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Entertainment & Sports

Industry Overview

In entertainment and sports, the profits come from discretionary spending, so these industries enjoy the most success in economically stable countries where leisure dollars flow freely. Industry companies supply their audiences with large-scale sporting events, music concerts, TV situation comedies, and silver-screen masterpieces. Simply put, they're in the business of fun.

Even during economically depressed periods, this industry flourishes as an escape from hard times -- for all walks of life. And standing at the pinnacle of entertainment culture are the celebrities: the movie stars and quarterbacks and rock stars and talk-show hostesses who seem to realize our dreams and thereby give us hope. This is the only industry whose product is an illusion -- neither a good nor a service, and yet both at the same time.

The culture in this industry is one of anti-corporate, studied casualness. There are still uniforms -- an ever-changing array of baseball caps and jackets in the music business, for example. But they're invariably less starchy, more expressive of individualism, than anything worn to work in the fields of finance or law. The people? Well, there's no people like show people, and the sports world has even more pep. This is a high-energy crowd. It's also a big-ego crowd, and working with its members can be both stimulating and frustrating.

Bottom line, though, is that even if your job does not bring you into contact with the creative members of the industry, the glamour rubs off, lending an aura of excitement to mundane tasks that would be boring in any other industry. Poring over Nielsen ratings all day doesn't sound so bad when you describe it to your dinner companions as analyzing the relative sex appeal of Jerry Springer, Oprah Winfrey, and Dan Rather.

Vertical Integration
A few enormous conglomerates dominate the entire entertainment industry, each controlling television, film, publishing, new media, and music businesses under one umbrella. Often, they own professional sports franchises as part of the package. Congress has encouraged this integration by easing restrictions on how many television stations one company can own and by passing the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which lifted an important ban on telecom companies developing new media content.

At the same time, technological developments are leading to a convergence of digital television, digital audio systems, and the Internet, so that all home entertainment may soon be distributed through a single so-called set-top box, as simply as MP3 music files are now distributed over the Internet. If you are interested in this industry, watch for unexpected potential employers such as Microsoft and Intel, companies that are expected to play major roles in the industry's development.

The War for Control of Copyrighted Entertainment Products
The fight against Napster, an online music file-swapping application, was just the beginning of the entertainment industry's efforts to make sure it doesn't lose profits due to new technologies that allow consumers to access entertainment products without paying for them.

In terms of online music file-sharing, the industry has now turned its sights on technologies such as those offered by KaZaa and Audiogalaxy, hoping to prevent them from allowing the sharing of copyrighted songs. In addition to citing the legal protections due to copyrighted materials and initiating legal battles with file-sharing providers, some big entertainment companies have resorted to taking over or partnering with these companies to ensure they make money from the sharing of copyrighted files: BMG, for instance, partnered with Napster, and Vivendi took over MP3. Others are banding together to provide their own online services: AOL, EMI, and Bertelsmann, for instance, formed MusicNet. And a good chunk of new music products these days come with copyright-protection software that limits users' abilities to copy files.

In the broader fight to make money off all use of copyrighted entertainment products, the industry is now trying to make the case that all PCs and other digital products that run entertainment software should come loaded with software "keys" that will "unlock" software protections embedded in the industry's digital products. File-sharing advocates point to the rise of the VCR market as evidence that the industry is misguided in its efforts; Despite the movie industry's howls of protest when VCRs came on the market some 20 years ago, VCR technology ended up vastly increasing consumption of the industry's products -- and pumped up profits in the process.

A New Television Landscape
In the old days, the major networks -- ABC, NBC, and CBS -- ruled the television roost. Nowadays, cable channels (everything from HBO to MTV to Comedy Central) make for a much more fragmented landscape. Adding to the confusion has been the success of upstart networks like Fox, UPN, and the WB. To enhance their moneymaking ability, the major networks have adopted an "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" strategy, making all kinds of production and distribution agreements with their cable competition.

Despite the blurring lines between sports, music, movies, cable, and publishing -- and the media behemoths that preside over them all -- these various forms of entertainment are distinct domains. And though at Time Warner you could conceivably enjoy a career that includes working for the Atlanta Braves, Home Box Office, Six Flags theme parks, and the Atlantic record label, most people choose one area and stick with it. These worlds are closely knit, and whom you know and whom you owe -- and who owes you -- counts for a great deal, particularly when you're looking for work.

Film
In the days of celluloid movie factories, the major studios controlled the project from the earliest script draft to the opening night at Radio City. Most films were completed in under a month and cost as little as $200,000 to produce. Today there are six major entertainment companies: News Corp, AOL Time Warner, Vivendi, Sony, Viacom, and Walt Disney. Known as the Big Six, they all have their roots in the original Hollywood studios: MGM, Warner Brothers, Paramount, and others. But the modern studios control Hollywood in a different way now: They solicit projects, provide the financing, and make the deals with thousands of smaller production companies. The indies (independents) remain only marginally profitable -- and are often owned by one of the Big Six. (Miramax, for example, is a Disney subsidiary.)

