Introducing the Creative Industries

From Theory to Practice

Rosamund Davies, Gauti Sigthorsson

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781446291160
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

"This text does a sterling job at identifying, outlining and defining the many elements that go to make up this booming sector of industry. What makes it particularly interesting is that it includes the view of the creative industries from the perspective of working in it, then the definitions of what products and producers are involved, and ends with the broader picture of the creative economy and predictions for future trends. Add to this that they include both theory and practice, and this really is an all-round guide to the vast domain that is loosely titled ?the creative industries?"
- Angela Birchall, School of Media, Music & Performance, Salford University This is your complete guide to studying and succeeding in the creative industries. This book takes you through the history, trends, products and markets of the creative industries, showing how success depends on a mix of ideas, tactics and talent. When understanding social networks and cultural economy is just as important as hands-on skills or an entrepreneurial spirit, Introducing the Creative Industries shows you how to use theories, concepts and practical skills to get ahead in their course and professional life. Creatively imagined and beautifully written, this book:

• Interweaves theoretical concepts and professional practice on every page
• Uses cultural economy to teach the essential concepts and thinkers
• Integrates case studies from fashion and gaming to journalism and music
• Teaches strategies for navigating the links between skills, industries, creativity and markets.

This book shows you how to spot opportunities and use your knowledge and savvy to take kickstart your career in this fast-moving industry. It is an essential guidebook for students of creativity in media and communication, design, creative industries and business.

1

What are the Creative Industries?

DEFINING THE CREATIVE INDUSTRIES

The creative industries don’t exist – at least not as a unified category. In this book we treat the “creative industries” as an umbrella term that covers a variety of activities, products and services. Whether we consider fine arts, music, film/TV production, games design, events and festivals, or advertising and marketing (just to name a few examples), they are all connected by three defining features (UNCTAD 2010: 4): first, they all require some input of human creativity; second, they are vehicles for symbolic messages, that is, they are carriers of meaning; and third, they contain, at least potentially, some intellectual property that belongs to an individual or a group.

To put it in less technical terms, the creative industries are about experiences. A tremendous range of economic activity arises from the creation of pleasure and meaning. These experiences, when they take the forms of goods and services, provide work for a host of people ranging from computer programmers and engineers to writers, artists and musicians. There are also many kinds of services, from public relations (or PR) to interaction design to retailing, where pleasure, meaning and experience are absolutely central to the business. Video games, for example, are deeply invested in providing pleasurable, meaningful experiences, but so are large, profitable businesses like Nike, Starbucks, or a certain fruit-themed computer company based in Cupertino, California. In other words, while some aspects of the creative industries might be regarded as frivolous, or at least not “serious” business, they contribute to and support a host of other economic activities, and entire industries.

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Intellectual property rights (IPR): Intellectual property is “any form of original creation that can be bought or sold – from music to machinery” (UK Intellectual Property Office, 22/5/2012). There are a few different types of intellectual property: copyright, patents, trademarks and designs:

Copyright: The legal right to produce or sell copies of an item of intellectual property (book, image, record, film, etc.) for a given period of time, usually between 50 and 70 years after the originator’s death. Copyright was invented for books, to identify the party legally authorized to print copies to be distributed and sold. This was also a convenient way for the authorities to keep track of the responsible parties in case they wanted to censor a publication.

Today copyright covers a wide range of original creations, including lyrics, scores, magazine and book layouts, software and databases. Copyright is an automatic right, which means that you do not have to apply for the rights to it and, until you have signed a contract assigning it to a third party, you retain the copyright to your creative work. Crucially, however, copyright applies only to the expression of an idea (in written, visual, audio form, etc.) but not to the idea itself. By law, ideas cannot be copyrighted. Since ideas are a central currency of the creative industries, this can be something of a conundrum for creative workers. Pitching ideas is the way that creatives establish contacts, secure meetings and win commissions, so sharing ideas freely is very often a better business tactic than hoarding them away out of reach. On the other hand, ideas do get poached and there is not necessarily anything you can do about it. As a creative practitioner, this is a call that you will repeatedly have to make and decide on a case-to-case basis.

Digital technologies and online distribution have complicated the enforcing of copyright laws considerably. Business models which relied on the sale of physical copies of music, films and books, have found themselves compromised by the willingness of consumers to copy and share copyrighted materials digitally. In turn, trade associations and corporations have attempted to stop consumers from engaging in copyright “piracy” by suing individuals and pursuing them for damages for lost sales. More constructively, the so-called crisis of copyright has spurred a great deal of innovation in recent years, particularly in the distribution of music and films online. Recommended reading: Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity (2005); Matthew Rimmer, Digital Copyright and the Consumer Revolution (2007); David Berry, Copy, Rip, Burn: The Politics of Copyleft and Open Source (2008); Matt Mason, The Pirate’s Dilemma (2008); Vincent Miller, Understanding Digital Culture (2011).

