The show must go on? The entertainment industry during (and after) COVID-19

Abstract

This article outlines how the COVID-19 pandemic has influenced different domains of the global entertainment industry regarding the physicality, synchronicity, and digitizablity of businesses. Physical location-based businesses with synchronous content delivery suffer from the outbreak; online businesses largely benefit from the lockdown situation. Continuity of impact is influenced by two interrelated factors: (1) whether there are explicit alternatives for consumers and (2) whether the altered consumer attitudes and behaviors during the pandemic become habitual, transformative, or ceased. We reach two points of comparison: the direction of the COVID-19 impacts (positive vs negative) and the continuity of the changes (continuous vs temporal). Our analysis yields four different scenarios that help us take a view of the unprecedented effects on the entertainment industry with a more comprehensive perspective: disastrous (negative and continuous), silver lining (negative and temporal), fortuitous (positive and temporal), and triumphant (positive and continuous).