A Brief History of the Television Industry (as it pertains to me and my career) 


I've had more than a few responses to my last blog entry saying things like "don't give up hope" and "it'll all be okay". I felt that I should maybe provide a little of the background behind my thoughts. 

So... here I find myself in 2006 as a TV composer with his career apparently waning. Am I upset about this? Well, yes and no. The important part, though, is the "no" bit, so here's the explanation why:

1982: The birth of cable TV.

Actually, cable TV was born before that. I remember something called the "Z Channel" back in the 70's, but it was extremely limited and had essentially no impact on the television market. However, 1982 was a breakthrough year. Now I might have my dates wrong, so cut me a little slack, but I remember when MTV hit the air, and I'm pretty sure I was 14. The channel only played music videos, and that was back in the days when The Police, Human League, Spandau Ballet, Peter Gabriel's "Shock the Monkey", and Flock of Seagulls ruled the airwaves. Ah, good days indeed (when you look at the late onslaught of rap that was to follow). Along with MTV came, as I recall, ESPN and CNN. These were indeed exciting times--24 hours a day of whatever niche programming you were looking for. Shortly after that, HBO, Cinemax, and Showtime began gaining ground, too.

This was not good news for the networks who slowly started seeing their revenues from advertising begin defecting to these niche channels. Want to sell beer? Well where better to do it than ESPN? Selling a financial periodical? Hit up CNN. This slow erosion continued into the mid-80's until...

... the dot-com boom! Suddenly, there were multi-million dollar internet start-ups with more money than sense and a desire to hit the mainstream. They wanted, more than anything, product recognition. (Funny, really, 'cause they didn't actually have a product to sell, as such.) I think the best case-in-point is Monster.com. I can't remember the year, exactly, but I do remember the ad--a series of kids saying things like "when I grow up, I want to be underpaid and under-appreciated" and "I want to be a cog in the machine and suck up to the man". The company, apparently, gambled its very existence on this ad that it paid $1 million to run during the Superbowl. (If I weren't so lazy, I could look it up and tell you when exactly. This is a blog, though, so screw that.) The ad spots that they bought paid off so well that just several years later (again, too lazy to do the research), the Superbowl was the Monster.com Superbowl (taking over, I believe, from FedEx). A blimp in the air, their logo on the field--the whole nine (or in this case, 100) yards. Good for them. Capitalism rules!

The networks suddenly had few worries. Advertising dollars were flooding in like javascript cookies to your hard drive, and the good times seemed like they would never end... until...

... the dot-com bust! We all remember it. Start-up companies quickly became belly-up companies, and the investment capital in ThingsForYourDogToWear.com and ThePepperCornStore.com dried up. These were dire times for internet entrepreneurs (and there were a lot of them). The frenzy known as the "Internet Super-Highway" (begun by Al Gore, I believe) came crashing down like the Windows OS. Very quickly, the ad revenues that had staved off the competition from cable competitors started dwindling again, and the networks were back where they had been about a decade earlier.

In economic terms, I think this is called something like "restructuring of the market" or even "market forces at work". Needless to say, the networks started eyeing their cost versus profit margins, and they weren't happy. At this point, cable had grown considerably with multiple 24 hour news channels, multiple ESPN's, MTV's, and even Nickelodeon's. Want to hawk your sugar cereal? You know where the kids are watching! Where there had been a handful of competing cable channels, there now were hundreds.

It was around about this time that I really entered the TV market. The year was 1997, and I got a little show for Nickelodeon called "The Journey of Allen Strange". The networks might have been suffering, but I was doing okay. Over the course of the following five years, my business grew to the point where, concurrently, I was writing the music for "The Journey of Allen Strange", "The Jersey" (Disney Channel), "100 Deeds for Eddie McDowd" (Nickelodeon), "Just Deal" (NBC), "Beyond Chance" (Lifetime Network), and a slew of shows for the History channel. It was early 2001, and life was certainly good. The networks, of course, were still suffering and this continued until...

"World Trade Centre: Attack on America". The three networks ran that story for over a week with absolutely no commercials. It was a big story, and they needed, as much as they could, to take the thunder away from CNN, MSNBC, and primarily Fox News. (I'll save my editorials on Fox News for another blog.) I'm sure that most Americans preferred to watch Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw rather than Sean Hannity or Bill O'Reilly. At any rate, the three major networks, in that one week, lost a combined total of $187 million in ad revenues. "Ouch" doesn't even cover it. Out of the blue, they froze all development on new shows and cancelled a slew of currently running series. My show "Just Deal", for instance, was top-rated in its slot for the genre. Cancelled... and cancelled, in fact, because NBC sold off the entire four hour Saturday morning block to Discovery Kids for $150 million. Take the money and run, I guess. Needless to say, they kinda panicked.

