Media Concentration and Culture: The Movie and Music Industry (It's effect on consumers)

Douglas Gommery wrote in his chapter, The Centrality of Media Economics, that media began and continues to function as an economic institution. Whether it should or should not is for us to contemplate on. Furthermore, Gomery pleaded for a study of changing conditions of quality and performance; simply listing who owns the media is not enough, but one needs to understand how a form of industrial structure leads to certain corporate conduct. In Bettig and Hall's Media Concentration and Culture: The Movie and Music industry, the authors note clearly that the Movie industry works as an oligopoly; limiting choices offered to consumers. In this post I'd like to share my views on the structure of Movie and Music industry, and how, I believe, it has been functioning on only the interest of the elites who own it, and not its consumers.
We are aware of the fact that an oligopoly only allows the large media conglomerates and accommodates only the super-rich. The control of the industry, then, is in the hands of a few elites who dictate how the industry shall be run. These include the Big Six, like Bettig and Hall mention, that include Warner Brothers, Disney, Fox, Paramount Pictures, Universal Pictures, and Sony. To illustrate the heightened level of their control over the whole industry, I'd like to post the incident between Paramount Picture and Variety magazine.
After Variety magazine published a rather harsh review of Paramount Picture's movie, Patriot Games, Paramount threatened to pull its advertisements from the Daily Variety magazine. Variety editors had to apologize to Paramount for the review and promised that the critic would no longer review Paramount Picture's films. This posed the question of corruption of the reviewing process, and the act of free speech.
A similar example shall be given in pertaining to intellectual property, which Bettig and Hall discuss later in the chapter in light of the Movie and Music industry. The example is of The Phanton Edit - an independent fan edit project taken up by Mike J. Nichols, where he attempted to edit George Lucas' The Phantom Menace. The intention of the project was to edit some elements of the original film and make a stronger version of it. The project received acclaim from media such as The NPR, PBS and BBC. George Lucas, however, disapproved of the project, warning fans that the edit was infringement. Hence, this limited the act of freedom of expression.
What you see above is what you'll expect from limited competition. An oligopoly structure is designed for the best interest of the owners and not the consumers. U.S Bureau of Labor in 1998 conducted a statistic which showed that consumer's out of pocket expenses for entertainment and reading materials is roughly equal to that of health care. When the Movie and Music industry will be aware of stats such as this, why wouldn't they try to take maximum advantage of it. Overpriced movie tickets, limited choices and movies of debatable quality are characteristics of an industry that functions under an oligopoly.

Maddy G.