Sign companies face tough choices in the future

The music industry has had its share of tidal waves. Recordings first challenged live performance. More recently, digitization from services like Napster rocked the industry by providing music online – for free.

In “Having rescued recorded music, Spotify may upend the industry again,” an Economistauthor compared the streaming service’s current conflict with that faced by Netflix, writing: “The fight for who comes out on top may have only just begun.” Netflix, which began as a partner to the major Hollywood studios, is now competing with them directly.

I wonder if the signage and graphics market is so different. When I was driving cross-country 18 months ago, I passed an auto body shop advertising car wraps. In a feature I wrote last year, a signage installer and fabricator termed her company a design studio. Another company, Ramsay Signs in Portland, OR, hired a theater designer to help with creative projects.

Spotify knew listeners better than the competition, combining the immediacy of Napster with Pandora’s predictive algorithms. Today, the service offers both ad-supported free services and a $10-per-month option with no interruptions. There’s one problem, which the Economistnoted: The more “plays” Spotify gets, the more royalties it owes. Now, the company, newly listed on the New York Stock Exchange, must decide if it can be profitable “at the expense of the labels it has enriched: by paying them less in royalties; by getting them (and others) to pay for promotions and data services; and even by competing with them directly, by making its own deals with artists,” or whether it has the know-how to turn the industry upside down all over again.

So, too, the sign industry is facing disruption. I have talked to owners who are sprinting toward digital marketing services and website creation. It’s not news that many signshops are adding digital printers and finding ways of creatively using their old machines (ask around at the ISA Sign Expo, and someone will doubtless be able to explain this). Everyone, or nearly everyone, offers vinyl, and installers have become so sought-after that I’ve heard of companies that hesitate to pay for training, fearing their newly skilled employee will simply open up shop down the road. Kind of like how Netflix built an audience of TV owners, then began dropping studio content and producing its own shows. Surprise, Hollywood!

What’s the surprise, then, for the sign industry? Perhaps it’s that signmaking has come to mean so many different things to so many different people. There are certainly challenges – just look at the contraction in the retail industry, for starters – but I’m looking forward to spending 2018 exploring this question.