Harry Potter and the Entertainment Industry 402
VoidEngineer writes "In a surprisingly insightful article entitled Harry Crushes the Hulk, Frank Rich discusses how "Harry Potter and the Order of the Pheonix" beat out "The Hulk" and goes on to offer some insightfull and interesting comments on demographics, digital media piracy, file sharing and p2p networks, the iTunes store, and more... His conclusion? "[Consumers] may well be willing to pay for their entertainment -- if the quality is guaranteed and the price is fair."
Hmm sounds familiar (Score:5, Interesting)
That sounds familiar.. where have I heard that.. oh yeah, now I remember, that's how all the other industries work.
You know what I realized (Score:5, Interesting)
And yeah, I paid $30 for Morrowind, but it'll be months, if not years, untill I'm finished with it.
On the other hand, music goers into the lastest American stuff are still getting gorged. Then again I got John Arch's A Twist in Fate for $10 bucks, and lots of the stuff I liked when I was a kid (Judus Priest, King Diamond, Early Fates Warning, The Ramones, the list goes on) is getting released on the cheap.
It's funny, but we fan boys aren't getting screwed nearly as bad as we used to. Anyone who paid $35 for 2 dubbed eps of Ranma 1/2 knows what I'm talking about. If the trend carries on like this, I'm gonna have to shut my mouth and start buying more stuff
Meh... (Score:2, Interesting)
Good news: The **AA's of the world now realize their respective business models are obsolete.
Bad news: Their new business model consists of the following:
1. Scan Customers' ports.
2. Lawsuit
3. Profit!
In all seriousness, I really do think that these guys are deluded enough to believe that this could work - we can't make up our lost revenue because our product is not as culturally relevant as, say, video games; so let's make up said revenue with repeated lawsuits! Even if only a fraction stick, we'll still make our money back!
Old plan: throw shit at consumers, hoping they would buy it.
New Plan: throw shit (lawsuits) against a wall, hoping they will stick.
It's official - The RIAA/MPAA seem to have a scat fetish
Re:that strategy will work (Score:3, Interesting)
Frankly, I'd prefere to read the book than the ebook and I am even willing to by the hardcover as opposed to waiting for the softcover to come out in several months time.
As for iTunes, I've spent about $15 so far. 15 songs I would not own otherwise from 15 albums I would never buy.
How about labeling crippled protected CDs... (Score:5, Interesting)
It was the Amélié Soundtrack CD I bought in Australia. Sadly the CD did not even mount in the Linux or Mac boxes I tried it on.
Both the original and replace CDs I tried worked on standard players but could not be mounted on a CD drive. Typical nasty BMG copy protection.
I got my money back but even the store techie was surprised they had not mentioned the protection scheme on the packaging. He mentioned it was required in Oz. Is this true?
Annoying because I want to show my support for a funky French film and was willing to put my money where my mouth was.
If iTunes was available in Australia or the UK, then I would be buying that album online just to avoid the CD protection.
From a consumer who actually pays for music...
Pay... (Score:4, Interesting)
Pay for just "good quality" and "fair price"? I wouldn't. I want good quality and fair price, yes, but fair use is just as important (if not more). If I pay anything for it, I want to be able to use it to it's fullest, whether that means ripping it to listen to on my MP3 player, burning a copy for my car, or putting it in the microwave. Then I'll buy it if I decide I want/"need" it.
Is it as good as they say? (Score:4, Interesting)
This whole article asumes that Harry Potter is high art, and that it is a product that can earn 100 million while not being part of the hype machine.
I've never read any of the Harry Potter series. I think I'd probably enjoy them, though. But I'm _very_ aware of them. The Harry Potter phenom is well covered in the media, and I doubt they would be so popular without the involment of the media.
Re:Brilliant (Score:5, Interesting)
For instance, my International Political Economy professor at one point was on a plane heading for Brazil (he was studying something or other while there) and sat next to a guy who worked in the marketing department for the lab that produces and develops Mallox (or was it Alka-Seltzer?).
They got to talking and it turned out the guy was going down there to help figure out this problem they were having in sales. In some areas their product was selling very well, but in other areas it wasn't selling at all. Marketing had spent billions of dollars (litterally) and said "people in those areas like products that are from the US, so we should put a little American Flag on the packages" and he was going down to do something of a feasability check on this.
My professor turned to him and said, evidently without missing a beat "your product isn't selling well in those areas because your product provides relief for over-eating and the people in those areas are starving!"
The guy's face dropped and shortly thereafter was taking down contact information and writing notes.
You would think this would be obvious, but sometimes that is exactly the solution is hiding.
Re:You know what I realized (Score:2, Interesting)
It's $1,000 to own the whole series. If you just want to watch them once, go to the video shop. Or wait until they're repeated.
