Zoolander, Ben Stiller’s 2000 fashion world spoof, has been doing consistently well on iTunes’ movie download-to-own chart. NewTeeVee’s Chris Albrecht wonders why. “Wait, what? An eight-year-old comedy is more popular than Ratatouille, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, and High School Musical (parts 1 and 2)?”
Apple hasn’t released demographic information, but let’s try to imagine, for a second, who might be willing to spend $10 on a legal––but DRM-heavy––movie download at this stage of the game. First of all, it’s gotta be someone who uses Mac products exclusively: students, artists, upper-middle-class nerds, aging hipsters, style-conscious parents, the curious rich, celebrities. Albrecht has screen caps of several recent iTunes top sales charts, and it’s clear from a glance that adventurous cinephilies don’t seem to be yet represented––but then, with the exception of a handful of classic titles, iTunes’ movie catalog doesn’t seem to be going for adventure. So let’s assume that the cool hunter Apple user is getting their movies elsewhere, and concentrate on the more middle-of-the-road aspects of the Apple demographic.
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New Line has sent Michel Gondry on a tour of indieWIRE events at Apple Stores to promote Be Kind Rewind. But is actual, physical globetrotting even necessary in today’s wired world? I thought it was kind of ironic that on the first stop of the tour, which took place last night in San Francisco, several of my Bay Area-based Twitter friends were essentially live micro-blogging the event––no doubt in some, if not all cases, using Apple devices.
So several days before Gondry’s tour is scheduled to come to my city, I was eating dinner in New York, and effectively getting a play-by-play of the San Francisco version of the event via Twitter updates on my cellphone. This morning, I woke up to find that Jackson West (who, in addition to being a Twitter followee, is a colleague at a site that I freelance for, NewTeeVee) had uploaded audio of the event and was making it available for download by anyone who reads his Twitter stream.
All of this says something about our new global-cultural-techno-econo-sphere, I’m sure of it; I’m just not sure what it is.
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