ENTERTAINMENT AS AN INDUSTRY
—In the United States alone—is responsible each year for $150 billion in expenditures and some 120 billion hours of consumed time (Vogel 1998, p. xvii). Entertainment as an economic sector consists of diverse products and services including motion pictures, television, music, broadcasting, print media, toys, gaming, gambling, sports, and fine arts.
Leisure time has been a determining factor in the development of recreation and entertainment as an industry. Entertainment has grown as an industry in step with increased income and time available for leisure and recreation. Economic development, often quantified in terms of productivity or output per person-hour, has enabled goods and services to be produced with fewer labor inputs. The growth of the entertainment industries has been directly related to the development of a modern economy and rising economic productivity, though precise estimation of the demand for leisure is a thorny task (Owen 1971). An important issue in the development of entertainment as an industry is the rising productivity of workers, and in particular the ways in which technical progress has increased worker productivity. Progress in technology, in addition to creating the demand for entertainment products and services, has also led to the creation of much of the dominant forms of contemporary entertainment.
Substantial production in the creative industries takes place within the U.S. economy and creative products are a major U.S. export. Motion pictures, home video and television programming, music and sound recordings, books, video games, and software are collectively one of the largest and fastest-growing economic sectors, responsible for about 6 percent of total U.S. gross domestic product per annum (Motion Picture Association of America 2006a). Multinational entertainment/media conglomerates such as Vivendi, Sony, and AOL/Time Warner are increasingly becoming dominant in this sector, with operations that permit substantial economies across the line of entertainment products. The process often begins with a literary work of fiction, which is then made into a movie exhibited in cinemas and later on syndicated and network television domestically and abroad, and finally released on home video. Characters and other elements from the movie can be developed into a line of toys cross-promoted with fast food, and further developed into a video game or board game, and perhaps even featured in a line of clothing.
In the motion-picture industry, the sector of entertainment with the highest profile, domestic (U.S. and Canadian) box-office receipts accounted for about $9 billion, while worldwide box-office revenue was over $23 billion for 2005 (Motion Picture Association of America 2006b). The international market now yields more revenue than the North American market and it is also the source of revenue growth for the motion-picture industry, though success in the international market is largely conditional on success in the North American market. The dominance of Hollywood films in worldwide box-office revenue gives rise to claims of cultural imperialism, though major Hollywood studios in fact design films for distribution in the worldwide market even though the films are screened in North America first. While international box-office revenues have been rising, the major sources of new revenues for the motion-picture …
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