Megan Brownlow and Chris Lederer’s report ‘A World of Differences’ discusses how despite an ever increasing amount of people moving towards ‘free entertainment’ sources, ‘E&M [Entertainment and Media] is a dynamic, diverse industry with steady and sustainable growth’. Focusing on five dimensions of the global E&M market (demography, consumption, geography, business models, and competition), to me I found most of my interest was drawn to the idea of demography – in particular, looking at the effect of the younger generations on the industry)
It was interesting to read a study that actually confirms what I’ve been preaching to those baby boomers who complain about “the kids these days” (my parents are those baby boomers). We are creating entire new platforms for success from our sheer ability to ‘consume more media than older people, and [we] are more open to adopting digital behaviours — and therefore more open to digital spending’. All the complaining that our phones are glued to our hands, and we are ruled by a digitally empowered world has been thwarted – we have converted this use to being able to multi task in different areas of media and adopt new consumption behaviours at an extremely fast rate. Lederer and Brownlow found that ‘there’s an almost perfect correlation between markets with more youthful populations and those with higher E&M growth’, thus suggesting that young people are leading the trends in the E&M market, particularly the digital media market.
I do wholeheartedly agree with this to an extent, but the idea of digital spending can come under some speculation when I have noticed that a lot of new technologies can be expensive, thus limiting our percentage of large amounts of ‘digital spending’. I know for a fact that where we want to consume this new digital media, it is such digital media expenses that sometimes inhibit us. When most things are available for free online in this torrenting age, why would I spend copious amounts of my precious money on such obtainable things?
I found Lederer and Brownlow’s findings extremely fascinating, especially in regard to the idea of tailoring content for younger audiences who do have increasingly shorter attention spans. I never considered this in realising that we are a generation who is inherently competent with media usage – consuming lots of media at once on numerous different platforms can also be our downfall if we don’t find a way to make our new content snappy but still well informed enough to be of use.