system that produces derivative media, lyrics are rendered fungible assets and securitized into a speculative instrument.

QUESTION: What are concrete examples of musicians 'securitizing' lyrics into speculative instruments, or is this mostly a provocative framing?

The case study analyzed in this chapter is 30 Rock, a television show that constructed a dense thicket of ironic references and economic relationships. There are a number of sitcoms, past and present, that exhibit a reflexive, highly referential style comparable to 30 Rock: historical precursors, such as The Simpsons (1989–present), Seinfeld (1989–98), The Larry Sanders Show (1992–98), South Park (1997–present), Family Guy (1999–present), Futurama (1999–present), and Arrested Development (2003–6, 2013–19); its contemporaries, such as The Office (2005–13), Community (2009–15), Parks and Recreation (2009–15), and Archer (2009–2023); its descendants, such as Portlandia (2011–18), Bob’s Burgers (2011–present), Rick & Morty (2013–present), and Brooklyn Nine-Nine (2013–21); and Tina Fey’s later work, such as Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (2015–20), Great News (2017–18), Mr. Mayor (2021–22), and Girls5eva (2021–present). … Figure 6.1 uses Internet Movie Database (IMDb) data to compare total numbers of references made in reflexive television comedies over the past thirty years. The Simpsons, currently in its thirty-fifth season of densely referential television, popularized this style of collage and continues to outpace its rivals, with more than 7,400 references to film, television, video games, and other media. If we stack the references and consider them cumulatively, as in figure 6.2, then we can see this phenomenon accelerate in the early 2000s and expand the market for referential branding to over twenty thousand references, just within this limited set of television series.

XREF: Connects to broader literature on postmodern intertextuality and reflexive media studies.

Though only the exterior of the building was used for 30 Rock—the interiors were filmed at Silvercup Studios in Long Island City, Queens—the show acted as one of the primary branding mechanisms for Rockefeller Plaza by setting its story within its synergistic space.

XREF: Relates to broader media-city synergy literature; 30 Rock mirrors how Sex and the City showcased New York landmarks.

This historic, corporate, industrial, and geographic setting provides 30 Rock with many comedic and satirical opportunities. Primarily, it sets up one of the show's key themes, which is the struggle between art and commerce in the production of cultural products in a corporate atmosphere. … The cultural geography of this mediated space extends with every new plot line and setting; totaling 138 episodes over seven seasons, 30 Rock charted and satirized vast stretches of the mediascape.

On 30 Rock, Jack continually advocates synergistic business strategies, having built his reputation on the invention of the GE trivection oven (a real product), which combines three types of heat: radiant, convection, and microwave. He applies this concept of synergy to TGS, adding movie star Tracy Jordan (Tracy Morgan, playing a version of himself) in an effort to appeal to multiple markets, particularly the young male demographic. Unbeknownst to Fey, GE decided to run advertisements for its trivection oven during the original broadcast of this 30 Rock episode, adding some real synergy to their satirical synergy. Promotion, both within the story and in the surrounding media environment outside it, is a recurring phenomenon with 30 Rock that is never as simple as the show would have you believe.

XREF: Connects to broader commentary on satirical media and how corporate sponsorship complicates ironic distance in TV comedy.

For this case study, I've compiled a series of intertextual data points amassed from the cascade of references made in 30 Rock. My goal was to generate a database with which it would be possible to discern formal and financial patterns from the many intertextual scenes, stories, and seasons of 30 Rock. As opposed to the clear-cut references to alcohol and automotive brands in hip hop lyrics, the intertextual references here confronted me with the contingency of making decisions on cultural matters that do not have yes-or-no parameters. What even qualifies as intertextual and how it could be quantified were preliminary quandaries, leading to more difficult questions like how might intertextuality act as a site of exchange for cultural and economic capital, how might its value be measured, and how might it be expressed or masked within a text. My aim was to map the political economy of intertextuality of 30 Rock, noting all instances of a reference to another cultural text or brand. If these references act as a form of currency, providing the possibility for an exchange of value—economic, cultural, or both—then this currency should be quantifiable to some degree, leading to a qualitative interpretation of the role of intertextuality within contemporary narrative.

DEFINE: Frames intertextuality as a form of currency that can be quantified and exchanged for cultural or economic value.

Once the data was collected, I used the software package Tableau Desktop to generate a variety of visualizations to interpret it. Tableau is primarily intended for business analytics and thus its focus is on “actionable results,” not the type of exploration and experimentation that is prized in the humanities. Furthermore, as Drucker warns, “graphical tools are a kind of intellectual Trojan horse, a vehicle through which assumptions about what constitutes information swarm with potent force.” The point of the reflection on my data-gathering process above and the visualization set below is not to provide a data-based “solution” to some verifiable claim, but to use computational means to explore intertextuality with a scope not possible under traditional interpretative means.

Due to the limitations of print, the following visualizations are mere static reproductions, a reduction of a reduction. Nevertheless, figure 6.3 illustrates the rough contours of this intertextual economy. In a television show about television, it is to be expected that one of the top categories for references is television. It is surprising, however, to see that brand mentions are actually the most referenced category. The sheer amount of brands (722) referenced is notable, considering that only eighty-five were officially product placements, as noted by the episode's credits sequence, which must include a “promotional consideration furnished by” tag when placements are paid for. Of the eighty-five, the majority are from Apple, indicating a long-term contract to integrate the brand into many episodes of the show, resulting in numerous references to its line of products, including the iMac, the Macbook, the iPhone, the iPod, iTunes, and Siri. In fact, many episodes begin in Jack's elegant, corporate office, where an iMac is clearly visible, effectively starting the show with a mini-commercial.

