You are entering into a much more complicated territory there. The reason things like $90m TV shows and $200m movies get made is due to history. Solving distribution, getting things from point A to point B, was the hardest and most valuable problem to solve, bar none, for a century. It built empires. It made the publishing system that we're familiar with (and growing out of) possible.

You see, there is a problem with publishing media that relies upon popular reception. Popular reception is perfectly random. There aren't any trends to identify, and no element of the works themselves can be tailored to increase your chances of success with it. It's been extensively studied. The only way publishers are able to fund projects ahead of time that cost so much and still turn a profit on what is essentially a coin flip is because they control distribution. When a terrible flop hits the theaters, they can pull it immediately and replace it with another attempt. When a film finds success, they can keep it in theaters for ages, minimizing their losses and maximizing their gains. The public response to each work is still random, but since they control what is available at the box office, they can still find success.

Now that distribution is so simple a clever 12 year old can do global distribution in their spare time as a hobby, and the publishers don't have control over what options the audience has any more... they are destined to fall apart. It's not the content that made $90m shows possible, and no one remembers the $90m flops. That was entirely a matter of keeping the field of options limited and exercising control over distribution channels.

This isn't correct. $90 million TV shows exist because after a studio creates that show, they have the exclusive legal right to sell it to distribute that content. Otherwise, nothing stops Netflix from just taking Game of Thrones for free and putting it on their own platform.

I think you're side-stepping the issue. If no one is interested in watching the $90m show, it fails regardless of whether everyone or only one outlet can make it available. It has to have public popularity in order to even get to the starting line of there being some contention over which avenue through which it is distributed.

The actual outcomes of cheaper distribution have been realized as less equal outcomes: the biggest hits are bigger than ever, the rest are part of an ever-increasing undiscovered long tail.

Even though distribution is cheap, when the product is consumable entertainment, you are competing on the basis of marketing for people's attention, which is a scarce resource. Capital can buy up attention through a variety of means:

* A saturation advertising blitz around release(as was realized with 1989's Batman campaign, and repeated countless times since). Rather than just release the product with a standard press kit, go all out: advertise a pre-event event, like a panel at a fan convention. Make secondary products that serve as loss leaders, each one creating a new advertising hook.

* Bundling and cross-promotional tactics(buy this new graphics card and get a free game!). When you have a large sales organization, you can afford the time and resources to negotiate complex deals of this nature.

* The inflated production values are the product: Avatar was a hit because it was a big, expensive, technically advanced production, and there are only so many of those in the world. Although it is a huge risk, this is the modus operandi of Hollywood blockbusters, AAA games, and many live acts.

* Franchise marketing: Instead of just having a piece of media, build a collection of IP adaptable to many mediums and release products for all of them, building a new hook for the brand with each release. This gives the same kind of effect as a saturation campaign, but is playing a longer game, and aims to make each release solid and more than a tie-in(e.g. why is Avengers: Endgame a record breaking hit? It's because it's the capstone to a decade of Marvel movies that build up to this moment, all using a consistent style and maintaining a similar level of quality).

While it's true that you don't have a definite formula for success, the quality of the result is a thing you can control for in some degree just by hiring people with a track record(another avenue of capital: buy the visible superstars), and then providing them with this marketing infrastructure to work within.

So I don't see an escape from these tactics without a change in the rules of how to capture human attention. Brand building for pop culture is a hugely expensive exercise, and this has made for a market that fights tooth and claw to get a small promotional edge. But like with other lines of business, waves of opportunity come and go that allow new products to get through, and Game of Thrones is one such example of the wave of "prestige TV" that appeared around the end of last decade.

>Although it is a huge risk, this is the modus operandi of Hollywood blockbusters, AAA games, and many live acts.

Statistical analysis suggests it is really just the same risk as a small production: 50/50. For every Avatar, there is a Waterworld.

>While it's true that you don't have a definite formula for success, the quality of the result is a thing you can control for in some degree just by hiring people with a track record(another avenue of capital: buy the visible superstars), and then providing them with this marketing infrastructure to work within.