Patents: Taking out a patent provides legal protection for a new invention, which has an industrial application. Patents can be renewed for up to 20 years, providing an inventor with time to develop his or her invention, prepare them for commercial application and reap the initial commercial benefits, before others can enter the market. They are not automatic, they need to be registered officially and it costs money to do so. According to the UK Intellectual Property Office (www.ipo.gov.uk), the earliest known English patent was granted in 1449 to a certain John of Utynam. The patent gave him a 20-year monopoly on a Flemish method for making stained glass, which was not known in England and which was used to make the windows of Eton College (IPO 2012 11/8/12).

Trademarks: Signs used by organizations to distinguish their identity from other organizations. When such a sign is trademarked, other organizations are legally prevented from using them without permission. Trademarks, such as the Nike “tick”, often form an integral part of the brand. They are very often visual logos, but they can also be textual or verbal slogans, sounds (such as the Intel processor sound), or even smells. Trademarks need to be registered and it costs money to do so.

Designs: Designs (both two dimensional (2d) and three dimensional (3d)) can also be registered, to provide the originator with legal protection against unauthorized imitation or reproduction. A wide range of designs might be registered. Examples might include a pattern for wallpaper, a craft or industrial ceramic item, a packaging design, etc.

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The local and the global

One reason why the concept of the creative industries is so eclectic is the international diversity of what people consider “creative” in the first place. In some countries the local creative industries are primarily about heritage, tourism and managing access to sites of natural beauty or animal habitats – after all, not all countries produce film, music or video games on an industrial scale. In this broader sense, the creative industries are not just important for rich countries, but also the developing world, with some countries developing export opportunities around cultural heritage, festivals and tourism, for example around the Carnival in Trinidad and the Caribbean (Green and Scher 2007), while others in film and audiovisual media (Barrowclough and Kozul-Wright 2006; Keane 2007; UNESCO 2009: 11–16). In Africa, the creative industries can be seen to include gorilla-viewing tours in Rwanda, the “Nollywood” film scene in Lagos, Nigeria (Lobato 2010), and urban tourism in South Africa (Rogerson 2006). In short, there are many emerging, local versions of creative industries around the world.

Many creative products and services are distributed globally or attract an international audience; yet, the traditions, ideas, languages, skills and talent that they draw on are all in some way local. Where things come from is tremendously important in the creative industries – literature, music and dance, for example, have roots in local languages and traditions. Even when the distribution of a product is global, industries such as film and television have strong local characteristics, whether those might be the American twang of Hollywood, or the dance and song of Bollywood (Kavoori and Punathambekar 2008).

The creative industries also go hand in hand with the economies of cities and regions. One might even say that countries, cities and individual areas are themselves symbolic products – after all, places stand for a great many things (Evans 2003). For example, the creative industries are closely connected with tourism, because a thriving cultural scene makes for an interesting destination. Therefore, cities go to great lengths to cultivate their international image – to brand themselves as destinations for cultural tourism. This applies both to wider urban areas, such as the city of Bilbao which has been rebranded through the presence of the Guggenheim Bilbao, and to neighbourhoods or areas within cities, for example the “neo-bohemias” of urban areas keen to make themselves into “creative cities” (Evans 2005; Lloyd 2010). Imagine London’s South Bank without the Royal Festival Hall, Hayward Gallery, British Film Institute, National Theatre and the Tate Modern – this patch of the city would not be particularly exciting without them.

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Creativity and creatives (artistic and cultural): The concept of creativity is not a precise one. Sometimes it refers to a process, and sometimes the product or outcome of that process; sometimes it refers to the talents of the people involved. In practice, creativity has a lot to do with the context in which it resides – it is far more than simply the “input” of the creative industries (with innovation as its “output”) (Pratt and Jeffcutt 2009). As James Donald, puts it, creativity can be seen as the “skill to make useful, enjoyable, or beautiful things, or a flair for making interesting things happen” (Donald 2004: 236). Creativity, in this sense, is not so much a skill or form of knowledge in itself; rather, it’s a by-product of various specific (and trainable) skills, such as writing, drawing, or playing an instrument. “Creatives,” in turn, are skilled people who contribute some form of expressive or original value to a production process (Hackley and Kover 2007). Across the creative industries, creatives are the people who invent, create and express in whatever medium is involved, from novelists and musicians to architects and graphic designers. When a creative has done his or her job, something exists that didn’t exist before. In Management and Creativity (2007), Chris Bilton challenges the romantic notion that creativity is a form of useful madness (spontaneity, fantasy and inspiration) and that it is a characteristic of exceptional individuals; on the contrary, he regards it as a rational, manageable process that brings together many different roles. Looking beyond individuals, Bilton argues that successful creative environments and institutions cultivate a diversity of creative talents and allow individuals to play multiple roles. In short, the “creative” is not an exclusive, specialist role, although many creative roles involve specialist skills and training.

