The bedrock of Elberse’s “blockbuster strategy” is a willingness to invest in “premium” content, on the theory that a series of small ripples is no substitute for one big splash. She notes that YouTube, one of the Internet’s most miscellaneous destinations, has increasingly devoted itself to promoting its “Original Channels,” many of them tied to established stars or brands, like Jay Z or World Wrestling Entertainment. Elberse extends her analysis to blockbusters of all sorts, arguing that a grand enough event can “break through the clutter,” thereby justifying its cost. She tells the story of Real Madrid, the soccer team, which paid more than a hundred and thirty million dollars for the right to sign Cristiano Ronaldo, the Portuguese star; she explains how Lady Gaga’s team arranged for her 2011 album, “Born This Way,” to appear in twenty thousand shops, ranging from Starbucks to RadioShack. Elberse argues that the profusion of consumer choice only increases the pressure on big media companies to create grand spectacles that bring us together. Alan Horn, the chairman of Walt Disney Studios, tells her that he concentrates on “high production value” films precisely because people now go to so few movies per year: only a big event, he figures, will drag people out of their homes. “If entertainment businesses forgo making big bets on likely blockbusters,” Elberse writes, “they will find their channel power waning over time.”

Although Elberse’s book is written in the upbeat, anecdotal, gently exhortative style of an airport best-seller, she struggles to turn her observations into useful advice. One passage describes the strategy of Harry Sloan, a Hollywood executive who in 2005 was appointed chairman and C.E.O. of M-G-M, a venerable studio that had fallen behind its rivals. Sloan brokered a deal that was, in itself, a blockbuster: he signed up perhaps the biggest and most reliable movie star in the world, Tom Cruise, by offering him an equity stake and sweeping creative freedom. But the Cruise experiment was, Elberse concedes, “widely regarded as a disappointment.” Even Lady Gaga’s ubiquitous album release turns out to have been only a qualified success: “Born This Way” sold 2.3 million copies, roughly half the sales of her first album, “The Fame.” In Elberse’s telling, blockbusterism often seems less like a strategy and more like a tendency.

Is it a growing tendency? Elberse links the phenomenon to “the public’s ever-increasing fascination with celebrities,” while providing no evidence that we are increasingly fascinated with celebrities. Certainly a scholar wishing to conduct a thorough study of Kim Kardashian will find no shortage of primary and secondary sources—but there’s more available information about everything else, too. How, exactly, would we measure our interest in Kardashian against an earlier generation’s interest in Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis? A related difficulty applies to any consideration of “hits” or “blockbusters”: there’s no easy way to make comparisons across decades or across media. Using data from Warner Bros. and Grand Central Publishing, Elberse shows that the most expensive titles—the potential blockbusters—generally consume a big chunk of a corporation’s budget, while generating an even bigger chunk of its revenues. And yet, by many measures, earlier eras produced bigger hits. “Avatar” is generally considered the top-grossing film of all time, with worldwide earnings of more than $2.7 billion. But nearly three-quarters of that was earned overseas. If you consider only American ticket sales and adjust for inflation, you will find that “Gone with the Wind” earned more than twice as much, at a time when the U.S. population was less than half as big.

“Now, now, it wasn’t a lie—it was a one-eighty.” Facebook

Twitter

Email

Shopping

Even seemingly simple comparisons are trickier than they first appear. To demonstrate that “hits are gaining in relevance,” Elberse tells us that, from 2007 to 2011, a growing number of songs sold more than a million digital copies, accounting for a growing share of the digital-music market: thirty-six tracks, for seven per cent, in 2007; a hundred and two tracks, for fifteen per cent, in 2011. But the digital-music market, in general, was expanding during those years: more songs were released, more songs were bought, and more songs crossed the million-sale threshold. Yes, hits are important—and they always have been.

On this point, at least, Anderson would agree. Although “The Long Tail” proclaimed a coming revolution, Anderson was careful never to predict the demise of blockbusters. “Hits, like it or not, are here to stay,” he wrote. But he believed that the cultural power of hits was fading, and he presented his economic analysis as a moral crusade. “For too long,” he wrote, “we’ve been suffering the tyranny of lowest-common-denominator fare, subjected to brain-dead summer blockbusters and manufactured pop.” The language reflected his own tastes, which were self-consciously hip. (He was vexed by the popularity of boy bands and excited about a retro-futurist electronic genre known as “chip music,” which achieved micro-success in the aughts.) He hoped that more of us would discover “smaller artists who speak more authentically to their audience,” and that all of us might, at last, perceive “the true shape of demand in our culture.” He was flattering his readers by inviting them to be part of his community of connoisseurs. Long-tail economics would make good on the promise of the Internet, turning more people into experts on topics fewer people had heard of. Elberse flatters her readers, too. In her book, the old ethos of the Internet has given way to the new ethos of social media; while Anderson predicted the end of the “watercooler era,” Elberse sees the water cooler reborn, as fans track the progress of the latest cultural juggernaut across their Twitter timelines. “Because people are inherently social, they generally find value in reading the same books and watching the same television shows and movies that others do,” she writes, recasting our taste for hits as proof of our common humanity. Lurking behind her blockbuster thesis is the suggestion that being sociable matters more than being hip.

Because Anderson and Elberse both focus on consumer choice, they make it easy to forget that the entertainment industry is partly a reflection of the political processes that created it. For instance, movie franchises might be much less valuable if copyright protections didn’t last so long. In 1790, Congress enacted a law granting copyright protection for fourteen years, with an option for a fourteen-year extension; in the most recent revision, in 1998, Congress extended copyright protection to last a lifetime plus seventy years. (Works created by a corporation, instead of a person, may be protected for as long as a hundred and twenty years.) Similarly, the shape and the size of various online music-streaming services will be largely determined by the compulsory royalty rates set by the government, and by legal decisions about the relative value of different forms of digital musical consumption.

Although neither “Blockbusters” nor “The Long Tail” spends much time considering the power of legislation, that power is one of the main themes of “Hit Men.” The book’s true protagonist is a federal regulation, a 1960 amendment to the Communications Act, which banned secret payments to radio disk jockeys. In response, the big record companies began hiring middlemen known as independent radio promoters, who had a mysterious ability to transmit their musical passions to the program directors running radio. By the nineteen-eighties, during Yetnikoff’s heyday at CBS Records, big labels were spending millions on independent promotion, a practice their smaller competitors couldn’t copy. “The large record companies understood on some level that if radio airplay were not free, it would mean a major competitive edge,” Dannen writes. This is not so different from the logic that drives big film studios to spend increasing amounts of money on special effects and elaborate marketing campaigns, at a time when it’s easier than ever to shoot and distribute a movie. Horn, the Disney chairman, told Elberse that blockbusters were important precisely because they cost so much money. And Disney would have much less money to spend if Congress hadn’t extended its copyright protections. “Very few entities in this world can afford to spend $200 million on a movie,” he said. “That is our competitive advantage.” The long tail is real—and executives like Horn will pay whatever they must to stay out of it.