XREF: Connects to broader research on product placement and commercialization of television content beyond explicit sponsorships.

The next visualization, figure 6.7, is an even more striking example of the kind of discovery only quantification can generate. Amid the flurry of references in every episode, I did not expect to see such a clear, positive trend line from season 2 to season 6, demonstrating a steady increase in the number of references used. Seasons 1 and 7 are outliers; perhaps season 1 relied more heavily on references as the writers were figuring out the show's tone and style, looking to make quick jokes or associations for purposes of characterization, while season 7 did not rely on references as much because the writers were focused on the characters and bringing the narrative to a satisfying conclusion. Regardless, the trajectory for the bulk of the series is clear, with a 50 percent increase over the course of seasons 2–6. The potential for synergy and speculation in this security grew over time as the complexity of its intertextuality expanded.

XREF: Connects to general observations about how series evolve their referential density and in-jokes as they develop an established audience.

Maintaining quality across the twenty-plus episodes of a single season of a television sitcom is difficult enough; 30 Rock's dense writing, quick dialogue, and audiovisual complexity would have presented an even more complicated challenge. Figure 6.8 suggests that one strategy for coping with that difficulty might be an increasing reliance on intertextuality. Another possible answer is that the commercial opportunities of derivative media became more apparent as the show continued and the intertextual market deepened.

XREF: Connects to broader scholarship on serially and long-form television, where later seasons often escalate self-referentiality as a coping strategy for narrative fatigue. SEED: Potential angle: how derivative media/commercial spin-offs reshape the writing of long-running shows — a piece on the economics of intertextuality in modern TV.

In effect, this concrete, textual manifestation of economic and intertextual ­synergy is so fundamental to the form of reflexive sitcoms as to constitute ­mise-en-synergy. While traditional mise-en-scène is about the relation between visual style and meaning, mise-en-synergy concerns the multi-platform relationship between audiovisual style, meaning, and economics. It can be thought of as a schematic and quantitative approach to the vast, multi-platform, intertextual components that comprise contemporary cultural texts. Using tools such as data ­mining, distant reading, and data visualization, the economic and intertextual parameters of the form of visual texts can be investigated on a scale that would not be possible without computation. A specific attention to mise-en-synergy highlights both textual and financial phenomena, interlocking processes that inform ­strategies of representation as well as structures of financialization. This ­mise-en-synergy should be seen not (just) as a crass business decision, but as an integral part of the canvas upon which contemporary cultural texts paint their commercial art.

DEFINE: Introduces the coined term 'mise-en-synergy' as a computational framework for examining the multi-platform intertextual and economic dimensions of contemporary media. XREF: Extends traditional film studies concept of mise-en-scène into a data-driven, cross-platform media-economics framework.

30 Rock enacts its own “adverlingus” and “pos-mens” of NBCUniversal properties and other products. In anthropological terms, these parodic buzzwords are examples of “emic” statements: they derive from a point of view where the analysis of cultural systems is defined in terms meaningful to the individual who is a participant within that culture. With its industrial self-theorizing both ironic and lucrative, 30 Rock develops a critical space for the examination of synergy, conglomeration, and financialization, while also participating in these corporate demands. The complicity with which it engages in these practices is integral to how it can simultaneously satirize them; its mise-en-synergy is both the threat and the opportunity, the obstacle and the insight, the product and the text.

But the real synergy lies in the constant inclusion of other NBC texts and platforms. Liz’s ex-boyfriend is seen on Dateline NBC: To Catch a Predator. Jenna confuses Osama bin Laden and then senator Barack Obama on MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews. Tracy tries to stab Conan O’Brien on Late Night. Jack has an alter-ego named Generalissimo on a Mexican soap opera airing on Telemundo, the world’s second largest Spanish-language network, which Jack is trying to acquire (as the real GE did in 2002).

In this situation, technology is hailed as an improvement for the business of television; when it was TiVo and DVR that allowed the circumvention of advertisements, a similar technology was considered a detriment. In our conversation, the executive cited DVR technology as one of the main anxieties that has driven business to DG Entertainment's CMS product. Whereas they once faced networks resistant to give up too much control or access to their content, he said, the new technological paradigm has networks requesting his company's assistance in indexing and leveraging their content through clips.

XREF: Relates to adoption and framing literature where new technologies are branded differently depending on whether they threaten or serve incumbent business models.

After three months of promotion that anticipated its September launch, "local viewers had seen a wide range of promos that emphasized the warm-but-wacky relationships among the show's lead characters and popular supporting players." More than just choosing appropriately humorous clips for promotional purposes, the CMS gives local affiliates the power to craft a whole new identity for their syndicated programs.

The impetus for these promercials, the executive explained, is advertisers who, fearing that DVR-using consumers will skip their commercials entirely, ask him “to enhance the prospect that people will see our commercial message.” His solution is to “wrap the commercial message in content that people would like to watch . . . [so that] it doesn’t look like a commercial so much anymore. They stop and go ‘Oh, that’s 30 Rock, what is that?’”

