Is it just publishing, or entertainment at large?

[Christa M. Miller]

Reading this op-ed about Kelly Clarkson's latest album reminded me of pretty much everything I've read here:
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/music/la-et-clarkson26jun...

So is it the entire entertainment industry, books and movies and music and TV, that is putting artists of all ilks on shaky ground? What if demand for traditional forms of entertainment has lessened not only because of the Internet, but also because we seek quality that we no longer see in a majority of offerings? And if these problems are not limited to book publishers, what (if anything) does that mean for us writers as part of an entertaining whole?

[Todd Mason]

Entertainment-delivery corporations downsize and economize just like the rest of the corporations they intermingle with, sad to say.

[Anne Frasier]

i had to register to read the article, but registration didn't take long.


and yep, that's some familiar shit.

[Olen Steinhauer]

Great link, and very applicable. Thanks. Though I (and many of us here) are not within the popular realm of Clarkson, someone like Grisham is treated with hefty cynicism when he tries a non-thriller, "literary" book. "The Clarkson affair reminds us that even our most popular artists don't have that much freedom once they're ensconced in the game."

A fine irony is that one of the last paragraphs says the controversy "reeks of sexism", while a photo insert link to another related article refers one to "Kelly Clarkson's fashion high and low notes". Music? Nah. It's all about what the girl wears.

[Daniel Hatadi]

I remember when Sony did this to Fiona Apple. She had a couple of hit albums then they canned the third. It sat in vaults for years, but a bootlegged version of it drifted around for some time. Then based on mass petitioning from fans, it was eventually re-recorded and came out last year.

Seems to me they do the same with a lot of the quality left-of-centre TV shows too (Firefly, Dead Like Me, Carnivale, etc.). The money just goes to ever dumber and dumber reality TV. I don't really even watch TV any more. It's DVDs all the way.