The Death of the Entertainment Industry

Five years ago, I decided to give up my well paying career as an apartment manager to pursue my dream; making movies, writing and working on music. More and more I realize, I dedicated my life to the pursuit of a slowly growing funeral march.

The entertainment industry is dying a slow death and I got in right as it went on life support.

With a ton of new media outlets out there, you would think that there would be a larger market for people to purchase music, movies, TV, and writing. I thought so…

As I type this, there is a growing cacophony of yelling and honking horns outside my little window from a mob of striking Writer’s Guild of America writers and their supporters. I’m glancing through Rolling Stone magazine, which tells me of more disappointing sales of music, so much so that Best Buy and other large market music vendors are cutting back store space to music, so much so that places like Target might not even have music in their stores in a couple years. Tower Records, my former employer from college, has already gone out of business and many other record stores are following suit.

But that’s not all…

Their appears to be no end in sight for the writers guild strike, both sides are that far apart.

TV will soon be dominated by more and more ‘reality’ shows, because that’s the only thing that can go on TV without writers. Goodbye new season of "Lost", hello “Who wants to fuck a millionaire.”

Both the Director’s Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild contracts are coming up in July, leading to possibly to another massive set of strikes.

The internet has led attention spans to be peanut size, any more content than a couple of minutes equals yawns from the new generation of kids.

And finally the worst- Revenue from all media is down every year for the past couple of years.

All of this is happening as I’m getting closer to the end of my tenure here at the Warner Bros. I’m going to have to find another job soon. Where? How? With whom?

Then there is my whole 'career' as a writer/director. I have scripts that I want to start selling. That can’t happen until after the strike.

Plus, I have a short movie that I'm working on that at this rate is never going to get finished.

Now, I sit here wondering why I did this? I know I didn’t expect to make a fortune getting into this industry, at least I didn’t care if I did. But I want to be able to support myself. I have a huge student loan payment to make every month from my investment in my movie making education. I’d like to start a family at some point. I’d like to be able to go a month without asking my mom for money to support my life in Hollywood.

I guess I did it for the love of all things media. But just like a marriage that happened for the wrong reasons, I’m falling out of love for this entire industry and the fickle tastes of the American Public.

Now if I could just get my old job back managing apartments…