“Every piece of pop aesthetic must be seen from the point of view of money,” claims Joshua Clover. “Not just in measuring its success, but in conceiving of what it communicates.” For 30 Rock and other reflexive, reference-laden comedies, what is being communicated is a purposefully obfuscated marketplace of references the show establishes in order to facilitate the exchange of cultural and economic capital, either presently or in the future. Two different databases of 30 Rock—one built by myself to critically explore intertextual dynamics, the other by a client of Hollywood studios to exploit the content for marketing—reveal the scale of this futures market. … As in hip hop, all references are rendered a fungible asset, an interchangeable good that can be leveraged for exchange, then packaged into a security. Intertextuality becomes a repository of value that can be exploited through speculative action, and its obfuscation—through clever wordplay, thematic meaning, irony, and other formal means—allows it to proceed without objection. Disguised with a rhyme or a laugh, our songs and sitcoms are turned into stocks and securities.

SEED: Could become an essay on how reference-laden comedy functions as cultural capital trading, drawing parallels to financial markets and their obfuscation. QUESTION: Worth investigating how this commodification claim applies to newer shows that are more overtly meta-referential.

But maybe Silicon Valley isn’t the place to look for the birth of the metaverse; back down the 101, in Hollywood, the metaverse has been a popular, beloved experience for decades. Its vision, one populated not by 3D avatars, but by well-known characters and intellectual property, is one many people actually want to live in. Perhaps our technological future lies in a cinematic world already imagined in the past.

The word metaverse—a portmanteau of meta and universe—is often traced to its coinage by Neal Stephenson in the 1992 novel Snow Crash, which depicts a dystopian world where humans can interact with each other as fantastical avatars in a three-dimensional virtual space. (Silicon Valley proponents of the metaverse appear to have overlooked the hypercapitalist dystopia presented in the novel.)

XREF: Connects to broader discourse about tech companies adopting cyberpunk terminology while ignoring the dystopian critiques embedded in the source texts.

For our purposes, Who Framed Roger Rabbit can also be credited with starting a cycle of films we might call the brandscape blockbuster—or, if you prefer, the intellectual property management film or the metaverse movie. It contains all of the necessary components in nascent form: a world that parallels our own, heavily populated by licensed, branded characters and stories, which are explored for the viewer as if in a nostalgic travelog. Disney and Warner Bros., with the deepest of catalogs, are the main purveyors of these stories. With a mix of live action and animation (traditional, computer-generated, or both), the brandscape blockbuster often depicts two distinctive worlds, one simulated and happier, in contrast to a darker, real world. The conflict often involves a populist rebellion against a tyrannical villain who aims to homogenize the world for their benefit, an intergenerational struggle over values, or both. It is a "four-quadrant movie," designed to appeal to all four major demographic "quadrants" as defined by ­Hollywood—men/women, over/under twenty-five—by offering action, adventure, romance, wit, nostalgia, and reflexivity. Though otherworldly and spectacular in their aural-visual representation, these films are arguably more "realistic" than any other cultural form operating today. The average American sees roughly five thousand brand names and advertisements in a single day, maybe even as many as ten thousand. With strategic licensing agreements and merchandising deals, these brandscape blockbusters seek to develop a fantasyland made in the image of the financialized marketplace, reflecting our dystopian reality back to us as a playful fantasy. It's a dreamworld that comes with a heavy price, literally and figuratively. Table 7.1 depicts this series of brandscape blockbuster films, most with much denser referential economies than their originators. We can read these films as industrial allegories—"Hollywood thinks about capitalism by telling stories about money," as J. D. Connor says7—but also as wide-ranging, diversified portfolios of brands, properties, licenses, and merchandising tie-ins. Nearly all are huge successes just in terms of box office, let alone brand value. These films demonstrate our descent into a financialized popular culture—not just as a symbolic representation of such, but as a material embodiment of vast speculation.

XREF: Connects to discussions of IP-driven cinema and intellectual property films since the 1980s, evoking the lineage that includes Roger Rabbit through contemporary franchise films.

Spielberg is often credited with creating the first smash hit of a new blockbuster era with Jaws (1975), through a combination of pre-sold property, marketing blitz, and wide release. His E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) featured a young boy coaxing an alien out of hiding with a trail of Reese's Pieces, tripling sales of the candy; according to Campaign, the marketing magazine, this was when "modern-day product placement began."

DEFINE: Defines the blockbuster era as combining pre-sold property, marketing blitz, and wide release, with Jaws as its origin point.

A few years later, Warner Bros. would mimic its chief competitor and develop a hybrid animation/live-action brandscape blockbuster of its own: Space Jam (Joe Pytka, 1996). Having merged with Time Inc. in 1990 and about to acquire Turner Broadcasting in 1996, Time Warner at that time was dedicated to achieving synergy among its many subsidiaries and mining its historic library of film and television properties. “Space Jam isn’t a movie,” Time Warner CEO Gerald Levin proclaimed, “it’s a marketing event.” With its combination of cartoon nostalgia (Looney Tunes) and global celebrity (Michael Jordan), Space Jam met many corporate objectives for its overleveraged parent company: from a $125 million production and marketing budget, amplified by over two hundred promotional partners, it earned more than $250 million at the global box office and $1.2 billion in merchandise sales.

QUESTION: Space Jam earned only $250M at the box office from a $125M budget plus 200 promotional partners — a thin margin despite massive merchandising. Worth checking how typical this was for 90s CGI/live-action hybrids.

