The Sky Is Rising 2024 Edition: Rather Than Destroying Culture, The Internet Has Saved The Content Industries

Read the latest edition of The Sky Is Rising at The Copia Institute »

Twelve years ago, we released our very first research report, the Sky is Rising. Back then, in 2012, the commonly accepted wisdom was that the internet was killing various creative industries, from the music industry (especially!) to movies, TV, and books among other things. This didn’t seem to match with the world that we were seeing, so we dug into all the data (and, wherever possible, sought to use the industry’s own numbers) and found that while some industries were struggling to adapt to the internet, the data actually showed that the sky was rising, not falling.

We found that more content than ever before was being created (though not all through traditional channels). We found that people were engaging with more content than ever before. And, contrary to the narrative spun by some legacy industries, we saw that people were more than willing to spend money on content. They were just focused on having it be convenient and accessible where they wanted it to be.

Over the years with support from CCIA, we released additional editions of the Sky is Rising report via our think tank The Copia Institute, but our last one was five years ago in 2019, before the COVID pandemic. Last year we set out to revisit not just the data, but the structure of the whole report. The process took almost the entire year, but we’re excited to release our latest edition of The Sky is Rising.

In the original report, a decade ago, we were focused just on countering the misleading narrative that the internet was killing the creative industries. Not only is that myth dead and buried, the latest report suggests quite the opposite: that the internet has saved those industries and basically become the lifeblood of all creative industries.

Throughout the report what we saw time and time again is that the growth in these industries is happening because of the internet. It’s making it easier than ever to create, to share, to distribute, to promote, to sell, and to engage. Creativity is thriving, and much of it is entirely due to the internet.

Indeed, we saw this most directly in industries most heavily impacted by COVID. One of our concerns going into this report was looking at how the pandemic impacted things, and the data certainly confirmed that some industries had huge problems: namely live music and movie theaters. But, in both cases, the amazing thing that the data showed was how the internet rushed in to fill the void, providing new ways to experience content that traditionally had required performance spaces, helping to tide things over during the periods of lockdowns, and then easing the rebound after lockdowns loosened.

The internet helped spare those industries, and helped billions of people around the globe continue to engage with and experience wonderful art, even in the midst of a global pandemic.

Over and over again we saw examples of the internet helping these industries out. The most stark and clear example is the recording industry (which, as a reminder, is just one segment of the music industry). This was always Exhibit A for an industry supposedly being destroyed by the internet. Except, just as we saw, with the ability to create more music, distribute it, and enable more convenient access to everyone, the business models have sorted themselves out, and now the internet is responsible for the industry reaching new highs.

On the video side of things, while COVID took a huge bite out of the box office, when lumped together with digital streaming, the larger market for video basically has continued to grow.

For what it’s worth, that chart highlights a change we made with this year’s report. Ever since the original edition, we had been combining movies and TV into a single “video” section. This turned out to be prescient as the line between movies and TV started to blur quite a bit during the streaming era. As we were putting together this year’s report, we started to lean in on this thinking, and we retitled the sections and expanded a few. In the old reports, we covered Music, Video, Books, and Video Games. This year, we have switched it to the activity involved: Listening, Watching, Reading, and Playing. This allowed us to expand some of these categories, and slot in some newer things like TikTok videos, digital magazines, and podcasts.

Also, we’ve added a “mini-chapter’ on AI. We’re way too early into the generative AI world to have that much data on what it means for creativity and the creative industries. However, from what we’re seeing, it feels like “generative AI” is taking on the misleading role that “the internet” had in the early 2000s, of a new technology that some are predicting will destroy certain industries. And, while it’s early, what we’re seeing is (again) quite the opposite. AI has all the makings of an incredible tool to help people be even more creative and to create more wonderful works that people will enjoy.

There’s a lot more in the full report, which weighs in at 80 pages, chock full of details, charts, and graphs. But the key takeaway from it should be that the story from the early 2000s about how the internet was going to kill the creative industries and creators was not only wrong, it had everything backwards. The internet has been a huge boost to the creative industries, opening up new ways for people to create, to distribute, and to engage with content of all kinds.

The sky is truly rising, not falling. And, we should keep that in mind as we live through yet another apparent moral panic about the next “threat” to these industries.

Read the latest edition of The Sky Is Rising at The Copia Institute »