Derivative Media

How Wall Street Devours Culture

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by Andrew Dewaard

Type

Essays

Subject

Economics

Keywords

economics

Publishing date

2024

Publisher

University of California Press

Language

English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Paperback • 282 pages
6 x 9 inches (15 x 23 cm)

ISBN

978-0-520-39247-2

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Book Presentation:
Sequels, reboots, franchises, and songs that remake old songs—does it feel like everything new in popular culture is just derivative of something old? Contrary to popular belief, the reason is not audiences or marketing, but Wall Street. In this book, Andrew deWaard shows how the financial sector is dismantling the creative capacity of cultural industries by upwardly redistributing wealth, consolidating corporate media, harming creative labor, and restricting our collective media culture. Moreover, financialization is transforming the very character of our mediascapes for branded transactions. Our media are increasingly shaped by the profit-extraction techniques of hedge funds, asset managers, venture capitalists, private equity firms, and derivatives traders. Illustrated with examples drawn from popular culture, Derivative Media offers readers the critical financial literacy necessary to understand the destructive financialization of film, television, and popular music—and provides a plan to reverse this dire threat to culture.

About the Author:
Andrew deWaard is Assistant Professor of Media and Popular Culture at the University of California, San Diego, and coauthor of The Cinema of Steven Soderbergh: Indie Sex, Corporate Lies, and Digital Videotape.

Press Reviews:
"The thoughtful and thought-provoking chapters of Derivative Media feel like cave paintings that future generations will read long after we've perished in the flames of greed. A must-read for anyone working in the arts wanting to help humanity change course quickly!"—Martin Starr, actor, Freaks and Geeks and Silicon Valley

"Broadly accessible to readers inside and outside the academy, Derivative Media should be the go-to account of our contemporary financialized culture. Andrew deWaard puts it all in place: the new economics, the private equity players, the dominant talent agencies, the hot studios, the crucial artists, the blockbusters, and the earworms. The insights and concepts in this book will reshape media studies and give activists new tools to understand the dynamics of the now."—J. D. Connor, author of Hollywood Math and Aftermath: The Economic Image and the Digital Recession

"DeWaard has written an incisive, brilliant analysis of twenty-first-century capital, media, and power. Derivative Media is a tour-de-force breakdown of financialization in the culture industries, and essential reading for scholars and creative workers alike."—Jennifer Holt, author of Empires of Entertainment: Media Industries and the Politics of Deregulation, 1980–1996

"Elegantly explains the pervasive and destructive role of finance capital in media industries. If you care about media, this book is essential reading: a generational advance in the political economy of communication. I have been waiting for a book like this."—Jonathan Sterne, author of MP3: The Meaning of a Format

"In this compelling and captivating breakthrough study, deWaard assesses the financial forces that are reshaping popular entertainment in the new millennium. And he supports his analysis with data crunching and graphics that put his research in a class by itself."—Thomas Schatz, author of The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era
"A tour-de-force synthesis of critical, qualitative, and quantitative research, that offers a frightening look at the calculated but opaque ways that shadow banking, hedge funds, and private equity buy firms using debt to overleverage music, media, and film studios. The sobering takeaway: all of a media text's intertextual references are rendered as fungible assets, as interchangeable goods that can be leveraged in a culture-to-capital stock exchange. Who knew our prized twenty-first-century vanguard forms could align this seamlessly with Wall Street's creator-killing profit schemes?"—John Thornton Caldwell, author of Specworld: Folds, Faults, and Fractures in Embedded Creator Industries

"DeWaard provides not only a vital accounting of the ways that private equity has inserted itself into media and entertainment industries over the last decade, but also a means of thinking through its influence in board rooms, on working conditions, and on the content being produced. Derivative Media puts into context how and why these processes have developed and charts a pathway of resistance."—Peter Labuza, Researcher, International Cinematographers Guild, IATSE Local 600

See the publisher website: University of California Press