Hesmondhalgh: The Cultural Industries

David Hesmondhalgh is one of the most influential contemporary theorists of the media industries, and his book The Cultural Industries (first edition 2002, now in its fifth edition published 2024) is a set text on countless Media Studies courses. AQA A-Level Media Studies names Hesmondhalgh as one of the key theorists for the Industries component. In this lesson we will unpack his argument in detail, examine the concepts of risky business, commodification, and the management of creative labour, and apply his framework to contemporary case studies.

A quick but important note on attribution before we begin. Hesmondhalgh is a British sociologist working at the University of Leeds. His approach is broadly political-economic but draws on cultural studies, sociology of labour, and critical theory. He is careful to distinguish his plural "cultural industries" from the older Frankfurt School singular "culture industry" (Adorno and Horkheimer), because he thinks the sector is more varied, contradictory, and contested than the earlier critics allowed.

The Core Claim

Hesmondhalgh's central claim is that the cultural industries are distinctive among capitalist industries — they face particular economic and social conditions that shape how they operate. He argues that three features stand out:

1. Risky business: Demand for cultural goods is unpredictable, so producers use specific strategies to manage risk.
2. High production costs, low reproduction costs: Making the original is expensive; copying it is cheap. This creates pressure for mass distribution and copyright.
3. Managing creative labour: Cultural production relies on creative workers whose output is hard to predict or control, but whose creativity is the source of value.

Let us take each of these in turn, alongside the broader concept of commodification.

Risky Business

"The cultural industries are risky businesses," Hesmondhalgh writes. What does he mean?

In most industries, if you make a product that is well-designed and well-priced, it will sell roughly as expected. You can do market research, test prototypes, and forecast demand with reasonable accuracy. But in cultural industries, demand is notoriously unpredictable. Nobody knows which film will be a hit, which song will go viral, which game will take off, which novel will sell millions.

The film industry provides endless examples. John Carter (2012) cost Disney around $250 million and lost$250millionandlost200 million. Paranormal Activity (2007) cost $15,000 and made over$15,000andmadeover190 million. The Lord of the Rings was turned down by multiple studios before New Line took the gamble. Harry Potter was rejected by twelve publishers before Bloomsbury said yes.

This unpredictability is not because producers are stupid; it is structural. Audiences' responses to cultural goods depend on mood, social trends, word-of-mouth, timing, and countless other factors that resist modelling. Hesmondhalgh argues that cultural industries respond to this risk with a set of predictable strategies:

Strategy	Description	Example
Overproduction	Make many products, knowing most will fail	Record labels sign many bands; few succeed
Star system	Rely on known talent to reduce risk	Casting Leonardo DiCaprio, Taylor Swift
Franchising	Reuse proven formulas	Marvel Cinematic Universe, FIFA games
Formatting	Copy successful formats	Reality TV formats, sitcom structures
Vertical integration	Own distribution to protect releases	Disney owning cinemas and streaming
Cross-promotion	Use one hit to sell another	Disney films → theme parks → merchandise
Marketing	Heavy spending to create demand	Blockbuster marketing often exceeds production budgets

These strategies do not eliminate risk, but they reduce it. They also shape what gets made — safe, familiar, franchise-driven content tends to crowd out riskier, more original work. This is one reason critics worry about the cultural effects of industry concentration.

flowchart TD
    A[Cultural Production] --> B{Unpredictable Demand}
    B --> C[Overproduction]
    B --> D[Stars & Franchises]
    B --> E[Formats & Sequels]
    B --> F[Heavy Marketing]
    C --> G[Some hits, many flops]
    D --> G
    E --> G
    F --> G
    G --> H[Hits subsidise flops]

High Production Costs, Low Reproduction Costs

Cultural goods are expensive to make for the first time but cheap to copy. A film costs tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to produce. Once produced, an additional streaming copy costs fractions of a penny. This economic structure is unusual.

It means that profit depends on scale. You need to sell lots of copies (or subscriptions, or tickets, or ads against views) to recoup your investment. It also means the marginal cost of exclusion (preventing non-payers from accessing the content) is the main cost of monetising the product. Hence the elaborate apparatus of DRM, streaming authentication, paywalls, copyright law, and piracy enforcement.

For students, this explains several features of contemporary media:

• Global distribution: Netflix and Disney+ want worldwide audiences because each new subscriber is almost pure profit once the content is made.
• Windowing: Films are released in cinemas first (high-price, scarce access), then streaming (subscription), then broadcast TV, then ad-supported. Each "window" extracts different willingness to pay.
• The long tail: Digital catalogues can host huge numbers of niche titles because storage is cheap. Old films and obscure albums become profitable at the margin.
• Intense focus on copyright: Companies guard IP fiercely because the IP is where the value lies. Disney's campaigns to extend copyright term are a well-known example.

Commodification

Commodification, introduced in Lesson 1, is central to Hesmondhalgh's account. He argues that the cultural industries have progressively commodified more and more aspects of cultural life. Things that were once free, public, or informal — journalism, personal communication, music-sharing, amateur creativity — have been increasingly captured by commercial platforms.

Consider music. A generation ago, music was commodified primarily as physical product: vinyl, cassette, CD. Digital piracy (Napster, LimeWire) threatened this model. Streaming (Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music) re-commodified music as a service: you pay a monthly subscription for access, not ownership. This shift changed the industry's revenue model, reduced per-track royalties, empowered platform owners, and concentrated the market.

Or consider news. Newspapers used to sell physical copies with advertising attached. Digital distribution broke that model; platforms like Google and Facebook captured much of the advertising revenue. The response has been new forms of commodification: paywalls (The Times, The Telegraph), membership models (The Guardian's voluntary contributions), and bundling (Apple News+).