Cultural industries: The innovation lab for the entire digital economy - including AI?

The cultural industries are both drivers and laboratories for innovation in the digital economy, particularly at the artificial intelligence (AI) age. This role is not limited to their economic weight but also for the unique ways they shape social and technological developments, by anticipating and revealing developments that are likely to spread across the economy as a whole. The major digital platforms contribute to centralize value creation and distribution within digital ecosystems, addressing the issue of value sharing between players with different leverage. Platforms now control content and user interactions, pushing traditional cultural models towards new subscription-based and aggregated-content formats that fundamentally change consumer habits. This momentum is growing even stronger with the generative AI, which automates creative processes and questions intellectual property, allowance, and the role of creators in an automated environment. As they act as both content curators and recommendation engines, the role and influence of platforms in the cultural economy are strengthened by the data they do have at their disposal and by the control they wield over information. The response to these shifts requires structural adaptation within cultural industries, bolstered by public policy to foster creative technologies aligned with the sector's unique needs. Regulation is essential to balance platform dominance, protect creative integrity, and ensure a fair and transparent value-sharing system, all of which are critical for sustaining competition and innovation in the digital age.