Author: Gil

Since I’ve been writing about the drug industry (our magazine bowed in October 1999) I’ve been hearing that we’re heading toward The Era of Personalized Medicine. This means that, as we develop more knowledge of the genome, proteome, and metabolome (you think I’m making this stuff up?), drugs will be tailored to generate greater efficacy or fewer side effects in smaller population groups.

The drug that gets touted as the advance guard in this wave is Herceptin, which can be very effective in treating breast cancer, but only in tumors that over-express the HER2 protein. Around 20% of breast cancer cases fall into this category; Herceptin isn’t effective against other tumors.

Some pharmacoeconomists contend that personalized medicine will lead to The End of the Blockbusters, as smaller patient groups translate to a cap on your “customer” base. On the other side of the spectrum is a “mass appeal” drug like Lipitor, the cholesterol treatment that sells more than twice the dollar amount of any other drug in the world and is now being tested for benefits in treating Alzheimer’s disease.

I bring this up not because I just finished that Top Companies report, but because of N’Sync.

This morning, I read a funny article adapted from the book The Long Tail by Chris Anderson (not this guy). It examines how the entertainment industry faces The Death of the Blockbuster, citing diminishing CD and movie sales figures and TV and radio ratings as indicators that the niche is where it’s at.

It’s altogether possible that NSync’s first-week record [2.4 million CDs sold] may never be broken. The band could go down in history [. . .] for marking the peak of the hit bubble — the last bit of manufactured pop to use the 20th century’s fine-tuned marketing machine to its fullest before the gears were stripped and the wheels fell off.

Music itself hasn’t gone out of favor — just the opposite. There has never been a better time to be an artist or a fan, and there has never been more music made or listened to. But the traditional model of marketing and selling music no longer works. The big players in the distribution system — major record labels, retail giants — depend on huge, platinum hits. These days, though, there are not nearly enough of those to support the industry in the style to which it has become accustomed. We are witnessing the end of an era.

His long-term economic arguments and his moralizing (near the end) are bizarrely off-kilter. For one thing, News Corp. owns MySpace. The site may offer massive “niche” opportunities, but it’s going to make cash hand over first for Murdoch & Co., both little (user fees) and big (as a promotional tool for its properties).

For another, in this era where every entertainment option is allegedly losing its hit-making power, Anderson manages to avoid any mention of the Harry Potter books and The Da Vinci Code. Both of these are such impossibly massive hits — despite the fact that more individual titles get published now than ever — that they blow a sizeable hole in the concept that we’re all moving to the margins.

It’s my contention that, while there a whole lot of factors at play in the decline of hits in the last five years, I think the biggest is that almost every blockbuster movie is crap, contemporary pop and dance music is so dull that radio stations needed to be bribed into playing it, and the current generation of TV executives were raised on the awful television of the late 1970s and 1980s.

Hits might not be as big as they once were, but they’re even more important to the entertainment industry now, given the high price of failure. I’m not saying it’s right, as it tends to lead to “safe” committee-designed projects, but in the pharmaceutical business, as in Hollywood, the big hits help defray the costs of a bazillion failures.

(The Agitator has some reflections on Anderson’s book.)