Textually, the film wears its commercial ambitions on its sleeve, parodying its own status as branded product. “We’re Looney Tunes,” Porky Pig explains, and Daffy Duck interjects: “And, as such, exclusive property and trademark of Warner Bros. Inc.,” revealing an actual branding of the Warner Bros. logo on his backside. Plenty of other branded Warner Bros. products are referenced in the film, ­including early Looney Tunes cartoons, Batman, Mars Attacks, and Caddyshack. ­Non–Warner Bros. products are also parodied, particularly Jordan’s many ­endorsement deals: “Michael, it’s showtime. Get your Hanes on, lace up your Nikes, grab your ­Wheaties and Gatorade and we’ll pick up a Big Mac on the way!” Later, ­complaining with Bugs Bunny about the lack of royalty payments for any “mugs and t-shirts and lunchboxes with our pictures on ’em,” which, as mentioned, would turn out to be worth over a billion dollars, Daffy sighs: “We gotta get new agents. We’re getting screwed.” And, in one of its many references to union politics, Daffy then mutters, “If this were a union job. . . . ” This reflexivity and critical understanding of its own context is key to the brandscape blockbuster’s appeal, transforming crass consumerism into a clever wink. "Space Jam offered up 'childish delight' and 'adult self-awareness' as points of entry," Paul Grainge argues, as its aim "was to signify, contextualize and aestheticize consumption practices growing out of the industrial and fan intersections of sports and entertainment." What happens when the self-awareness rises in tandem with the commodification and synergy? What happens when the winking is constant and the nudging becomes a sharp elbow? Like Jay-Z and 30 Rock, brandscape blockbusters depict worlds that are utterly saturated with references, forming referential economies with ample transactional possibilities, which also allows them to build a reflexive, critical apparatus both complex and popular.

Again we see the critical component of a brandscape blockbuster escalating in combination with its commercialism. For films that are clearly designed for profit and synergy, it is worth noting that the corporate strategy for these movies includes seeking out acclaimed comedic writers and directors who can transform a corporate premise into something not just watchable, but profitable and critically acclaimed, even “essential cinema,” in Polan’s words.

Like Roger Rabbit, the film is both a love letter to the history of American animation and a circus of branding and licensing agreements. Unlike Roger Rabbit, which included references to seventy or so other films and cartoons, Chip 'n Dale references over 260 films, TV shows, cartoons, and games in a constant barrage of meta-jokes, Easter eggs, sight gags, and brand mentions. The cost of this licensing buffet is, of course, left unsaid—a tab picked up by the Disney corporation at a price, whether paid in social capital or actual capital, that few other entertainment companies could afford.

XREF: Connects to broader discussions about Disney's market dominance and IP consolidation in contemporary media.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit operates like an elegy for the golden age of hand-drawn animation and of Los Angeles itself, including a sly critique of the power of the automotive and oil industries in conspiring to severely curtail public transportation in the city.

XREF: Connects to broader discussions of LA's car-centric development and the historical Red Car streetcar system, a known conspiracy-adjacent urban history topic.

Like The LEGO Movie and 30 Rock, the film offers a critique of corporate culture but surrounds it with a shroud of nostalgia, advertising, and references, both paid and unpaid. As a Disney product, its meta-referential tone suggests that all of this is a bit silly, but also that these properties are our past, our memories, our childhood, even our friends. Disney’s unparalleled ability to ­commodify childhood includes its ability to reassure adults that their commodified memory is all in good fun. Spot the reference. Get the joke. Buy the ­merchandise. Bring your kids.

In 2020, rapper Travis Scott hosted a concert for millions on Fortnite, premiering a song that debuted at the top of the Billboard Hot 100; many more artists followed, including Marshmello, BTS, J Balvin, and Ariana Grande.

Disney licensed Mickey Mouse to Nintendo and Atari as early as 1981, and Tron, another live-action/animation hybrid about a simulated digital world and an evil businessman, is the eighth highest-grossing arcade machine of all time, earning an estimated $45 million by 1983, over $130 million in 2022 dollars and far more than the film grossed.

Spielberg's E.T. is known not only for its successful product placement but also its incredibly unsuccessful Atari video game adaptation, one of the biggest commercial failures in video game history, resulting in 728,000 cartridges unceremoniously dumped into a New Mexico landfill in 1983.

Kingdom Hearts is a model example of the brandscape blockbuster video game. A role-playing game and collaboration between Disney and Square Enix, one of the biggest video game developers, Kingdom Hearts enables players to explore a fictional universe populated by dozens and dozens of characters and story lines from Disney, Pixar, and Square Enix properties (such as Final Fantasy). Starting in 2002 and now including thirteen different games, Kingdom Hearts has become a sprawling universe and franchise of toys, books, clothing, manga, and television. Disney not only licenses many of its most popular film and television properties to be adapted into video games, it also codevelops many different original games in different gameplay styles. These games attempt to build unique universes in which a broad range of its intellectual property is not just exploited strategically, but offered in a more immersive manner.

DEFINE: Defines 'brandscape blockbuster' video game via Kingdom Hearts as the model example.

For many of the world’s Disney fans, a trip to Disneyland or Disneyworld is not affordable or possible; the proto-metaverse Disney is building through its games and virtual experiences welcomes consumers of all income levels. Increasingly, it then pressures its users into upgrades through microtransactions. Disney has licensed or developed over six hundred video games. While these have had varying levels of success, it’s not hard to imagine these branded metaverses generating more profit for Disney than the theme park division one day soon.

