Shorter attention span these days. Viewers want a payoff immediately and don't want to wait a whole season.
Aside from streaming, commercial breaks are getting longer and episode content shorter. Content is only half the runtime now. If they put a rerun between each new episode, viewers stay engaged, but they get a whole bunch more commercial spaces for free.
We can't even have books any more to get content at our own pace. AI is going to produce too much crap to sort through, unless you stick to the known authors, but that just confirms this article's point.
> AI is going to produce too much crap to sort through
There will be money to be made in manual curation again soon.
As in magazine style, not influencer style. Where it's not the producer paying for an ad, but the readers paying for the editor doing their job.
If it has been done for writing for a couple hundred years, it can be done for video entertainment as well. It's already done for video games to a point, although some review sites look like payola now.
I think one component of it is the devaluing of writing in the industry. A big issue in the most recent WGA strike (mostly glossed over in favor of obsessing over the AI stuff) was studios pushing really hard to turn writing into one-off gig work instead of a stable position. A lot of successful shows have a first season that is lackluster or just plain "off" because they hadn't figured out what the show was actually about, and I suspect that excessive commoditization of the writing process is a recipe for producing that "weird first season" every season.
Devaluating writers probably hurts, but you see the "weird first season" even in older shows. The 1960s series Get Smart and Dick Van Dyke Show had first seasons that were much weaker than what the show would become, to cite a couple of examples. There probably is no substitute for a period of getting your sea legs under you as a writer.
What I'm saying is that I suspect writers need to be attached to a specific show for a while for that seasoning/maturity/"sea legs" process to happen for the show. I don't think it works if there's just a procession of people who only write one or two episodes and then move on to other shows.
To be fair, there is the odd exception where one writer just single-handedly cranks out the scripts (e.g. Joe Straczynski writing all of season 3 of Babylon 5), but that's the exception for a reason.
>when do we get the next alias that has 24 episodes a season and 8 or 9 seasons
When? It'll be 3 years late when you discover a cult classic that was canceled for abysmal ratings after 6 episodes. Which is why they'll never make it.
I have no data to back me up, so take this with a big pinch of salt.
But I think perhaps the top 10 only seems more dominant because the long tail is so much longer and deeper. For example, my 10 year old son prefers to listen to obscure electronic music on Spotify (tracks with fewer than 10K listens), over Taylor Swift or Muse.
I think for music that certainly seems likely - 99% of my listening is artists who I will never hear on the radio. Books too, probably. But I don't know how relevant that is for something like movies. Outside of the occasional independent theatres, movies force us into a relatively limited selection. But if anything that media is becoming irrelevant as new media like YouTube and Twitch rises to prominence.
I would argue even with movies it holds true. 30 years ago, it was very difficult and expensive to buy, say, 1950s film noir. Now it takes 5 minutes to torrent.
Perhaps this is what's going on. It's hard for new obscure stuff to make money and so there's less of it, but old obscure stuff (which doesn't need to make money) is more popular than ever.
The problem is how compensation works in streaming. Those long tail artists are now paid less than they would make off of a few hundred CD sales. The Taylor Swifts and Muses of the world still get the bulk of the subscription you pay every month.
These long tail artists almost didn't sell their albums before streaming though. I've always been into obscure music since I was a teenager, to find it I'd have to dig through many record stores' bins, and get lucky enough to get my hands on second hand stuff. There was never a place they were stocked (perhaps except for some local store around where the artists' themselves were located).
When piracy came along I had access to a lot more music I had only heard about, or heard from a friend's bootleg recording that was a copy of a copy of a cassette tape someone had. Streaming happened and I felt much better than having to pirate some poor souls hard work.
Bandcamp is still there for selling albums digitally which is much better for not popular artists to reach their fans than the old ways.
Music was never compensated enough for the work done, it's always been tough, the culprit is not streaming.
Independent music and independent publishing was, in my opinion, thriving even just 25 years ago in a rhizome of record shops and small venues which are getting stomped on by streaming culture and ecommerce platforms. It was certainly always hard, but also certainly doable if you put the work in to make the economics of it possible. It seems like now the same energy is going into carving out a following on ad-driven social media and streaming platforms, plus a dozen small side-hustles.
What I'm hopeful about though is that things like patreon are making the idea of supporting artists you appreciate directly somewhat more normal, but streaming platforms are not doing any favors for musicians in my opinion.
> The problem is how compensation works in streaming.
That may be ONE problem.
I think a more serious problem is that small venues are closing. It's partly gentrifcation, forcing residents into neighbourhoods that were formerly industrial (and so allowed noise). The new residents complain about noise, and a venue that's been running for 40 years gets shuttered.
That's not it. You need to pony up a few thousand dollars for a minimum CD order. Back then selling a few hundred CDs meant you broke even. Distribution was via your shows or email lists and mailing them.
Now distribution to the entire world is basically free and you don't need to pony up money to print CDs.
Anyone pining for the way things used to be, wasn't there and is looking through rose colored glasses.
