Sequels, reboots, franchises, and songs that remake old songs – does it feel like everything new in popular culture is just derivative of something old? Contrary to popular belief, the reason is not audiences or marketing, but the actions of Wall Street. Derivative Media argues that the financial sector is dismantling the creative capacity of the cultural industries by upwardly redistributing wealth, consolidating corporate media, harming creative labor, and restricting our collective media culture. Moreover, financialization is transforming the character of our culture into endless variations on old intellectual property, infused with more opportunities for branded transactions. Derivative Media: How Wall Street Devours Culture offers readers the critical financial literacy necessary to understand our current political economy. With examples drawn from the media, it demonstrates the destructive financialization of film, television, and popular music. Just as importantly, Derivative Media provides a plan to reverse this dire threat to culture.

More information at University of California Press, including link to free, open-access copy.

Reviews: Public Books, Jacobin, Journal of Popular Film and Television, Choice Reviews

Podcasts/Appearances: American Prestige for The Nation, Money 4 Nothing, New Books Network, The Culture Journalist, Popular Music Books in Process

Praise:

"The thoughtful and thought-provoking chapters of Derivative Media feel like cave paintings that future generations will read long after we've perished in the flames of greed. A must-read for anyone working in the arts wanting to help humanity change course quickly!"—Martin Starr, actor, Freaks and Geeks and Silicon Valley

"Broadly accessible to readers inside and outside the academy, Derivative Media should be the go-to account of our contemporary financialized culture. Andrew deWaard puts it all in place: the new economics, the private equity players, the dominant talent agencies, the hot studios, the crucial artists, the blockbusters, and the earworms. The insights and concepts in this book will reshape media studies and give activists new tools to understand the dynamics of the now."—J. D. Connor, author of Hollywood Math and Aftermath: The Economic Image and the Digital Recession

"DeWaard has written an incisive, brilliant analysis of twenty-first-century capital, media, and power. Derivative Media is a tour-de-force breakdown of financialization in the culture industries, and essential reading for scholars and creative workers alike."—Jennifer Holt, author of Empires of Entertainment: Media Industries and the Politics of Deregulation, 1980–1996

"Elegantly explains the pervasive and destructive role of finance capital in media industries. If you care about media, this book is essential reading: a generational advance in the political economy of communication. I have been waiting for a book like this."—Jonathan Sterne, author of MP3: The Meaning of a Format

"In this compelling and captivating breakthrough study, deWaard assesses the financial forces that are reshaping popular entertainment in the new millennium. And he supports his analysis with data crunching and graphics that put his research in a class by itself."—Thomas Schatz, author of The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era

 "A tour-de-force synthesis of critical, qualitative, and quantitative research, that offers a frightening look at the calculated but opaque ways that shadow banking, hedge funds, and private equity buy firms using debt to overleverage music, media, and film studios. The sobering takeaway: all of a media text's intertextual references are rendered as fungible assets, as interchangeable goods that can be leveraged in a culture-to-capital stock exchange. Who knew our prized twenty-first-century vanguard forms could align this seamlessly with Wall Street's creator-killing profit schemes?"—John Thornton Caldwell, author of Specworld: Folds, Faults, and Fractures in Embedded Creator Industries

"DeWaard provides not only a vital accounting of the ways that private equity has inserted itself into media and entertainment industries over the last decade, but also a means of thinking through its influence in board rooms, on working conditions, and on the content being produced. Derivative Media puts into context how and why these processes have developed and charts a pathway of resistance."—Peter Labuza, Researcher, International Cinematographers Guild, IATSE Local 600

The industry's only director-cinematographer-screenwriter-producer-actor-editor, Steven Soderbergh is contemporary Hollywood's most innovative and prolific filmmaker. A Palme d'or and Academy Award-winner, Soderbergh has directed nearly thirty films, including political provocations, digital experiments, esoteric documentaries, global blockbusters, and a series of atypical genre films. This volume considers its slippery subject from several perspectives, analyzing Soderbergh as an expressive auteur of art cinema and genre fare, as a politically-motivated guerrilla filmmaker, and as a Hollywood insider. Combining a detective's approach to investigating the truth with a criminal's alternative value system, Soderbergh's films tackle social justice in a corporate world, embodying dozens of cinematic trends and forms advanced in the past twenty-five years. His career demonstrates the richness of contemporary American cinema, and this study gives his complex oeuvre the in-depth analysis it deserves.

More information at Columbia University Press

Praise:

"[An] excellent book on this maverick, shape-shifting filmmaker.... Immaculately researched and illustrated with frame blowups throughout the text, the volume is an important contribution to the field.... Highly recommended."—Choice