QUESTION: How would virtual metaverses actually overtake the massive theme park revenue? Worth probing Disney's actual park vs. interactive segment financials. XREF: Connects to broader narratives about companies pivoting from physical to digital revenue, like other traditional attractions brands encountering the metaverse. SEED: Angle: the microtransaction economy as a bridge to cheaper brand access — how Disney converts affordability into recurring payments.

The narrative is similar to other brandscape blockbusters in that it reassures its older audience that the media of its youth, and the intellectual property that is continually rejuvenated and resold, is worth treasuring. “We haven’t been this popular in years,” Ralph says in the conclusion of the film, having rescued the damsel in distress. “The gamers say we’re retro, which I think means old, but cool.”

XREF: Connects to the broader phenomenon of reboots and IP nostalgia in contemporary pop culture — Star Wars, Stranger Things, remakes.

The first film in the series is similar to Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Chip ’n Dale: Rescue Rangers in its desire to pay homage to the meaningful cultural artifacts of its creators’ youth and wrestle with its own status as commodity. The sequel doesn’t bother pretending to offer anything but a realistic depiction of the metaverse Disney is building all around us: a fully branded virtual shopping mall and arcade that dispenses with anything ­resembling public or communal space that isn’t monetizable.

XREF: Connects to commentary on brand saturation in metaverse spaces and theme-parkification of public life.

In 2018, a sequel, Ralph Breaks the Internet, featured the owner of the arcade installing Wi-Fi, allowing Ralph and Vanellope to explore the internet as if it were an interactive physical 3D space. The film represents the internet as a city bustling with brands and avatars, thus amounting to a cinematic depiction of the metaverse before its popularization a few years later. It’s even more overstuffed with references and characters than the first Ralph film. Nearly a hundred film and television references are made, and over four hundred individual characters were designed, the most of any Disney film to that point. The referential economy of the franchise now included both technology companies and short-form viral video references in its depiction of a purely corporate internet designed for mindless consumption. Apple, Google, Amazon, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, Spotify, IMDb, WhatsApp, Facebook, Pinterest, and Fortnite all make appearances. Payment processing apps, such as Fandango, Kickstarter, Venmo, and PayPal, are depicted as well, a fitting complement to the depiction of the internet as purely consumerist. eBay is central to the plot (they need to buy a rare part for Vanellope’s arcade machine), as is a Buzzfeed/YouTube parody, BuzzzTube, where Ralph will earn the money to buy the part from eBay. “There are much better ways to make money on the internet than stealing cars,” a new character exclaims, “such as becoming a BuzzzTube star.” Ralph proceeds to “go viral” copying popular user-generated internet genres such as makeup tutorials, unboxing videos, spicy-food eating, cooking tutorials, and video game streaming. Humans are seen briefly, sadly hunched over their screens, clicking the like button on Ralph’s videos on Buzzztube. … Disney’s mask is off in the sequel. The first film in the series is similar to Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Chip ’n Dale: Rescue Rangers in its desire to pay homage to the meaningful cultural artifacts of its creators’ youth and wrestle with its own status as commodity. The sequel doesn’t bother pretending to offer anything but a realistic depiction of the metaverse Disney is building all around us: a fully branded virtual shopping mall and arcade that dispenses with anything ­resembling public or communal space that isn’t monetizable. At one point, Vanellope visits “Oh My Disney” land, a space introduced with an establishing shot that includes all five of Disney’s key brands in a single frame (Star Wars, Pixar, Marvel, Disney Animation, and The Muppets), all while soundtracked with a remix to the hit song “Let It Go” from Frozen.

XREF: Connects to broader discourse on how media represents the internet as consumerist space, presaging metaverse concepts popularized later.

Stormtroopers from Star Wars chase Vanellope for advertising "unauthorized clickbait" of Ralph's videos, before she escapes with the help of the entire Disney Princess Line. Ralph, afraid of change in this wired new world and worried that his friendship with Vanellope is in danger because she wants to move from the arcade to an online game, enlists a virus that escapes his control. … Ralph, the surrogate for the film's older audience and their inability to understand their children's online lifestyle, accepts that Vanellope deserves her independence. He also accepts the branded triviality that her independence entails. Again the ideology is clear. Spot the reference. Buy the merchandise. Bring your kids, but don't be overbearing. Let them grow up unaccompanied in this toxic, branded world. "Let her go," Ralph tells the horde, fixing his insecurity and instructing parents everywhere.

XREF: Connects to broader critiques of children's media as corporate ideology, echoing similar readings of animated film product placements and licensing. SEED: An essay angle: how 'Ralph Breaks the Internet' frames corporate online spaces as inevitability that parents should accept rather than question.

With the addition of gaming into the brandscape blockbuster narrative, the viewer's relationship to media products is now envisioned as playable, livable, and inhabitable. In 1989, no one walked out of a viewing of Who Framed Roger ­Rabbit thinking they could actually live in the Toontown depicted on screen. But in the intervening years, Disney has developed a number of virtual spaces that aim to immerse its consumers in a Disneyland that doesn't require a physical visit. ­Toontown did come online in 2003, an early experiment by Disney's Virtual Reality Studio to make a massively multiplayer online role-playing game. By 2012, many viewers leaving a screening of Wreck-It Ralph expected that virtual capability. The fictional games in the film were playable online, as were licensed, mobile games that extended the story.