Time Line of the Book being scanned (Score:5, Interesting)
On Friday Night/Saturday Morning: First Chapter scanned and proofed. The whole book has reportedly been scanned, and is being proofed. Scans are available of both versions of the cover.
Saturday Afternoon (I wake up) Told the proofed version will be ready by 8 pm. Rough versions of all the chapters are available. people looking for the book are being send to a seperate channel. A website has been established where one individual has taken the rough chapters and has been proofing them himself, and posting them online.
Sunday Afternoon book has been proofed and is combined into a html file with the cover images. This is turned into a
This comment doesn't really have a point. I will say I purchased a copy of the book, and I was personally involved with the scanning. I just want people to be aware of the existence of scanned books, in the hope that it will enhance this discussion.
Gryftir
I confess (Score:5, Interesting)
Though I'm sure the author would love to sue me for saying so, you don't lose too much in reading the electronic format. Unlike music or a movie, however, a book is something we don't always finish. A bad book we put down. When we finish a book, we know that it was at least readable.
I guess what I'm saying is that I've never finished an ebook without suffereing the immediate compulsion to grab myself a copy of the real deal. Movies, music, anime, tv... these things are more impulse buys. I would never buy them in the first place normally, but after being exposed to them in a way I wouldn't have been in the first place, I at least have a reason to purchase them.
A book is something I cannot avoid purchasing if I enjoy it. Don't ask my why, I don't know. But I suspect that I am not alone in this; I also suspect that as much as a mediocre amount of piracy can help music sales, it can probably be a great boon for the sales of a less popular book.
I'm not saying "Go forth and pirate books!"; I'm just saying that maybe having people get exposed to your book, no matter how it happens, results in drastically increased sales?
Thoughts?
Re:I'm boycotting all RIAA products (Score:3, Interesting)
That said, there's plenty, plenty, of good non-RIAA stuff out there. The indie/underground/non-corporate/etc scene has always flourished and always will.
Re:Adults who read Harry Potter (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm definately not a fan of the HP series (saw both movies, just wish I could get those few hours of my life back) but my girlfriend has read them all, and seems to enjoy them. It hurts nobody, so how is it so wrong?
Re:Brilliant (Score:2, Interesting)
Sorry pal, but in order to swallow this tale, I'd need a whole truck load of Mallox (or should that be Alka-Seltzer?).
I really started to choke after you tell us, with a straight face, that the company spent billions ("litterally"), on this marketing problem.
FYI Nike's global advertising budget in 2000 was $978 million.
In addition, are we expected to believe that a company that would invest megabucks would be completely ignorant of the demographics of their target market? With bells on, I expect.
This has all the hallmarks of an urban legend - the inclusion of a US flag as a fix being an especially nice touch. I'll pass this along to Snopes or the AFU archives when I've got a minute.
T&K.
Re:Brilliant (Score:3, Interesting)
2) "Billions" may be an exageration to the point done either by him to make a point or through my faulty memory--it has been three years since I took the class. It may also represent many years worth of expenditures.
"In addition, are we expected to believe that a company that would invest megabucks would be completely ignorant of the demographics of their target market?"
Have you ever studied Brazil?
Brazil is a neomercantalist economy which has an unbelievable disparity between its rich and its poor. There are areas of Brazil which are extremely wealthy and in which this product was doing very well,
It is not particularly unbelievable that a company would research the economy, find that it has a strong (trillion dollar) economy overall, and fail to notice that there are regions which are semi-periphery and others which are truly and completely periphery.
Re:I have been arguing this with the wife all day (Score:1, Interesting)
If you think you're not being elitist with the comment "most people who read Harry Potter don't read much else", you need to look that word up in a dictionary immediately, because it doesn't mean what you think it means.
Re:I have been arguing this with the wife all day (Score:3, Interesting)
I must disagree with this false statement, it has been my experience that the children who are being enraptured by Harry's world are truly starting to hunger for literature, and as there is a limited supply of Potter to read, they expand their collection. I know 7 year olds who, having read all of the potters, have gone on while waiting for book 5 to read J.R.R. Tolkein and C.S. Lewis and other great classic literature. I doubt if you would find many 7 year olds reading Tolkein 10 years ago...
Re:I confess (Score:4, Interesting)
I actually hunted down a copy the new HP book online the day it came out; after failing to find it in bookstores... Though I'm sure the author would love to sue me... I'm not saying Go forth and pirate books! I'm just saying that maybe having people get exposed to your book, no matter how it happens, results in drastically increased sales?
I noticed an interesting image [nytimes.com] in the article. It shows two kid sisters in a public library at 1:00am; one of them is dressed up as Harry Potter and it sitting by a bookshelf rack reading the new book. These kids did not pay a dime to read the book. I am quite sure that dozens upon dozens of people will be checking that copy out to read it, again with no money going to the author or to the publisher (except, of course, the money from the library's original purchase).
