WETFEET RESOURCES
RECOMMENDED RESOURCES
Entertainment & Sports
Industry Overview
Love-Hate
Major Players
Job Descriptions & Tips
Entertainment and Sports Job Listings
Industry Overview
With the rise of the Internet and other new communications technologies, the
field of entertainment is increasingly difficult to define. In this profile,
we’re talking about film, television, and music, as well as sports—each a
form of entertainment raking in millions of dollars. The first three of these
businesses are dominated by enormous, vertically integrated companies such as
Sony, Time Warner, and Walt Disney, which have interests in multiple segments
of the industry. But there are also thousands of jobs in the entertainment
industry at smaller, less corporate companies—film and television production
or distribution companies, for instance, and small independent record
companies, talent agencies, and management companies. Similarly, pro sports
is dominated by the four biggest spectator sports—baseball, football,
basketball, and hockey—but there are many other sports out there with varying
degrees of business sophistication, and even at the Big Four there are
numerous, albeit unglamorous and low-paying, jobs in minor-league outfits.
In entertainment and sports, the profits come from discretionary spending, so
these industries enjoy the most success in economically stable countries
where leisure dollars flow freely. Industry companies supply their audiences
with large-scale sporting events, music concerts, TV situation comedies, and
silver-screen masterpieces. Simply put, they're in the business of fun.
Even during economically depressed periods, this industry flourishes as an
escape from hard times—for all walks of life. And standing at the pinnacle of
entertainment culture are the celebrities: the movie stars and quarterbacks
and rock stars and talk-show hostesses who seem to realize our dreams and
thereby give us hope. This is the only industry whose product is an
illusion—neither a good nor a service, and yet both at the same time.
The culture in this industry is one of anti-corporate, studied casualness.
There are still uniforms—an ever-changing array of baseball caps and jackets
in the music business, for example. But they're invariably less starchy,
more expressive of individualism, than anything worn to work in the fields of
finance or law. The people? Well, there's no people like show people, and
the sports world has even more pep. This is a high-energy crowd. It's
also a big-ego crowd, and working with its members can be both stimulating
and frustrating.
Entertainment and Sports Job Listings
Athlete Coordinator
Director of Sponsorships
Entertainment
Entertainment Agent
Entertainment Development Executive
Entertainment Executive Assistant
Entertainment Marketing
Entertainment Publicity
Production Assistant
Sports
Sports Agent
Sports Marketing
Sports Media Relations
Sports Publicity
|