That, too, has been extensively studied. For every star-studded mega-hit, there is a star-studded mega-flop... and a mega-hit populated only by unknown first-time actors. Once you look at all the data, there really isn't anything you can do to budge the needle. Big stars will not increase your chances of success. Big budgets will not increase your chances of acclaim. The only studies that have shown actual predictive power before the release of a media property dealt with Tweets sent within 48 hours of the public release. And obviously, it is quite a bit too late at that point to make funding decisions. This fact isn't new, history is littered with tales that show that even those whose sole career it is to spot and publish successful works have horrendous track records. I just read last night that in the 1970s, the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was submitted over 200 times to publishers and once someone did agree to publish it, they expected to make no money on it. It almost instantly became the best-selling philosophy book of all time. Not even the most stellar hit can be spotted beforehand.

The book 'A Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives' has a couple chapters about this and I think explains it quite well. The main issue is that the audience is never the same. If a film hits the theater this week versus next week, the available audience is fundamentally just not the same people. Few people go to the theater every single week, so your ability to really nail the tastes of the audience of this weekend won't help you if you release the following weekend. They back this up with research, specifically including research about the factors you mentioned like star power, production budget, etc. The publishing industry has always been ruled by superstition because that's how human beings respond when put in a position of total randomness. They will say that certain publishing companies CEO is a 'tastemaker' and 'knows what the people want'... analysis, however, shows that the CEOs who had this reputation were actually benefitting from the success of projects started under the tenure of the prior CEO, then when the projects they themselves backed got made and didn't perform as well, they "hit a cold streak", left, then the next exec started getting credit for their later projects, and the cycle repeats itself. If you're in that industry and looking to make a career, it's hard to build upon an honest "well, I will roll the dice and hope for the best", so fanciful mythmaking is essentially encouraged.

I'm not aware of research specifically controlling for the random response of the public and examining the influence of marketing alone. It would be interesting to see. A battle for peoples attention is absolutely what it boils down to once the publishers lose control of distribution and can no longer meaningfully restrict what options the audience has which was always their primary means of ensuring a positive return despite random outcomes from each individual effort.

Game of Thrones is a pretty bad example to use. Year after year it is one of the most pirated shows out there, which HBO tacitly approves of. Far more people watch the show for free than actually pay for it, but HBO still indirectly benefits from this massive popularity.

https://theconversation.com/game-of-thrones-for-hbo-piracy-i...

Erm...I don't think Game of Thrones is what the OP is talking about. You're talking about entertainment, and GP is talking about "information" in the context that "Humanity as a whole benefits from free access to it". Is humanity benefiting from watching actors enact stage combat scenes with makeup and costumes?

I tend to agree with you on this specific example, but there's also plenty of work that IS good quality in my opinion that wouldn't get funded if the entity funding it didn't get exclusive access to distribute. I would say that the New York Times (or pick your favorite paper) is a good example of this. There's a good amount of quality writing that people don't get paid for out there, but funding things like investigative pieces that take months or years to research just doesn't happen much outside of well-funded newspapers that traditionally get that funding because they are the owners of the copyright, so if you want the info, you need to pay them.

> it's nonsense to argue that "there is no evidence that intellectual property in any way increases production of works"

Please, offer the evidence, then. As it is nonsense to claim otherwise, it should be easy to come with unambiguous peer-reviewed research on this. (I'm not actually holding my breath here. All evidence I have ever seen reduces to assuming that IP increases production of immaterial goods. I am happy to be proven wrong here.)

Sure, I'll quote the original source linked to above from economist David Levine (who makes the case against copyright):

"we find that France, where copyright is introduced, the number of composers per million increased substantially more than in other countries."

I'm cherry picking this quote, but then again, this entire book cherry-picks examples that work in their favor.

I'm not arguing that patent or copyright law are correct. I think the patent system in particular needs a lot of reform. And copyrights are way too long.

What I am arguing is that copyright (specifically, I'm not getting into patents) helps creators profit off of their work, and that profit motive induces people to create content in the first place, at least some of the time. I'll add that from a moral perspective, I think that if you write a book, Amazon shouldn't be able to copy your book and start selling it for free without reimbursing you. Economist Grew Mankiw notes that he spoke with the authors of the book linked to above and asked (I assume jokingly) if they would mind if he made copies of the book and sold them for a profit and the authors didn't feel that that would be fair within the current system.