This week, for the first time in a while, I found myself in a record shop. Not to buy a record (the household turntable is long retired) but to return a DVD, which feels only slightly less quaint. The store configuration was interesting. In pride of place up front, on generously proportioned display racks that permitted appreciation of their sleeve art, were the vinyl LPs, a varied but relatively narrow mix of classics and new releases. Off to one side was a smaller selection of 12-inch singles. Past the graphic novels section was an annex devoted to headphones and other accessories. And the rest of the shop was a dark, crammed, cavernous rummage sale of CDs, DVDs and Blu-Ray discs interspersed with rails of the kind of T-shirts bought by the sort of people who wear T-shirts from record shops.
It appears the much-vaunted vinyl revival has now settled into its long-term future as a premium boutique product valued by a small, affluent, committed subset of the overall population. It’s a pattern we’re starting to see elsewhere in the culture industries as they emerge, blinking, into the post-digital revolution era.
Earlier this month, Peter Vandermeersch, chief executive of Ireland’s biggest newspaper publisher, Mediahuis, announced that daily newspapers would be extinct within a decade. So you might think, if you’re reading this in old-fashioned newsprint, that you should savour that experience while you can.
It isn’t hard to envisage a future of digital-first media brands producing weekly news magazines printed on high-quality paper with superior design standards
Not so fast. Vandermeersch went on to clarify that his Belgian-headquartered employer, while preparing to phase out weekday printed newspapers across its six European markets, would “probably” continue to print a Saturday, Sunday or weekly product. This is a view held by several other publishers navigating the choppy waters between a print past and a digital future. Some readers, after all, do still remain attached to their weekend print fix, with its long reads, big interviews and in-depth analysis of the week’s events. It isn’t hard to envisage a future of digital-first media brands producing weekly news magazines, similar to The Economist or Germany’s Die Zeit, printed on high-quality paper with superior design standards, and still retaining a market niche in an otherwise fully digital news environment. Like those vinyl racks at the front of the record store, these would be branded as “premium” products for the discerning customer with high disposable income.
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Could cinema develop along the same lines? “Feature films are in a bad place,” director David Lynch lamented this week to venerable French cinephile magazine Cahiers du Cinema. “You could sit down and actually have the experience of stepping into a whole new world. Now that’s all in the damn history books. It’s distressing. Art and experimentation are over. Theatre owners ... continue for the love of cinema. There are still heroes fighting for it.”
Time will tell whether Lynch’s grim prognosis is correct. Indications are that Covid may have prompted a further slide in the very, very long decline since the 1950s of cinemagoing as a popular habit. Although Lynch also criticised people who watch films on phones or tablets – “People think they’ve seen a movie, but if they’ve watched it on a phone, they haven’t seen anything. It’s sad” – Covid spurred an increase in the number of households with ginormous TVs equipped with fancy technologies like OLED that narrow the gap between home viewing and cinema.
Yes, there is still something unique about the communal experience of watching a film with an audience in a darkened auditorium. And there will continue to be a market for that experience. It’s just that, in the delicate words of Spinal Tap’s manager, its appeal is becoming more selective.
As you sip your New England IPA at a repertory screening of Mulholland Drive in a pristine new 35mm print, though, consider what is being lost (in addition to the obvious jobs and profits)
The rebranding of cinema as a niche premium product is already well under way. The number of screens in Dublin city centre continues to fall, with the future of the largest multiplex, Cineworld, hanging in the balance due to the parlous situation of its parent company. But the Light House and Irish Film Institute soldier on while, in the suburbs, Stella offers its own premium experience in a refurbished art deco venue. As you sip your New England IPA at a repertory screening of Mulholland Drive in a pristine new 35mm print, though, consider what is being lost (in addition to the obvious jobs and profits).
The decline of physical cultural artefacts such as albums, printed newspapers and bricks-and-mortar cinemas, and their part-replacement by niche products aimed at smaller, more affluent elites, undermines the claims the makers of these products make for their own social significance and opens up the vista of a further class divide between premium subscribers and the masses for whom digital will just have to do. That may be better than complete extinction, but it’s still an unappealing prospect.
