Capitaux immatériels: nouveau centre de gravité de la future économie de la culture?

The industrialization of cultural activities and the increasing weight of cultural industries are pushing researchers to reconsider the field of cultural activities in terms of «creative industries». In fact, cultural economics has to match the emergence of digital technologies and the shifting of digitalized cultural goods into the networks' economy: the appropriation of revenues mechanisms and of balance between downstream and upstream are challenged, although a new «long tail» law of distribution is gaining ground. The resulting trivialization of cultural industries is deeply transforming the traditional economic models of culture and their hybrids around two poles: eventization and mediatization, in the heart of which one can discover that informational goods are prevailing in importance over contents. The platforms'economy, at first established by the digital distribution, actually highlights the main features of the new cultural economics, built on the interactions between creation and consumption of informational goods, the relevance of immaterial assets as innovation, human capital, marketing, R&D: from which we can just estimate the creativeness of cultural economics.