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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.
"Recommended."
"Centralization has allowed streaming platforms to consolidate cultural power on an enormous scale. . . . Derivative Media explore[s] the consequences of these technological intermediaries for the music, film, and television industries."
"Mixing aesthetic and political-economic critique, deWaard’s work is a mind-bending contribution to whatever is left of public-humanities criticism."
"deWaard’s book phenomenally illustrates the top-down organogram of the corporate culture industry and analyzes the marginalization of workers. . . . This book makes us rethink how we see cultural products and their political economy.”
"Derivative Media is an insightful analysis of the relationship between contemporary capital, media, and power. For these reasons, the book should be of interest to scholars and laypeople alike."
“More than simply relying on trades, deWaard turns to quarterly earnings reports and anonymous interviews to understand this critical signal crisis. To call deWaard’s text essential would be an understatement.”