We're a small part of this ecosystem. When we go to a school and talk about investment banking, they are these monster financial conglomerates, and so we end up in the same pot. That is still an issue for us.
I guess the difference between the Korean hip-hop scene and the American hip-hop scene is that in the American hip-hop scene, you know, they have their Jay-Zs. They can become conglomerates through hip-hop. In Korea, it doesn't happen.
You hear a lot of dialogue on the death of the American family. Families aren't dying. They're merging into big conglomerates.
The very first words that we, the American nation, spoke were right here in Philadelphia. You know those words: "We the people. " It wasn't, "We the conglomerates. " It wasn't, "We the corporations. " It was, "We the people.
The future of publishing lies with the small and medium-sized presses, because the big publishers in New York are all part of huge conglomerates.
Audiences, as they get smaller, can intensify their relationship with the product, and so can the creative relationship with the people that you are serving. The good news is that, the more shows there are, the less the conglomerates have to gain by breaking the will of each individual creative.
Today's baseball players are walking conglomerates. They have fantastic salaries, multiple investments, but we had one thing they don't have today, the train ride. We didn't always like it, but those rides kept us close as a team and as friends. Something you can't get on a two hour plane ride that used to take you fifteen hours on a train.
We are moving rapidly from an era of an oligopoly of content providers to an oligopoly of content controllers: new choke points. This is not media consolidation in the traditional sense, where a few huge conglomerates used economies of scale to dominate journalism by dominating the local and national agendas. This consolidation, to a very few companies plus increasing government intervention, is even more dangerous — and information providers of all kinds are finally starting to grasp what’s happening.
