Soft power: the media industries in Britain since 1870

Abstract

This paper discusses the emergence and growth of various media industries in Britain. It shows how a rise in real wages and leisure time, rapid urbanisation and the development of fast urban transport networks, and a rapid growth of the market's size let to a sharp rise in the demand for media and entertainment products and services, which was met by ever-new technologies coming from constantly emerging new industries, such as recorded music, film, radio, television, cable, videogames, internet, and social media. The paper argued these industries contributed to a sharp productivity rise by industrialising traditional media and entertainment, and to a sharp welfare growth as consumers valued them so highly that they were willing to incur ever-higher opportunity costs to consume them. It also discusses how four factors quality races, marginal revenues equalling marginal profits, the superstar effect and agglomeration benefits shaped the evolution of individual industries, and it assesses the success or failure of British industrial policy towards media industries. The paper observes media's impact on the aggregate economy through opportunity costs, expectations and aspirations, the functioning of the market, education, and, finally, through shaping the means of institutional change. In addition, the paper makes new decennial benchmark estimates for British consumer expenditure on books between

Methods and characteristics of commercial advertising in the socio-cultural context of the New Economic Policy (NEP)

“…During the Soviet period, the issues of advertising activities were usually ignored since, in the conditions of a planned economy, advertising was not in demand. Only in the post-Soviet epoch, the attention to the history, theory, and practice of advertising today has significantly increased on the part of both domestic and foreign researchers [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13]. Nevertheless, within the boundaries of the designated topic, there are many unfilled niches, such as the influence of pre-Soviet traditions and Soviet innovations on advertising activities, the construction of methods and characteristics of this activity under the influence of socio-cultural features of the NEP period, etc.…”