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At the end of the 2007 NBA Finals I wrote about the death of professional sports. Realizing how out of control the situation was becoming, ESPN had a feature to recap 2007 called "Cheatwave" which basically highlighted how every sport is heavily involved in cheating and the integrity of these various games is in question.
Basketball - refs that cheat and still to this day affect games that they should just be regulating not deciding the ultimate impact with the most notable example of this reoccurance happening when the Lakers lost to the Cavs (not the last time they played, but the time before that) where a bogus foul on D. Fish made it so that the Lakers didn't get a chance to tie the game with less than 10 seconds left and instead were forced to loose by 4 points. Football- Steroids and filming other people's plays before you even play them. The commissioner of the sport got all the evidence regarding "Spygate" and decided that it was so damning he had all the tapes destroyed. Now a Senator is calling out le Commish to figure out why he would destroy the tapes, while conversely everyone wonders why the CIA is allowed to destroy their interrogation tapes. Baseball - Steroids and turning the other way to ignore it. Players heads growing multiple hat sizes past the age of 35 and used syringes found lying around the dugouts BUT for years. Now this entire generation of players is dealing with the public's indecision to allow only some of the "clean" players into the Hall of Fame (HOF) or allow all of them into it but with asterisks marking this low point in the sport. Ratings are at an all time low, similar to post-strike baseball, except there won't be a homerun chase between two juiced players to kick start the ratings again (see McGuire vs Sosa).
Hockey - Lowest ratings ever for one of the "main" professional sports with Stanley Cup ratings lower than an out door Beach Volleyball tourny. Wow. Didn't learn from baseball's mistake, went on strike and essentially killed the entire sport in less than a year by destroying all the goodwill they had built up with their fan base. This entire sport is just moments away from having to declare bankruptcy.
But so what? Who cares? Isn't this supposed to be an entertainment website? To which I reply, that is exactly what it is and anyone who doesn't realize the similarities happening to the entertainment industry same as the sports world is doomed to repeat it.
Ratings are at all time lows across the board for movies, TV, and especially music.
Movies - Less people are going to movies, which continue to increase prices to counter this trend when not even realizing that the product on the screen is of such low-quality that the movie going public has become too wise to be tricked into seeing that first weekend. Less people are willing to see a movie like Hot Rod in the first week and instead hold back. Then they are rewarded for said smart behavior by their friends who were dumb enough to go see it and tell them how shitty it really is. First weeks are still huge for most movies, but if you don't hit those first weekend numbers then its become obvious that unless the movie is actually good, you won't hit those numbers. In fact, even if a movie is good you still might not hit those numbers as movie goers would rather rent it for cheaper and in the comfort of their own home or (gulp) watch it on the internet the day it comes out anyways. Just 5 years ago, the average life span of movies in a theater was about 8 to 10 weeks. Now the average life span is less than 6 weeks, including some that are gone in just 3 weeks, especially in a hot market like LA, Chicago, NYC and Miami.
TV - While TV numbers overall are down, crazy shows like Idol still rake in 20+MM viewers a week. But how do those shows stay on? Commercials and the viewing of those has gone down so drastically that Nielsen's is still trying to figure out a more accurate way to calculate who is actually viewing the commercials, which is more important, than who is actually watching the show. With the on-going writer's strike (rumored to end this week) making for increased amounts of lower-quality programming (see Kid Nation and other horrible reality shows) viewers have decided to move on from broadcast television and instead are now watching shows on the internet or various clips on sites like Youtube or Funny or Die. With the death of regular TV's being replaced by HDTV at the end of this year, the current death of regular DVD and even HD DVD, why keep buying more stuff when you don't have to buy anything and can watch it WHENEVER you want, with NO commercials and watch it WHERE EVER you want. Unless Slingbox gets more popular I don't see how TV's will continue to be in every house hold along with microwaves. My friends, I introduce you to the microwave, an invention that could potentially outlast the TV. Wow.
Music - My friend is a tour bus driver currently on tour with Soulja Boy, the self-proclaimed number 1 rapper in the business right now. This is hilarious for so many reasons such as the simple way that Soulja Boy revealed his discovery (serious paraphrasing here), "I'm lookin' at the list of top 10 songs and I'm thinkin' to myself, hey, this ain't addin' up. I see this list and I'm thinkin', hey, I should be numba 1." While this is nothing new what is insanely new, and really just insane, is the fact that Soulja Boy doesn't even have an album out. When he performs, he constantly is boo'ed off stage by the crowd because his act is horrible (only 3 songs, 15 minutes long) and he isn't a very good performer/showman. Wait a minute, what? The number 1 artist right now doesn't even have an album out and is "on tour" with his 15 minute long, 3 song bomb squad? Yes!
He has the number 1 ringtone of all time and those are $3 each. A few years ago Eminem sold only 6MM records and we thought that was bad but now you have artists not even selling records anymore, just ringtones. Artists generally aren't even making any money these days unless they tour and now labels only get behind an artist for one album then they prefer to let them "quietly die" so that they can create the next new artist to milk for profit. Why do they do this? Because you make more money off a Soulja Boy then you do over a DRE who has been in the industry and can actually negotiate for more clout and points on his songs/tour. With all these factors, it is becoming much more obvious that the music industry has been dying for a few years now so everyone involved in music is currently in crisis mode which equates to - make as much money as you possibly can while we still can before this little sugar mill runs dry.
Basically, this is the current money making equation regarding artists and their music:
1) Come out with a hot single
2) Release it
3) Go on tour and milk the shit out of it while it's still hot
4) Release a follow-up dud album and land on TMZ for the rest of your life as that guy who came out with that one hot single a few summers ago.
When I moved to Los Angeles to get involved in the entertainment business the structure and formats had been set for decades. After having been out here for less than six years, I have personally seen all of the profit formats get flipped on their head. On a daily basis from my tracking boards, I read about deals being pulled, payroll companies declaring bankruptcy, friends getting fired, ideas being stolen - everything I used to read about before. But what HAS changed is the much more frequent reports I come across that debate whether movies even make money and the growing amount of numerical support that is stating, actually, not anymore.
Mark Weathers
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Mentioned on Henry Abbott's blog - TrueHoop - Tuesday Feb 5th on ESPN.com "Dan Steinberg of the D.C. Sports Bog asks Carmen Electra, and various celebrities, and playmates and stuff why there are so many celebrities and playmates and stuff hanging around the Super Bowl. He asks them what questions he should ask them. It's kind of hilarious and certainly post-modern. He even gets a hug from that lead singer of Sugar Ray. I can't think of any way this is really about basketball, but you should watch it anyway. Here's an unrelated blog post about the death of the entertainment industry. If I had a team of graduate students, I would assign them to write papers explaining the connection between these two blog posts." http://myespn.go.com/blogs/truehoop/0-30-15/Tuesday-Bullets.html
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