XREF: Connects to the broader shift toward transmedia storytelling and participatory culture, echoing Jenkins's convergence culture arguments. SEED: Could become an essay on how the expectation gap between what audiences demand and what producers initially deliver has widened across media franchises.

While the sequel shares the synergy, cross-promotion, and product placement of the original, it is far removed from that film's narrative and ideology. The villain of the first film is a cartoon alien, intent on kidnapping the Looney Tunes for his amusement park, to which Bugs Bunny responds by convening a meeting at Union Hall 839, a reference to the Animation Guild, IATSE Local 839. Animators in Hollywood have a long history of labor actions, including "the Disney strike" of 1941 and Local 839's strike over offshoring of animation in 1979. The original Space Jam pays tribute to these workers, as well as the Teamsters, and narrativizes a collective struggle among cartoon creatives, commenting on its own status amid a synergistic merchandising cash-in. … The villain of Space Jam's sequel, meanwhile, is a new form of content kidnapping—an algorithm named Al-G Rhythm—but a union organizing a labor action is not at all the response the film suggests. Instead, the conflict is mapped onto LeBron's relationship with his son, a wunderkind who is seen single-handedly developing every aspect of a video game: not just coding, but recording sound effects, composing music, scanning 3D models, and drawing characters. A portrait of the entrepreneurial artist as a young man. There is no collective worker power in the sequel—there aren't even workers.

A generous reading of the film might interpret it as Spielberg’s sad elegy for the blockbuster form he played a large role in creating. … There is no new culture in this grim world, only a capitalist monoculture that endlessly retreads the past in VR form. Neither hero nor villain wants to actually change the OASIS; the villain just wants to own it and insert intrusive advertising. When the hero wins, he merely implements a couple days of OASIS downtime each week. … Two hours of simulated IP mayhem later, a weak plea to balance your screen time is all this bleak depiction can muster.

Nearly twenty years later, our world of AdTech and surveillance capitalism has woven a much darker web. Presaged and promoted by the brandscape blockbuster, our corporate metaverse is here, overlaid on our physical reality by the screens in our theaters and in our pockets. The opportunities for independence and radical thought in the cultural sphere have faded, just another piece of content drowned out by brands in an endless scroll. … Generative artificial intelligence trained on corporate IP threatens further repetition and degradation while lowering labor costs. Monotonous stories woven together with empty references to some other desolate entry in the corporate canon. Lots of content, but little creativity or criticism.

QUESTION: Does corporate-driven content creation actually measurably reduce original cultural output, or is this an impressionistic claim worth testing?

This book has argued that the American media sector is being devoured by Wall Street. The financialization of the cultural industries is leading to a reduction in the scope, heterogeneity, and diversity of our media culture. It is redistributing wealth upward, making creative work more precarious, and producing derivative, intellectual-property-based culture.

DEFINE: Defines 'financialization' as the process by which Wall Street ownership of cultural industries reduces heterogeneity, redistributes wealth upward, and produces derivative IP-based culture.

To conclude, I will catalog some financial regulation options that would help rejuvenate the media sector and end the era of derivative media. It's almost comical how simple some of these changes would be to make from a legislative perspective. Remove a line here, reinstate a rule there. Of course, the difficulty is not the formulation of regulations, but the power struggle over earning the votes to enact that legislation. The ­financial sector employs a veritable army of lawyers and lobbyists.

SEED: The contrast between legislative simplicity and political difficulty suggests an essay angle: enumerating specific financial regulation tweaks that would reshape the media landscape.

Since private equity has been such a destructive force, particularly in the media sector, a series of reforms targeted at the PE industry are needed. Asset stripping is an especially harmful practice enacted by PE firms; limited liability protections should not be extended to them when they are deliberately looting a company for their own benefit. Immediate dividend payments to PE investors is another exploitative practice, reducing the capacity of the company to invest in its own labor and productivity; regulations that prevent PE firms from paying dividends in the first two years following an acquisition would be an easy fix. The most corrupt PE firms have been using bankruptcy courts to rid themselves of pension and severance pay obligations; PE firms must be held accountable in these situations.

XREF: Contrasts with conventional justifications for limited liability shielding and the mainstream acceptance of PE dividend extraction. SEED: Could develop into a piece on specific regulatory fixes for PE asset-stripping and dividend practices in media consolidation.

The U.S. tax code allows interest on debt to be deducted from corporate income when calculating tax liabilities, thus providing an incentive for private equity and other financial firms to use debt financing rather than equity for capital investments. Not only does this amount to a subsidy from taxpayers, but since reduced taxes increase the returns to the financial investors without creating anything for the economy, it is essentially a transfer of wealth from the public to PE firms, another example of taxpayer-financed capitalism.

Antitrust measures have been used to tame Hollywood before, including the Paramount Decrees in 1948 that broke up the Hollywood studio system and the Financial Interest and Syndication Rules in 1970 that prevented monopolization by the Big 3 television networks.

XREF: Connects to contemporary debate about Big Tech antitrust enforcement and streaming platform consolidation.

When a publication as pro-free-market as The Economist is bemoaning increased concentration and inadequate competition, documenting a $10 trillion wave of mergers since 2008 and that two-thirds of the economy has concentrated since 1997, you know the situation is dire.

XREF: Connects to broader antitrust and market concentration discourse, and the $10 trillion mergers since 2008 figure is a citable stat.

