Understanding the Business of Entertainment

Introduction

Back in the nineteenth century, when a handful of scientists were quietly discovering something they called electricity, the world’s storytellers were doing pretty much what they had been doing for centuries. Talented people wrote plays or books or musical compositions, or entertained by telling stories at public gatherings. Entertainment was, for the most part, produced and consumed within narrow geographical boundaries. There was no television, no radio, no broadcasting of any kind. There were no movies, no DVDS, no records, no CDs, no internet, no computers.

There was no mass entertainment business.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, things rapidly changed. New technologies radically affected how content could be created ...