Mass audiences aren’t very mass anymore

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BY L. KENT WOLGAMOTT / Lincoln Journal Star

In the 1940s, more than half of all Americans went to the movies at least once week. In the ’50s and ’60s, the most popular television shows were seen in more than half the households in the country.

Today, despite unceasing hype and advertising, an average week sees around 10 percent of us going to the movie theaters. And the most popular TV shows also have a rating around 10.

Following the same pattern, radio station audiences have condensed to where the top station in any mid-sized or larger market rarely gets above 10 percent of the listening audience. And concert attendance is also in a decline.

The mass audience in the United States is splintering and dividing into ever more specialized and personalized niches.

That’s why only one record, Usher’s “Confessions,” sold more than 7 million copies last year. The rest of the Top 10 for 2004 all sold less than 4 million each and included recordings by rapper Eminem, country singers Kenny Chesney and Gretchen Wilson, pop band Maroon 5 and rockers Evanescence.

On one hand, the splintering and condensing is the almost inevitable outcome of an historical trend that began with the rise of the movies in the ’20s and ’30s. On the other, it is hard to guess what will happen with the new, smaller audiences.

“The overriding tendency in the U.S. through the 20th century has been toward greater individual autonomy,” retired University of Nebraska-Lincoln journalism professor Michael Stricklin wrote in an e-mail interview. “The big idea is that individual autonomy, in reading, listening, viewing, buying, etc., has outrun the community’s ability to cope. This means mass audiences aren’t very mass anymore.”

Movies became the first mass entertainment medium in the first three decades of the 20th century. The fledgling movie business started in the first decade of the century. In the teens, most of the major movie studios were founded. By the ’20s, those studios had begun to firmly establish the production and distribution systems in which they controlled everything from making the movies to the theaters in which they were shown.

That system enabled the studios to keep costs under control. All the actors were under contract rather than making huge amounts per picture, and studios churned out films to entertain an ever-increasing broad audience. That meant a night at the movies included a cartoon, a short feature or newsreel, a B-movie and then the feature.

In 1947, the peak of the studio system, 90 million Americans out of a population of 151 million went to the movies each week, according to “The Big Picture,” a book on the changing economics of Hollywood by Edward Jay Epstein. That figure represented 60 percent of the population, who bought a total of 4.7 billion tickets that year.

In an average week in 2003, less than 12 percent of Americans bought movie tickets. The total number of tickets sold in the U.S. in 2003: 1.57 billion.

That downward spiral has become the subject of much media attention.  Summer 2005 was a huge box office disappointment. According to box office tracker Exhibitor Relations, this summer’s $3.6 billion total is down 9 percent from 2004. Even worse, attendance slumped by 12 percent.

In part, the 2005 summer slump is a result of mediocre product.

“Nothing’s getting through the clutter,” said Bill Barstow of Main Street Theaters, which operates theaters in Fremont, Plattsmouth, Nebraska City and Sioux City, Iowa. “People have been bombarded with stuff, and Hollywood is getting caught up in that. Everything is just so fragmented. But I honestly believe if there’s something compelling, they’ll come back in a big way.”

Beyond Hollywood’s lack of creativity, the movies have been hit through the decades by a series of technological advances that altered the way Americans receive entertainment programming.

The first and most important of those advances was the rise of television after World War II.

“The perfection of national radio and television distribution systems led to national mass audiences,” wrote Stricklin, who has studied audiences throughout his career. “That, not coincidentally, was accompanied by national branding for canned food, health and beauty products, automobiles, electronic appliances, clothes and on and on. Until there were national mass media, there had been no national advertising as we think of that term. Brands were regional.”

With a more mobile population, a better, more efficient transportation system for food, goods and services, the growth of suburbia and the decline of regional brands, the media became the “glue” that held the nation together, creating a broad community across the country.

In 1957, “The Ed Sullivan Show” averaged a 50.4 rating, with more than half of all households with televisions watching the program. In the ’60s, westerns “Gunsmoke”and “Wagon Train” regularly drew half of all viewers.

Even as late as the ’70s, “All in the Family” averaged a 23.1 rating for its entire run.

That stands in sharp contrast to today’s TV viewership.

On Oct. 23, for example, “Desperate Housewives” had a 10.9 rating, “dominating” its Sunday night timeslot.

The decline in broadcast TV ratings is most attributable to the rise of cable television, which began in the ’50s, got traction in the ’70s and became a mature delivery system in the ’80s and early ’90s. No cable audiences are larger than those for broadcast, but with the addition of each cable network a little part of the broadcast audience has been chipped away.

The presence of the television monitor in nearly every home created two other factors in the decline of the broad television audience.

Home video, introduced in the late ’70s and early ’80s, eroded the theatrical movie audience as well.  Watching movies at home is now a national entertainment staple. In the last few years, DVD sales and rentals have gone through the roof.