Bilton draws on a larger debate on the collective, shared process of creativity. One influential example of this thinking, in relation to the creative industries, is James Webb Young’s A Technique for Producing Ideas (presented to students in 1939, published in 1965). Young broke creativity down into elements of a larger process of learning, thinking and experience — from gathering “raw materials” and processing them consciously and unconsciously, to the “a-ha moment” and the work of adapting an idea to artistic, commercial, technological and practical reality (Young 2003). In philosophy, anthropology, sociology and psychology, creativity has come to be regarded as a feature of human intellect and social life — the resources of creativity, such as language, skills, raw materials and techniques, are shared among everyone (for an accessible historical overview, see Johnson 2010). Talented individuals draw on this shared pool, a fact that does not detract from exceptional works of poetry, paintings, novels or music (Weisberg 1993; Sternberg 1998). In The Gift (2007, orig. 1983), Lewis Hyde suggests, from an anthropological perspective, that creativity can be understood in terms of reciprocal gifts that strengthen communal bonds, ties between the living and with past generations. At a more individual, psychological level, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has argued in his influential book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (1991) that creativity is one aspect of a broader range of pleasures associated with doing, making and being “in the moment” of activity. Therefore, the notion of creativity as an economic, professional activity, industrialized and systematized within the “creative industries” has been criticized as a rather reduced notion of human capacity, psychology and community (Osborne 2003; Banks and O’Connor 2009).

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Symbolic products and services

A broad, inclusive concept like “creative industries” gives us a way of talking about the many things that different specialist occupations have in common, and what the people working in each can learn from the others. At first, it might not seem like a sculptor creating a unique piece of art might have anything in common with a programmer writing code for a mobile phone application. However, if you think about it, both the sculpture and the piece of software are symbolic products – the people involved make something that has meaning. This is why some scholars define the creative industries as a combination of individual creativity and the mass-production of symbolic cultural goods. This idea comes from economists and cultural critics who have pointed out that there are certain industries that use characteristic forms of industrial production and organization to produce and disseminate symbols (Hirsch 2000; Banks 2007; Hesmondhalgh 2008: 553).

Symbolic products are created in a variety of media. Moreover, when they are mass-produced and distributed they are usually not stand-alone creations; instead, they form clusters or “chains” of related products and services. Star Wars is the classic example of a creative product that became a brand through a successful film franchise which, through licensing, became merely one aspect of an entire universe of characters, stories, games, toys and lifestyle products (pyjamas, lunch boxes, special-edition hamburgers, etc.) (Curtin and Streeter 2001). The pioneer of branded entertainment, Walt Disney, called this systematic packaging of symbolic products total merchandising: one Disney product advertised another (so that the Disneyland TV show promoted the Disneyland theme park, populated by Mickey Mouse, Snow White, Cinderella and other characters and scenarios from Disney’s films) (Anderson 2000). Following an identical pattern, the successful Pirates of the Caribbean film franchise was developed from a Disney theme park ride of the same title. Similarly, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter has become a highly successful total merchandising brand: from a character in a book to films, computer games, action figures, clothes and a variety of other products – all of these symbolic products bring together creativity and industrial production knitted together around the character of the boy wizard, his friends and enemies (Kruhly 2011).

Working in creative disciplines, whether it’s fine art, architecture, computer games or film, involves many different specialisms. At the same time, these specialisms are constantly being brought together, whether it’s in teams working on a single project, or at the level of businesses and organizations. This is something that journalists have experienced in the recent past with the transition from print to digital publishing. While the fundamental skills of researching and writing stories remain the same, they have had to adapt to a new technological context (see Chapter 9). Newspapers and magazines now publish across a range of platforms – their websites offer videos, audio podcasts, and versions of their publications customized for reading on mobile internet devices. Therefore, media convergence, online distribution and increased interactivity have fostered new products, practices and identities. A newspaper journalist has to be able not just to research and report on a story using text and photographs, but also to contribute to other formats like video, podcast, or blogs, and to interact with the audience through multiple channels, including social networking sites.

When we focus on the process – what we refer to later in this book as the production chain (Pratt 2004) – of creation, production, distribution and consumption, we do not tend to distinguish between “high culture” and “low” (or “popular”) culture. In the study of economics, particularly the economics of culture, snobbery is of dubious analytical value. When viewed from this perspective, the branding of the boy wizard Harry Potter is not very different from the highbrow form of branding used by iconic art galleries like the Guggenheim in Bilbao and the Tate Modern in London. These int...