I entered 2001 with four shows. I toasted the beginning of 2002 with none.

Slowly, however, things started coming back. Still, things weren't the same. Here's a little bit of trivia to demonstrate:

Per show budget:

•"The Journey of Allen Strange" (1997): $300,000. The show ran the standard 65 episodes and ended.

•"Galidor: Defenders of the Outer Dimension" (2002): $600,000. This was an abberation--a largely CGI (Computer Generated Image) show essentially advertising Lego toys. Okay, there was a lot of money behind this one. Cancelled after one season 'cause they didn't sell enough toys.

•"Scout's Safari" (2002 - later in the year): $250,000. Still an "okay" budget, but uh oh--this one was cancelled because it was too expensive!

•"South of Nowhere" (2005): $125,000. I didn't even get this show, but this is a show made by the same production company as all of the others. I've heard rumours that the company is actually losing money on this one. Could be true--couldn't say--I'm not on it. At any rate, I didn't get the show because the network insisted on using "their guy". This was a first--didn't even know "networks" (in this case, Noggin... never heard of them? Me neither) had "guys". After an apparently disasterous first season with this composer, the production company insisted on using me. The network fought back and, of course, won. Anyone think they might have a deal with that composer to take his residuals? Stranger things have happened! As I understand it, though, the show wouldn't even have been worth doing: the lowest music budget I would ever have seen on a series.

Now, you have to bear in mind that my per-show budget is directly related to the show budget (with the exception of "Galidor"--I did not make double what I was making on the previous shows!) Basically what's going on is this: you've got a product which we'll call "the show", and you are attempting to sell that to your sponsors who we'll call "advertisers". You have a certain amount of advertising space to sell to your advertisers to: 1) cover the cost of the production, 2) cover a portion of the operating costs of the network or cable company (I've discovered that even the lamest of cable channels likes to call themselves "the network"), and 3) make a little profit, maybe? As the ad revenues go down, what do you think has to happen? Bingo... show budgets get slashed. $125,000 per episode is downright appalling.

So here I am: 2006. In 2001, I went from four shows to none and then have since been doing no more than a single show a year. The competition is fiercer than ever (god only knows why--who would actually want to get into this racket at this point in time?!), and the budgets are beginning to really fall. Add to this the fact that all of my earlier scores were orchestral (because that's what they wanted) and in the last couple of years have been all hip-hop (because that's what they wanted), and can you blame me for asking myself, very seriously, "is this really what I want to be doing anymore?"

So this is certainly not a "poor me" story by any stretch. It's far from it, in fact. I'm pleased that I, at least, can see these sorts of trends. (My move to Canada was partially spurred on by this.) But at 38, I do find myself in the unenviable position of pondering a new career. Honestly, it's more than just a notion at this point.

So to all of those people who wrote me to say "it'll all work out" and "don't worry"... well, it will work out and I'm not exactly worried, but things have changed in my industry, and the smart move is to start exploring other options. That's what "Ghost on the Highway" was about--taking a serious stab at editing and something that's feature-length at that! That's what the writing is about. (I'm still working on the adventure holiday story, incidentally. Rather than posting it here, I'll encourage anyone who's interested to please e-mail me and ask for a copy--I'd just rather not float it around the internet, but I'd be more than happy to send it to you and hear your feedback.) Believe it or not, that's even what the construction thing is about. I'm very fortunate to be working with a guy who's incredibly talented. (I've seen more of his work than just the deck we were building, and it's absolutely outstanding.) I could learn an awful lot from the guy and am not ruling out construction as a possibility. I'm also considering writing a children's album. (Nothing will make you think more about doing things for kids than having kids of your own and having to watch, read, or listen to, the garbage that's pumped out for them.)

So there you have it: the last twenty years of my industry in a nutshell. Aside from the fact that I have a wonderful family and in-laws who are prefectly okay with letting us hang out here for awhile, I also feel lucky that I have options. So many people don't, and really, I have absolutely no reason to complain. Of course, I'll still find something to whine about, and you'll get to read about it here.

More to follow soon. I'm supposed to be building a shed later in the week! 

Posted: Tue - August 1, 2006 at 02:28 AM          

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