Worldwide DVD sales totaled nearly $5.3 billion in the first three months of 2005, a 28 percent increase over the previous year. DVD rentals increased by 51 percent.

In fact, home video and other auxiliary sales (per-per-view, pay cable, network TV and basic cable TV) have become the profit center for movie studios.

According to Epstein’s figures, in 2003, the six major studios spent $11.5 billion to produce, publicize and distribute 80 films under their names and spent another $6.7 billion on 105 films from their “independent” subsidiaries, such as Miramax and New Line.

The studios recovered just $6.4 billion from their share of world box office, leaving them $11 billion in the red after their movies had completed their theatrical runs. But they more than made up that $11 billion gap on DVD sales, which totalled $33 billion worldwide in 2003.

So theatrical runs of movie are really now loss leaders for the studios. “Studios nowadays almost always lose money on current production,” Frank Biondi, former studio chief at both Universal and Paramount, told Epstein in “The Big Picture.”

Taking advantage of the millions of dollars spent on advertising for the theatrical release of a movie and any word of mouth generated by the picture is a primary reason studios have shortened the “window” between the time a movie is in theaters and its DVD release. That, theater owners say, has also contributed to the continuing decline at the box office.

Another factor in the erosion of the movie and television audiences is the rise of video games. Once viewed as a very limited market by the entertainment conglomerates, video game sales, including consoles, software and accessories, are now greater than movie box office receipts.

Personal entertainment isn’t immune from the splintering now going on. Just ask those in the music business.

In 1982, Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” raced to the top of the Billboard charts and stayed there for an unprecedented 37 weeks. It ultimately sold a record 25 million copies.

Two years later, Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” was the dominant album in America, selling 15 million copies.

Last year, Usher’s “Confessions” topped the album sales list at 7.9 million. No other album sold more than 4 million copies.

Why the decline? Most in the music biz blame downloading of music on the internet for the sales drop.

The rise of the internet has also hurt movie and television audiences and is expected to continue to do so.

The splintering of the music audience can also be seen in live performances. According to Pollstar, the concert industry magazine, and Web sites, the top 100 tours this year generated  $730.9 million in gross receipts, down by 17.2 percent from 2004.

“In terms of anything new, you’re definitely not getting cross over,” said Phil Potter, events manager at Pershing Center. “When you’re offered a show, you have to look at it as a finite market. You have to research to that market and market to that market. You can no longer go to a couple radio stations and the newspaper and be good. There are some markets that are internet markets, some markets that are poster markets. … It means you have to work harder to sell tickets.”

Part of the reason marketing music on a couple of radio stations no longer works is the splintering and condensing of radio markets.

In 1984, KFRX dominated the annual Arbitron survey of the Lincoln market, garnering a 16.5 share. Its closest competitor, the now defunct rock station KFMQ, got a 12 share.

In the Arbitron survey conducted this spring, KFRX again topped local ratings. But in 2005 the contemporary hits station led the pack with a 7.2 share. Five stations were within one share point of KFRX.

The other part of the equation has to do with the artists and bands now being pushed by music companies and concert promoters.

“A lot of the artists these days are not talented enough to write, perform and cross over,” Potter said. “The Stones or Springsteen had the talent to cross over. Eminem has the talent to do one thing and he does it well. But he’s never going to cross over.”

Other, more manufactured acts, such as Britney Spears and the plethora of boy bands that dominated pop music in the late ’90s, didn’t have the talent to attract a wide audience, Potter said.

That doesn’t mean that they were unknown to 90 percent of the population, however. Today’s media saturated culture provides visibility, if not popularity.

“Look at ‘American Chopper,’” Barstow said of the Discovery Channel program. “It doesn’t get much for ratings. But everybody knows what it is and what it is about.”

But true “American Chopper” fans are a niche, maybe a million or so people in a country of 300 million.

That continual dividing of the mass audience has accelerated in the internet era, with people delving deeply into their areas of interest and connecting online with others who share that interest.

But Stricklin, who now lives and teaches in Teresina, Brazil, warns that for all of its “communities” the internet will never be a substitute for a mass media that brought together a large community.

“For certain, blogs cannot hold a community together, no way,” Stricklin wrote. “Nor can fringe-audience movies, a zillion music formats, R-rated video games and the like.”

That Stricklin warning bodes ill for more than just the mass media conglomerates who are scrambling to find ways to continue to make billions off their products. In the end, communities and individuals are likely to suffer, too.

“Media that was founded in the belief that communities were undying and local as social institutions, that were developed to attract and sustain those communities, are withering because, as Gertrude Stein observed about her home town of Oakland, Calif., ‘There’s no there there,’” Stricklin wrote. “She was not being cynical. She was just about 70 years ahead of her time.”

Reach L. Kent Wolgamott at 473-7244 or kwolgamott@journalstar.com.