Abstract
In this chapter, we define entertainment and lay out the data that demonstrate why entertainment matters. Not only does entertainment generate huge revenues, but it also has a pioneering influence on culture, in many ways. Entertainment shapes how our views of the world around us, impacts our language, can provide meaning to our human existence, and can motivate us to do better.
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Notes
- 1.
We have added the term “technical” here to differentiate the channels we are talking about here from the channels we discuss in the context of managerial distribution decisions.
- 2.
One might say that pleasure is also tied to different goals in the case of movies, music etc., such as making their creators popular and wealthy—but here the “other” goal is an immediate result from consumers’ pleasure or at least their anticipation of it, whereas for advertising consumers’ pleasure and its economic effectiveness are simply two separate things. Also, the quality of an entertainment product does not only have an instrumental function, but is almost always also an end state by itself. We discuss this as an inherent characteristic of entertainment products.
- 3.
All numbers given in this section are our own calculations and should be treated as rough estimates, building on publically available information by, among others, McKinsey, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Statista, Datamonitor, and IFPI, as well as various conversations with industry experts. Please note that these numbers in general reflect the “retail” value paid by consumers or advertisers, not the share of money that flows back to entertainment producers. We shed some more light on the latter in our chapter on value creation for the different forms of entertainment.
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Hennig-Thurau, T., Houston, M.B. (2019). The Fundamentals of Entertainment. In: Entertainment Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89292-4_2
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