I cannot help but wonder what Ms. Rowling or other authors and publishers think of this kind of thing. Obviously, they cannot speak out against public libraries, without inciting the wrath from the public at large. Libraries are something that we grew up with. They are institutions of learning that our founding fathers, like Thomas Jefferson, felt were essential for any progressive society.
Yet the same people who would become incensed about the public library being challenged would not think twice about condemning the sharing of a digital copy over the Internet. I am sorry, but I simply fail to see the fundamental difference between the two. Both mediums allow me to read the book without paying for it.
Perhaps this newfangled Internet thing and its implications are too radical a paradigm shift for the public at large, and they cannot deduce the obvious analogies to how things have been being done in the non-digital world for centuries.
Oh, and I can just as easily walk into my local library and checkout out a CD or a DVD. As the media oligopoly tightens its grip on our society (please, no Star Wars jokes), it seems that they will have to attack libraries themselves in order to follow through with many of the assertions they have been making to their inevitable conclusion.
Re:Is it as good as they say? (Score:3, Interesting)
The media coverage of Harry Potter started *because* of its popularity, it didn't cause it. I will grant that the popularity of the fifth book has probably been helped along by the media coverage, but remember, the popularity of the series was already quite entrenched when the fourth book was being anticipated.
Bear in mind, however, that Scholastic (publisher of "Harry Potter") over $3 million [cnn.com] to market the fifth book. The hype may have started with fans, but like anything else, it's been well-capitalized upon.
Re:that strategy will work (Score:5, Interesting)
This was true until I found myself paying full price $29.99 for the latest Harry Potter.
The last book (#4) was the best in the series so far, and I hope this just comes close. I haven't been able to read it yet though- there are two women in the house, so that makes me last in line....
I do buy music- and I hate it. I would love to see something like iTunes on the Windows platform. The only thing that scares me about it though, is that people will only buy the 'hits'. Everyone I know has the same experience with music- you buy the album 'just for this one song', but USUALLY the depth of the album surprises you, and the song you initially liked ends up being the one you hate the most.
So if we only buy the ones we like, a lot of music will never get noticed...
Kid Rock's album (don't remember the name, but the one with 'Cowboy' on it) was actually a fairly solid album. Songs like 'Got One For Ya' and 'Black Chick White Guy' weren't played on the radio, that I heard, but they ended up being some of my favorites. Also, Uncle Kracker (hey, if you didn't like Kid Rock, you probably didn't buy this either) had a hit with 'Follow Me', but in my mind the rest of the album was much better.
There are a lot of cases though were I know I don't want the whole album- usually older songs from one-hit-wonders that I want to put on some party CD or something like that. I mean, do I really want to purchase the entire Rose Royce collection, just to get 'Car Wash'? Although Rose Royce does have at least 5 different 'best of' albums, but I really don't want to pay for the rest of their music. (Interesting note, I saw Rose Royce at the Asparagus Festival in Stockton, CA. They played at 12:00 Noon...it was pretty sad..maybe I should buy their albums just so they don't have to do that again)
Another example is the band Orgy. These guys are horrible- but they did a real good cover of New Order's 'Blue Monday'. I bought the CD...it was one of those rare occurances when I threw the CD away....even with one good song, it wasn't worth the piece of plastic it came on.
So- when do I know the album has depth, and when do I know that I really do only want one song? I guess I will need to rely more on reviewers, and try to make better decisions. So I don't waste money.
My problem with books is actually more complicated. If I don't like a book, I have usually spent quite a few hours to find out. I hate that waste of time- and of course reviews are only for hard-cover, so I never really catch on to those. I end up buying a lot of books I don't really like.
Some good books though:
Hole in the Head
Slab Rat
Carter Beats the Devil
The Straw Men
Blah blah blah
Re:Downloading music akin to shoplifting? (Score:1, Interesting)
On the other hand, if you do want a product and would be willing to pay for the product if you could not obtain it for free then you are acting economically immorally by obtaining it for free. It is akin to old ladies in new cars and fine cloths lined up at a food bank for a hand out of surplus cheese.
Back before medical insurance and malpractice law suits, doctors used to charge people what they could afford be that $100 or a live chicken. This was actually the practice up until the early 70's. One of the questions I had on a final exam in Economics class was to prove that this arrangement maximized the doctor's income.
Imagine the leap liberal hearts would take if when you picked items up off the shelves and swiped a card at the checkout stand, some government computer somewhere decided your price for the items based on your income. Would this maximize business profits and at the same time deliver the greatest amount of affordable (by definition) goods and services to the public? The proof is left as an exercise for the reader.