Thats definitely what's happening, at least with music. When radio was dominant, the "hot 100" lists were pretty diverse because everyone was exposed to the same set of ~70-150 hit songs every year, that were curated by record companies and radio stations. This system let weirder or more ambitious music occasionally trickle to the top. Without everyone listening to the same programming, the only artists that can be the most popular are the most widely appealing musicians.
Agreed. I upvoted the article because I think it's interesting to consider, but a statement like "the number of artists on the Billboard Hot 100 has been decreasing for decades" is entirely compatible with the notion that the proportion of the population listening to the long tail rather than the artists on the Billboard 100 could be higher than ever. Taylor Swift is big, but she's still no Michael Jackson or The Beatles in terms of cultural penetration, and probably never will be.
I agree with the long tail part, but goths rose to a subculture status that most things never will again.
A meme with a short shelf life is the most external acknowledgement most subcultures will see these days. Usually it's just mocking a caricature of the people who have that shared trait and are also obnoxious enough to gain social media prominence. And nobody ever really believed it was representative of the thing in the first place (unless you're in traditional media, in which case it's taken as axiomatic).
Yep, this is my impression as well. The article seemed very dissonant to what I actually see when comparing between pop culture during my 90s childhood and today.
Just to take one top of mind example: Recently when watching TV with my kids, we've been going down a "science and engineering" youtuber rabbit hole, and I think there is essentially no end to it. There are at least tens of popular creators in this genre, and hundreds, maybe thousands, of people doing it. When I was a kid, essentially this entire segment of pop culture was comprised of Bill Nye.
And I see this all over the place. We had Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera. Now there are hundreds of singers in a niche like that who have a following.
So which of these worlds is the oligopoly? Not the one today, I think...
I think the problem here is with the definition of "pop culture" that the article is using. It's true that lots of segments of pop culture that were dominant in the past have been hollowed out. But pop culture has itself just massively broadened out.
I think that's very true. And it applies to film and other media as well. There's vastly more content available to far larger audiences than ever. There may very well be more concentration on the business side, but not on the creative side. I watched American Fiction on Prime Video this week and it was really outstanding. It turned a modest profit on a $10M budget at the box office which makes it barely a blip on box office records, but on the flip side it's the kind of film that would have had zero chance of getting made 30+ years ago.
On an individual level, the way to solve it is to stop watching the popular stuff and go with indie-made things. In general, it's a good idea to consume less media anyway.
On a cultural level, the key is to promote local productions. Those will never get popular, but at least the local community will gain a better sense of connection through the artistic expressions of their community members. So for example: photo exhibitions, short film screenings, art galleries, all tailored to local productions.
Personally, I have no interest in the formulaic garbage coming from the pseudo-anonymous void.
> On an individual level, the way to solve it is to stop watching the popular stuff and go with indie-made things. On a cultural level, the key is to promote local productions.
You’re not wrong, but these are mostly untenable solutions at present.
The reason this situation has come to be is because of the newsfeed algorithms (pick your app) that sanitize or destroy local and niche influence/barriers and create a deep downhill rut towards amalgamated culture.
If our feeds only showed us what our followers post, the way it used to be, as opposed to showing us not-so-random content from all across the country/world, we wouldn’t have this problem so severely
Sounds a bit pessimistic. It has never been that easy to create music, videogames, produce videos, comics, and distribute them. Nowadays basically anyone can do it, so the amount of content available is gigantic. Moreover, alternative ways of getting money have appeared: patreon, kickstarter, various donation websites, partnerships...
On top of that there are still countless communities, free of any monetized algorithm, thanks to forums and things like discord.
So I think that it's more "tenable" than ever, and I don't thing that the cultural situation is worse than it was before, actually I think it's way better. It's just so easy to find a new think to dive into, connect to other hobbyists, discuss it, and for the most motivated, create content.
> It has never been that easy to create music, videogames, produce videos, comics, and distribute them. Nowadays basically anyone can do it, so the amount of content available is gigantic.
And they all compete in one giant global marketplace, which often undermines the viability of "local productions."
There's probably some counter-intuitive principle that infinite choice has a homogenizing effect. It's probably because people generally lazy, but historically have lived in environments with more barriers to that laziness that kept it in check (e.g. no one's becoming a solo game playing hikikomori in 1800, because they'd quickly become bored out of their minds). In the past local culture was unavoidable and required no special effort, because of travel and communication barriers. How the travel and communication barriers are gone, which means local culture requires special effort to maintain, and the lazy will hook into the homogenized culture that requires less effort.
> On top of that there are still countless communities, free or any monetized algorithms, thanks to forums and things like discord.
IIRC, forums have been dying off for a decade or more.
I have this occasional daydream of two internets, one global (the one we all know and love), and one local, where you can only see content from within a 10 mile radius.
> no one's becoming a solo game playing hikikomori in 1800
John Bentinck, fifth Duke of Portland? He had England's biggest ballroom built, and a billiard room with multiple billiard tables, but never threw a party, hated meeting people, and lived underground. He had all the above ground rooms in Welbeck Abbey painted bright pink, with a toilet in the corner of each one. Any workman who acknowledged he existed was dismissed.
