This special issue of Business History Review looks broadly at the entertainment industry in its many forms, including stage performance, radio, games and gaming, film, and leisure travel, and at the artists and businesspeople who shaped the industry, including directors, agents, broadcasters, brokers, owners, and programmers. The articles in the issue explore changes to the entertainment industry brought on by globalization and by regulatory and technological advancement. In exploring these themes, this issue looks at several of the journal's core interests, including the intersection of business and society and the effects of business-government relations on business and business strategy.
Two articles in particular consider the entertainment industry as a vanguard of strategic change. Samuel E. Backer's “The Informational Economy of Vaudeville and the Business of American Entertainment” explores how and why vaudeville grew to become the United States’ leading theatrical form and looks specifically at the role played by booking offices, which became pioneering information gatherers and helped to modernize and commodify American entertainment. Cynthia B. Meyers's “Advertisers and American Broadcasting: From Institutional Sponsorship to the Creative Revolution” describes a fundamental change in commercial broadcasting that also had long-term consequences. Commercial broadcasters turned away from relying on advertisers to pay for and produce content, instead having them purchase only interrupting commercials, a change that posed creative and strategic challenges for these advertisers and paved the way for modern television advertising.
Another set of articles explores the ways in which entertainment both shapes and reflects culture and societal norms. Jeffrey Fear and Cristina Stanca-Mustea's “‘Carl Laemmle Presents’: A Story of Political and Cultural Risk in Germany, 1917–1934” looks at how Laemmle, head of Universal Pictures, sought to win over the German market, adapting strategy over time in response to local preferences. Sudev Sheth, Geoffrey Jones, and Morgan Spencer's “Emboldening and Contesting Gender and Skin Color Stereotypes in the Film Industry in India, 1947–1991” examines divisions in India's film industry, describing how the “parallel,” often regional, cinemas contested the stereotypical depictions of gender and skin color found in Bollywood.
A third set of essays in this volume analyzes how the entertainment industry, even while becoming increasingly globalized by the end of the twentieth century, remained an important part of national industry and identity in many places. Denise Tsang's “Innovation in the British Video Game Industry since 1978” examines the evolution of the video game industry in Britain from its start in 1978, describing some of the different strategies British game developers used to remain vital in the face of multinational competition from American and Japanese firms. Finally, Juan Ricardo Nazer and Manuel Llorca-Jaña's “The Development of the Casino Industry in Chile” provides an account of the Chilean casino industry, which grew markedly after regulatory changes in the 1990s and 2000s and came to be seen as important in promoting tourism and economic growth.
In all of these ways, the articles in this issue present the mixture of art, strategy, policy, and technology that are unique to the business of entertainment. In addition, they show both the global and national natures of the entertainment industry from the nineteenth century to the present.