The purpose of antitrust law is to maintain competition and limit monopoly power, but neoliberal ideology has narrowly defined the parameters of antitrust to concern only consumer prices, not the broader public interest, and antitrust enforcement has weakened as a result.

XREF: Connects to broader critiques of neoliberal economic policy and regulatory capture. QUESTION: What specific legal rulings or policy shifts codified this narrowing of antitrust scope?

Taming and resisting capitalism, however, are merely tactics that neutralize harm, they are not transformative strategies. In the face of global climate collapse, accompanied by increased authoritarianism, imperialism, social injustice, and global immiseration, the question of overcoming capitalism itself has returned to prominence. Dismantling capitalism entails the gradual transition to a system more democratic, egalitarian, and participatory. Our media system could play a role in this transition were it to present a more diverse array of stories and ideas with which citizens could imagine and experience the many possible alternatives to capitalism. … To the contrary, the current financialized media system actively impedes such a transition because of its structure that rewards profit extraction and derivative content.

My stock answer is always: what can we do? I believe this book presents the case that understanding derivative media is a crucial first step, followed by structural change at the level of media and finance reform at the very least. Taming and resisting capitalism are viable options. I think this book also suggests that the true scale of this problem, in tandem with the many other crises we face, necessitates broader, revolutionary transformation.

QUESTION: The author distinguishes between reformist and revolutionary responses — worth probing where the threshold between them lies.

These four anticapitalist tactics all contribute to a grand strategy Wright calls eroding capitalism, to which he adds a fifth action: escaping capitalism. Maybe capitalism is a complex, flexible system that is at this point too large and powerful to successfully tame, resist, dismantle, or smash; it always manages to co-opt its opposition. Or maybe it's failing because of its own contradictions and will end because of its inability to produce new forms of accumulation. Either way, our organizational capacities against it might be wasted. There is still the option to escape capitalism.

A shareholder, typically a wealthy hedge fund manager, who uses a large equity stake in a corporation to pressure or threaten management to make changes that are profitable to the investor. Activist investors often work together, in what is called a “wolf pack,” a practice that was outlawed until 1992. Activist shareholders claim they are merely aiming to improve a company’s operations or financial stability, but they have no incentive to produce value, only extract it. They typically have two goals: increase cash flow over which the company has control and extract that cash flow. Similar to the financial engineering strategies of private equity, activist investors pressure their targets to utilize mass layoffs, corporate tax evasion, price gouging, corporate asset sales, and acquisitions of cash-rich companies. Extracting the cash is then accomplished through dividends and stock buybacks. Formerly known as a corporate raider.

DEFINE: Defines activist investors (formerly corporate raiders), their wolf-pack practice, and their extraction-focused goals through dividends and buybacks.

When large asset managers such as BlackRock and Vanguard hold large blocks of corporate equity of competing firms with the same industries. Common ownership consolidates corporate shares within the hands of a few large firms, which harms competition, incentivizes companies to keep prices high and wages low, and produces conflicts of interest. Also known as horizontal shareholding.

DEFINE: Defines the concept 'common ownership' (horizontal shareholding) as large asset managers holding equity in competing firms within the same industry. XREF: Connects to antitrust scholarship questioning whether index-fund concentration at BlackRock/Vanguard undermines market competition despite benign appearances.

A financial instrument to hedge or speculate on price movements by dismantling any asset into individual attributes and trading them without trading the asset itself. Derivatives take the form of financial contracts such as futures (an agreement to buy/sell an asset at a predetermined price at a future date), options (the opportunity but not the obligation to buy/sell an asset at a predetermined price at some point in the future), and swaps (allowing for the exchange of one asset flow for another), though they often involve a combination of all three. These contracts “derive” their value from an underlying asset such as commodities, equities, currencies, debt, mortgages, interest rates. Derivatives, in combination with leverage, have come to be the key form of speculative capital over the past few decades.

DEFINE: Defines derivatives as contracts (futures, options, swaps) whose value derives from an underlying asset, tradable without owning that asset.

The growing influence of financial markets, firms, and instruments. Though there is a long history of finance, credit, and debt, financialization is typically thought of as a set of processes that began accelerating in the 1970s and 1980s, leading to the contemporary moment in which a global network of financial institutions have achieved imposing scale and power. Key components of financialization include financial instruments (e.g., stock markets, mutual funds, dividends, stock buybacks, derivatives), financial strategies (e.g., asset management, private equity, hedge funds, venture capital), and state support (e.g., central banks, financial deregulation, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund).

DEFINE: Defines financialization as accelerating processes since the 1970s-1980s, drawing out its instruments, strategies, and state support components.

The financial strategy of using borrowed capital to acquire an asset, risking that the future profits will outweigh the cost of borrowing. Named after the concept of a lever in physics, whereby a small input force is amplified into a larger output force, financial leverage increases scale and amplifies smaller amounts of capital into potentially larger profits, multiplying gains. However, losses are also multiplied and thus financial leverage is a risky investment technique available only to large, wealthy investors and firms. Private equity firms and hedge funds are predicated on using high levels of risky financial leverage.

DEFINE: Defines financial leverage as the strategic use of borrowed capital to acquire assets, with gains and losses both amplified.

Private equity strategies for streamlining include layoffs, reduced wages, increasing debt, offshoring, exploiting bankruptcy law and tax loopholes, selling off assets, and eliminating pensions.

DEFINE: Lists the specific tactics comprising private equity 'streamlining' strategies.

