Where next for the generation that grew up without paying for their entertainment?
By David Hepworth – this piece first appeared in the August 2009 issue of The Word Magazine
The music industry knows it already. The newspaper industry suspects it. The BBC fears it. The thing that keeps them all awake at night is the dawning realisation that a generation is coming to maturity who want the things they provide but has no intention of paying for them.
Teenagers are just as keen on The Ting Tings as you might have been on The Stone Roses at their age. What makes them different from your generation is that they’ve grown up with virtual juke boxes like YouTube at their fingertips. They haven’t once needed to reach for even a single thin coin to access the music of their choice.
Students want a newspaper just as much as you did but given the choice between a broadsheet which costs the best part of a quid and a bunch of yesterday’s press releases wrapped in a picture of Lindsay Lohan, thrust into their hands at a travel point at a cost of precisely nothing, they will take the latter every time.
For all its efforts to ensure that its programming has the requisite “edginess”, the BBC finds the amount of time young people spend watching its TV output is dropping steadily. This is going to make the licence fee an even more difficult sell when these people become law-abiding householders. And it won’t be much use pointing out the riches of the BBC’s web activities because these same people have grown up believing that there is nothing that cannot be banished from their life with just one click and then replaced with another just as easily.
It’s not surprising they feel that way. They have grown up in the waning years of a boom during which cheap credit and irrational optimism combined to shower them with information and entertainment that has been either free or paid for by someone other than the end-user. This has allowed them to preserve their cash for the things they remain happy to shell out on: alcohol and phones.
The music business (and by that I mean your personal favourite rock star, not some mythical “suit”) is reacting to the fact that the few records it can sell are 50% cheaper than they were ten years ago by jacking up the price of concert tickets. They’ll bumble through the current upheaval because music is less a business than a lifestyle and most of its hardcore practitioners wouldn’t know how to live any other way. Over at the harder-nosed end of things Rupert Murdoch is talking about making some of his company’s websites only available to people who will pay. If he manages it the other publishers will do the same because they all know that the vision of an advertiser-funded digital future disappeared with Lehmann Brothers. The people who put their faith in yet to be specified “new models” will, like 7th-Day Adventists, have to wait. You would be amazed how many of these transformational companies have got their fingers crossed hoping they will be bought by a rich, clueless uncle. I love Spotify but can’t help thinking that the day it gets enough advertising to pay for it it will have too many ads for us to want to listen to it.
I sympathise with companies trying to find a way to arrive at an honest price for what people have been allowed to get for free. As an independent operator in the world of ink, I would, wouldn’t I? The people I have no time for are the users who believe they will always be able to get by, their information needs met by Google News or the Metro, music piped into their homes courtesy of Spotify, TV and radio entertainment provided in perpetuity out of a licence fee that doesn’t get any bigger, with no need for local news and a belief that specialist information needs will be met by internet forums and blogs. Recent research by a journalism foundation at Harvard indicated a strange disconnect between the things the young audience valued and their willingness to pay for it. They lived on Facebook but wouldn’t dream of paying for it. They thought it was important that there was such a thing as serious journalism but couldn’t imagine supporting it out of their own pocket. If maturity is the realisation of consequences then maturity is being postponed indefinitely.
Given attitudes like these you wonder if in the near future there will be Two Nations. The Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay majority will be content with a digital version of a free newspaper while a small reading public will actually pay more money to access the old fashioned, in-depth newspaper experience, which will no longer be available on line. It’ll be like the days when the informed classes spoke Latin or French. I blogged about this very subject recently. Among the feedback I got was an observation from an education professional. He said he had been talking recently to some bright students. They found their information needs could be met by five headlines from the Yahoo homepage and took it as an article of faith that they didn’t pay for anything online except role-playing games. What were they studying? Politics, Philosophy and Economics. I might add they’re probably not studying it enough.
