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.

Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, loc. 62