A type of investment strategy that buys, restructures, and sells private companies for profit. This extractive financial technique was originally known as a leveraged buyout in the 1980s and 1990s, but developed such a bad reputation that it was rebranded as the more opaque term private equity. In order to acquire the company, a PE firm, such as Bain Capital or Blackstone, raises the capital from asset managers, institutional investor funds, wealthy investors, and other PE firms. The acquisition is often supplemented by debt, which is raised using the target company as collateral; the target company is then saddled with the debt used to purchase it.

DEFINE: Explains private equity as the rebranded form of leveraged buyouts, clarifying the opaque terminology.

When a corporation pays shareholders the market value of a share, thus repurchasing shares of stocks previously issued, reabsorbing that portion of ownership. This activity increases the value of the remaining shares because there is now less stock outstanding and earnings are split between fewer shareholders. Stock buybacks also increase earnings per share (since there are fewer shares), a valuable metric to Wall Street and thus CEOs and executives. Like dividends, they are profits that are not reinvested by the company into productive means, such as new hires, higher wages, or increased research and development. Instead, they are payouts to investors that are disproportionately already wealthy. Between 2010 and 2019, the publicly traded companies in the S&P 500 Index spent $6.3 trillion on buybacks.

4. A similar study by Adam Mastroianni, using only the top twenty films each year, showed a similar pattern: “Until the year 2000, about 25% of top-grossing movies were prequels, sequels, spinoffs, remakes, reboots, or cinematic universe expansions. Since 2010, it’s been over 50% every year. In recent years, it’s been close to 100%.” Mastroianni shows a similar pattern for television, music, books, and video games.

XREF: Connects to cultural conversations about franchise fatigue and the death of original IP in Hollywood in recent years.

5. Samuel A. Chambers, There’s No Such Thing as “The Economy”: Essays on Capitalist Value (Punctum Books, 2018), 44–45. Also see Timothy Mitchell, “The Work of Economics: How a Discipline Makes Its World,” European Journal of Sociology 46, no. 2 (2005): 297–320.

XREF: Connects to performativity debates in economics and social constructionist critiques of disciplinary knowledge.

11. Network effect is the term/belief that the value of a service increases in relation to its number of users, and is often the reason given for the success of companies like Facebook, Airbnb, or Uber—and not, say, their aggressive, often illegal corporate conduct.

DEFINE: Defines network effect and immediately subverts it by pointing out it masks illegal corporate conduct. XREF: Connects to critiques of platform capitalism and the 'survivorship' narrative around tech success.

28. The “tendency for the rate of profit to fall” is a claim by Karl Marx that—because of the complexity of empirically proving such a complex phenomenon—continues to be debated. The data used here comes from the World Profitability Dashboard and its accompanying article: Deepankar Basu, Julio Huato, Jesus Lara Jauregui, and Evan Wasner, “World Profit Rates, 1960–2019,” Review of Political Economy (2022).

XREF: Connects to Marxian economics literature the reader may know on the falling rate of profit debate.

Atul Gupta, Sabrina T. Howell, Constantine Yannelis, and Abhinav Gupta, “Owner Incentives and Performance in Healthcare: Private Equity Investment in Nursing Homes,” NBER Working Paper No. w28474 (National Bureau of Economic Research, February 2021).

QUESTION: What specific outcomes does this NBER study attribute to PE ownership? Could be worth pulling the underlying findings.

Paul McCartney, the Rolling Stones, and Robbie Williams ended up at Universal Music Group, while Radiohead self-released their next album in 2007 with an online “pay what you want” scheme that was very successful, then signed with the independent label XL Recordings.

QUESTION: This hints at a broader question about viability of pay-what-you-want models for smaller artists, where the success of Radiohead may not generalize.

LeBrun, Benjamin, Kaitlyn Todd, and Andrew Piper. "Buying the News: A Quantitative Study of the Effects of Corporate Acquisition on Local News." New Media & Society, March 24, 2022.

XREF: Connects to broader research on media consolidation and its democratic consequences. QUESTION: What specific effects did the study measure — content, staffing, or editorial independence?

Lotz, Amanda D. "Teasing Apart Television Industry Disruption: Consequences of Meso-Level Financing Practices before and after the US Multiplatform Era." Media, Culture & Society 41, no. 7 (2019): 923–38.

Pechenick, Eitan Adam, Christopher M. Danforth, and Peter Sheridan Dodds. “Characterizing the Google Books Corpus: Strong Limits to Inferences of Socio-cultural and Linguistic Evolution.” PLoS ONE 10, no. 10 (2015): e0137041.

XREF: This connects to ongoing debates about the reliability of large digital corpora for studying cultural and linguistic change, a core concern for any researcher using n-gram or corpus methods.

Peitz, Martin, and Patrick Waelbroeck. “Why the Music Industry May Gain from Free Downloading—the Role of Sampling.” International Journal of Industrial Organization 24, no. 5 (2006): 907–13.

SEED: A potential essay angle: exploring how seemingly harmful piracy can function as marketing, and how this economic paradox maps onto other digital industries (books, software, games).

Posner, Eric A., Fiona Scott Morton, and E. Glen Weyl. “A Proposal to Limit the Anti-Competitive Power of Institutional Investors.” Antitrust Law Journal 81, no. 3 (2017).

XREF: Connects to literature on common ownership and antitrust, likely in a book about power concentration or market competition.