Books have been a good model for music, as far as technological effects go.
Technological advances in publishing have acted to democratize the industry. We have fewer ultra superstars like Hemmingway. (J.K. Rowling seems to be the most recent one.) But publishing a book is something almost anyone can do on their own now, albeit with considerable effort, so you don't necessarily need to be an ultra-superstar to earn a living at it. You may have to devote considerable effort promoting yourself, though, and you'll probably have to tour.
You can replace "books" with "music" and most of the paragraph would apply just as well, minus the sentences mentioning J.K. Rowling and Hemmingway.
I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, though. It used to be that all entertainment culture was locally produced and consumed, in the form of parlour music and after dinner stories. When media enabled this to be centrally produced, this also enabled extreme concentrations of wealth. However, it also took away people's power to produce their own culture. Now technology is putting it back into the hands of the people.
So no, hopefully file sharing won't save Hollywood. Hopefully some significant portion of it will remain as a gathering place for some of the best and brightest talents, but Hollywood's former brilliance will be shattered and redistributed to everyone out there.
Technological advances in publishing have acted to democratize the industry. We have fewer ultra superstars like Hemmingway. (J.K. Rowling seems to be the most recent one.) But publishing a book is something almost anyone can do on their own now, albeit with considerable effort, so you don't necessarily need to be an ultra-superstar to earn a living at it. You may have to devote considerable effort promoting yourself, though, and you'll probably have to tour.
You can replace "books" with "music" and most of the paragraph would apply just as well, minus the sentences mentioning J.K. Rowling and Hemmingway.
I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, though. It used to be that all entertainment culture was locally produced and consumed, in the form of parlour music and after dinner stories. When media enabled this to be centrally produced, this also enabled extreme concentrations of wealth. However, it also took away people's power to produce their own culture. Now technology is putting it back into the hands of the people.
So no, hopefully file sharing won't save Hollywood. Hopefully some significant portion of it will remain as a gathering place for some of the best and brightest talents, but Hollywood's former brilliance will be shattered and redistributed to everyone out there.