Industry and audience power essay

Essay question: "the internet has given audiences much more power than ever before." To what extent do you agree with this statement?

                                      Introduction 

Clearly today the internet has given audiences more power, but is it too much? With the power to say anything at all at any time at all while still being anonymous, which may inherently give audiences too much power. This shifts the position of the audience from being simple consumers to actually having a say in what goes on behind the scenes. 

                                    Music industry 

The rise of the internet took the music industry by storm, allowing smaller creators to get the recognition they were looking for and allowing bigger more known artists to get bigger and bigger. With sites such as YouTube, music sharing is easier than it has ever been. This comes with a problem, radio industries start to die out. With the internet, people can listen to music anywhere they want without a radio and without paying any money. However, this may not be a bad thing. New technology is being mass produced every day and with innovation comes change, perhaps it is time to shed the old formats such as vinyl, CD's, radios and disks. Instead of making revenue from how many downloads an album gets, you now can make money from advertisers. However, nothing is without flaws, as advertisements can be easily overcome using an adblocker and paid downloads for albums is outdated due to piracy. 

                                 Film & TV industry

The music industry is not alone in this huge change as the film and TV industries have had to change drastically to fit the internet as well. Producers now have to be extremely cautious with their content so as to not trigger any backlash from their audience which would cause them to lose money, this is called being "politically correct". With the internet a negative crowd now gets a voice for their opinions, causing many creators to be taken down because they dared to offend this new generation. An example of this, though not too similar, would be with the recent Sonic the Hedgehog movie. Poor design of the main character "Sonic" caused millions to voice their angry opinions of it, thus triggering a redesign of the character. Audience backlash isn't the only problem however as another problem arises with Netflix and their push on "binge-watching" TV shows that are usually episodic, this creates a problem where instead of having one episode per week there would be bulk releases of episodes so that you could "binge-watch" it which therefore slows down release of new episodes. This causes Netflix to lose potential viewers who are seeking something to watch every week as it comes out instead of watching a bulk of episodes and being starved for more. However with the rise of the internet there are good changes as well such as an audience being able to watch wherever they go, this means industries can sell more ad time and therefore make more money.