Music
Like most movies, music is often created by committee and on the whim of the record label. But the artists retain some control. At least, some do; the Billboard charts always seem to have room for packaged products like Menudo, the Monkees, and N'Sync. The 1996 Telecommunications Act lifted restrictions on how many radio stations a company can own and the ensuing domination by conglomerates resulted in more standardized (and oft-criticized) playlists nationwide.

Beyond the Top 40, music is also big business in conjunction with the advertising industry: Whoever owns the rights to songs used in big national ad campaigns stands a good chance of making even more than the record company or the artist. Sony is currently the acknowledged leader in the business. Other top music companies are Time Warner (Atlantic), EMI (Virgin, Capitol), Vivendi (PolyGram, Universal), and Bertelsmann (Arista, RCA).

Television
The old news in television is the emergence of cable, the decline in network viewership, and the surprising success of Fox TV, the only new network to date that has threatened the supremacy of reigning giants CBS, NBC, and ABC. The more interesting and pertinent news for job seekers is the slow but inexorable digital convergence of computer technology, the Internet, and television, and also the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which allows phone companies and power utilities, among others, to create and distribute entertainment content. These developments opened the floodgates for telecommunications and technology companies to enter the competition -- Pacific Telesis (NYNEX and SBC), AT&T; (TCI), Intel, and Compaq have become strong players. Also building on this technology, Microsoft and other companies are melding broadband cable and electronic media to enhance Internet capabilities.

Sports
When world-class athletes cry, "Show me the money," team owners, managers, agents, and sponsors dance to the tune. The popularity of professional sports teams is phenomenal, and sky-high revenues are pulled in through a variety of avenues including advertising, sponsorships, team name and logo licensing, ticket sales, and worldwide broadcasts.

As far as professional organizations go, the National Football League (NFL) leads the pack in profits, with the National Basketball Association (NBA), Major League Baseball (MLB), and the National Hockey League (NHL) not far behind. Teams, once owned by individuals, are increasingly owned by companies: AOL Time Warner (publisher of Sports Illustrated) owns baseball's Atlanta Braves, basketball's Atlanta Hawks, and hockey's Atlanta Thrashers; the Tribune Company owns baseball's Chicago Cubs; Walt Disney owns hockey's Mighty Ducks of Anaheim and baseball's Anaheim Angels; and News Corp., Cablevision, Comcast, The Molson Companies, and Anheuser-Busch all have teams as well.

Keep in mind that this could be the most competitive industry out there. Getting a job in sports or entertainment is a difficult undertaking that requires persistence, intense networking, and good luck. Unless your dad knows Ted Turner, don't count on landing even an entry-level slot easily. Every year, hundreds upon thousands of job seekers flood New York and Los Angeles hoping to become celebrities, and the majority of them wind up waiting tables to make ends meet And, if they decide to stay in show biz, they eventually end up taking jobs in production or administration. Take heart in the fact, though, that companies can't ignore talent. If you prove that you've got the skills to thrive in a challenging and nontraditional work environment, then you're in for a thrilling ride.

Careers in this industry usually start at the entry level; agents, personal managers, and studio executives usually got their start as lowly assistants. Once launched on their careers, people in the entertainment industry tend to change jobs frequently, and contacts in the industry are crucial.

For those of you with a business or technical background, work is more readily available. The big corporations that dominate the industry always need people in the standard management functions such as finance, HR, IT, marketing, and communications. Technicians are needed in traditional fields such as sound engineering and photography, and in the rapidly expanding fields of digital special effects: Dozens or perhaps hundreds of companies in Southern California and the San Francisco Bay Area employ software engineers and other specialists to create digital special effects, which are at the center of films like The Matrix, Monsters Inc., Lord of the Rings, and Spider-Man, and contribute unobtrusively to scores of other films, removing unwanted telephone cables from outdoor scenes and wrinkles from stars' faces. Leading companies in this field include Pixar, PDI, Sony Pictures Imageworks, and Industrial Light and Magic.

The difficulty of getting a job in the movie biz is legendary -- making a feature-length film can take years and a cast of thousands, yet you will be competing with hundreds for even the most menial short-term contracts and per diem arrangements. When you finally land a job, your initial contributions are generally limited to contracts, spreadsheets, gophering, and creating dazzling promotional copy. But over time you often actually come to know the stars and other industry bigwigs you serve, and these relationships evolve into the ever-important industry contacts that will make or break your career.

To get a job in the music industry, you'll have to follow a path almost as long and complex as that from the first stirrings of a tune in a musician's head to the final song you hear every time you turn on the radio. The important support jobs in the music industry are cover-art production, promotional video production, publishing rights, marketing and sales, and publicity -- and then more publicity, and then different publicity for radio, clubs, and both the mall stores and anti-mall stores such as Tower Records and Virgin Records. If you're interested in marketing to an online audience or the challenge of developing better online audio, these are also job areas to explore. So are MP3 players and DVDs, which are growing apace and are gradually replacing CDs and videocassettes.

As the sports industry expands to include lucrative ancillary employment in marketing, promotion, sports medicine, and agency representation, your options extend well beyond one team or sport. You can earn almost as much as a good left-handed pitcher if your legal skills include licensing and contract negotiation.

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