Questions of value in strike

Perhaps both sides in the writers strike should start studying the new economic model operating in today's pop music world. If your product has lost its value in one arena -- meaning if no one's buying your CDs anymore -- you can create value in a new arena. That's why Prince gave away millions of copies of his latest CD, because the real money for him was in concert tickets. It's why Beyonce and Gwen Stefani have launched clothing lines and the fragrance industry is chock-full of perfumes from Britney Spears and Jennifer Lopez.

"Successful pop artists represent something to people, so their value is in loaning their persona, their music or their likeness to other marketers," says Ken Hertz, a veteran music industry attorney who represents Beyonce and the Black Eyed Peas and does strategic marketing with such companies as Hasbro and McDonald's. "That's where the new equity lies. Music is the best way for a marketer to build trust with people. And if you trust them, you're going to buy their product, but the real engine for creating trust is the music."

That's not to say that screenwriters will strike it rich endorsing Dell computers (although "Daily Show" contributor John Hodgman will surely make more money for his appearances in those Mac vs. PC ads than writing books like "The Areas of My Expertise," a hilarious almanac of utterly unreliable information). My point being: No one knows where the real value of writing will come from five years from now. It may still be in residuals from TV and films, but it may be from some new YouTube-style Internet buzz site fueled by outside money from Wall Street or Silicon Valley.

While the WGA and the studios flail away at the negotiating table, snarling at each other like the warrior ice bears in "The Golden Compass," new entrepreneurs from Wall Street and Silicon Valley are entering the fray every day. The studios have been buying up or trying to co-opt many of the new entertainment streams, but the writers have a lot to say about the future, since the Internet is a medium where the word has retained tremendous power.

"We're entering an era where, just as there are 300 cable and satellite TV stations, there will be 300 different economic models for different kinds of entertainment," says veteran film producer Michael Shamberg. "There will always be a primal need for people to tell stories, but no one knows what the price structure for those narratives will be. It's a time of extraordinary experimentation of how to sell things, therefore it's an extraordinary time in terms of what you can sell."

So the writers can count on one key advantage. Even when it's difficult to agree on the value of almost anything, it's not hard to understand that in a business of storytelling, everything starts with the storyteller.

"The Big Picture" runs each Tuesday in Calendar. If you have questions or criticism, e-mail patrick.goldstein @latimes.com.