Re:Time Line of the Book being scanned (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:my car's transmission system crushs Harry (Score:3, Interesting)
They spent about 3.5 million in advertising for HP#5 ... and there was one interview with the author. Compare that with the incessant barrage of publicity, talkshow appearances by stars, and the rest of the hype accompanying The Hulk or nay other movie (including the HP ones, but they at least spare the cast the gruelling talk show circuit ... that's almost a sign of a worried produciton company).
Re:I have been arguing this with the wife all day (Score:2, Interesting)
Okay, so you don't like fiction and you find it to be a waste of time. Nothing wrong with that. I find it ironic, however, that you use the argument "I am an adult" in your reasoning since you said you read CS Lewis stories when you were a kid.
Lewis himself wrote in the essay "On Three Ways of Writing for Children":
"Critics who treat "adult" as a term of approval instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adults themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence...When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man, I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up."
He also wrote in either "On Stories" or the "Three Ways" essay, I can't remember, and I'm paraphrasing:
Growing up implies adding on, to make more of oneself. If I liked fantasies as a child and then I throw it away when I become an adult to start reading non-fiction, you could not say that I had added non-fiction. I merely changed my reading.
Re:I have been arguing this with the wife all day (Score:5, Interesting)
Within 72 hours of The Order of the Phoenix being published my partner and I had both read it cover to cover; I'm currently reading it for the second time. She's 39 and I'm 47; we have no children. We've both read all of the Harry Potter books, the first long before it was filmed. There are somewhere between five and ten thousand novels in this house - we both read a lot.
J K Rowling's work is not 'bullshit'. It's not, in my opinion, great literature either, but it is superb and highly imaginative story telling, tightly plotted and compellingly told and stands repeated reading.
There are two particular things I can point to which indicate that the Harry Potter phenomenon is something genuine in terms of literature. The first is, of course, that the first Harry Potter book came out from a small independent publisher with no fanfare at all. The whole snowball effect was entirely by word of mouth, at least until The Philosopher's Stone was filmed. Up to that point there were no external factors - no marketing, no colateral - so that only the intrinsic quality of the work could have made it one of the biggest best sellers of all time.
The other thing is that, in the UK, the publishers brought out an 'adult binding' of the Harry Potter books because they found that adult readers were embarrassed to be seen reading a "children's book" on public transport. This had never been done before for any other "children's book"
Both the original binding and the 'adult binding' of several Harry Potter books have separately been on the best sellers lists in Britain for years, and an individual Harry Potter book has been the best selling book in Britain for three of the last four years (in 2001, Harry Potter books took the top four places [guardian.co.uk] on the best sellers list). At this moment, Harry Potter books are first, second, eighth, ninth, seventeenth, and twenty-second on The Guardian's [guardian.co.uk] best sellers list. That's right, six places for five books. The second place, after the "children's binding" of Order of the Phoenix is the "adult binding" [booktrack.co.uk] of the same title. Given that many adults will have the "children's binding" (we have) this indicates that roughly as many adults as children are reading the book.
Furthermore, apart from The Order of the Phoenix, all the Harry Potter books have Booktrack Platinum Awards [booktrack.co.uk] for selling over a million copies within five years in Britain. Only six other books have ever won this award.
Harry Potter isn't a 'flash in the pan' success. It's a solid, consistent success over a period of years. It's a series of children's books, but it has sold well to adults. Its success long predates its marketing and is still out of all proportion to the amount of marketing effort it receives.
Of course, popularity is, as you say, no indicator of aesthetic merit. However, this degree of popularity sustained over this long indicates something, and it doesn't indicate hype because the popularity (at least in Britain) predates the hype, not the other way around. Yes, it's easy to appear superficially cool by rubbishing Rowling's work. But unless you have some alternative explanation for this degree of popularity, your shallowness and lack of
Re:I have been arguing this with the wife all day (Score:5, Interesting)
The phoenix predates Christianity anyway only a Christian would see an analogy. One interesting thing about the entire series is that virtually no character is assigned any kind of religious faith.
it's named Fawkes after Guy Fawkes etc.).
British kids would get this quite easily.
A better example of some of the more obscure references would be that Hagrid bought Fluffy from a Greek man...
Hit's only not that much to worry about (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't know if you saw the leaked results from the independent musicians meeting with Apple, but around 50% of the purchases were whole albums. That's another great indication that the movement to single song sales will not necessarily mean the elimination of the album as art form.
RE: concerns of people only buying "hits" (Score:4, Interesting)
They usually sell complete albums of songs for much less than it would cost you to buy each song individually for 99 cents.
When you find even 2 songs you like on a given album, you often think "Hmm.... spend about $2.00 for just 2 songs - or get all 12-13 tracks for between $6 and $10?" If you end up only listening to half of the stuff, it was still a fair deal that way.
Re:Is it as good as they say? (Score:2, Interesting)