The problem with discord is that there is no permanence or visibility to it on the open internet. This is both good and bad. You can't search for problems you are trying to solve unless you are part of that discord server. Communities can get deleted and that's that. On the other hand it is more private and there is a direct connection rather than waiting for people to respond to your post.
The problem is same as it has always been, getting old.
I have got old now and the medium of artistic expression that young people are into is not the same as when I was young.
In 40 years old people will complain no one makes crazy tiktok videos like they use to.
Of course in the moment, no one considers social media videos art. Just like at one point rap was noise, rock music was noise, the electric guitar was noise.
William S Burroughs, jazz, blues, on and on back.
Same narrative over and over by old people. "My youth was filled with high art while kids these days like such trash."
The way it used to be was that, if you wanted a newsfeed, you had to pay a curation company to print you off some stories and leave them on your doorstep in the morning. The era of non-algorithmic social media feeds was maybe 5 years long if I’m being generous, and I’m skeptical it could have become load bearing in that time.
> You’re not wrong, but these are mostly untenable solutions at present.
In the past, it was a lot worse. There was a lot more "shared culture" that seemingly everyone tuned in to, that you kind of had to grin and bear. If you didn't know what happened on Seinfeld last night (90s), or on the Simpsons (2000s), or Game of Thrones (2010s), then you really had nothing to talk about at the water cooler. Nowadays, there really isn't much popular stuff that -everyone- watches, so it's easier than ever to drop that popular stuff.
A sticky notable exception is still national sports. There's still so much shared pop culture in knowing what the local city's Sportsball team sportsed about during last night's game that you have to kind of put up with if you want to socialize at the water cooler.
It both was and wasn't back then. The large pop culture establishment was definitely more shared, TV, film and music for sure. But at the same time you also had more thriving regional culture. There were many musicians who became popular on a regional level and toured medium sized venues in the time before the internet. You don't see that anymore. Indie artists today have more diffused fan bases which makes profitable touring more difficult, among other things like the ticketmaster monopoly. Niche interests were also more localized and personal with small clubs instead of internet based forums like today. That's both a good and bad thing. I think the nature of things has changed but not in a way where you can say definitively everything is more homogenous or heterogeneous.
> On a cultural level, the key is to promote local productions.
If an important selling point for a media product is that it’s locally produced, then it’s probably bad (as local productions usually are).
The real solution imo is just to consume less media. If consuming media takes up a significant portion of your time, then to me that sounds like a fundamentally boring life. I’d recommend one should fix their boring life problem before they start worrying about their boring media problem.
Books are media too. I've been an avid reader from early childhood and I don't consider my life boring. I guess what a "boring life" is, is up to every individual.
That's a fair point about books. But even then, I simply can't relate to a life that revolves around consuming media. There's a lot of great movies and TV shows as well, but I don't know how you can spend so much time watching TV (or even reading books) that you run out of stuff to watch (or read), and still manage to lead a rewarding life.
I agree that "I ran out of things to watch/read" is something I find puzzling. There are so many great books, shows, movies, musical compositions, ... I don't know how anyone could ever run out.
I chose those two because they were fairly famous local acts in Texas long before they became nationally famous.
ZZ Top in particular used to open for a lot of bands who would tour Texas. They were noted for bringing along a set of local fans who would help sell tickets for your tour.
2) One must suck before one gets good
If you can't make a living while you notionally "suck", you lose the pipeline to "good". I would, in fact, argue that this is really what is dragging down a lot of our "pop culture" right now. We are finally seeing the results of that pipeline collapsing around Y2K.
There is no "local community," so there is no local production in any meaningful sense anymore. I am nothing like my neighbors, never have been, and have never known very much about them in any of the places I've lived. That suggestion is entirely untenable.
Many indie works suffer from the same formulaic failings as popular works, so that doesn't seem like a solution either. The same old hero story with a black or gay protagonist is not suddenly more interesting, yet that's a large portion of what's coming out of the indie scene.
In the US, there is no solution. We are all shackled to the cultural carcass that is late modernity. Retelling the same stories we have for decades, just with different colors.
> There is no "local community," so there is no local production in any meaningful sense anymore.
This is absolutely not true everywhere in the US. In every place I've lived, there has been local community. More vibrant in some places than others, but always there.
I can't know if that's the case in all parts of the US, but I suspect it's true in the majority.
> I am nothing like my neighbors, never have been, and have never known very much about them in any of the places I've lived.
Perhaps you've been opting not to engage with the local communities you've been in?
Communities that are local =/= local community in a general sense. There are in some places participatory communities that (often older, middle class, family-oriented) people participate in, but I'm not sure those organizations can meaningfully be said to represent the localities they are present in.
When there's a loneliness epidemic that is especially pronounced with young people, it seems really silly to act like local community is a general institution that most people actively participate in. It might be true in your neck of the woods. It is certainly not in mine.
They didn’t say “most people actively participate in” local community. They said people should do more of it, and you replied that there’s no such thing. Sorry you feel that way or that it may (or may not) be true where you live, but bold claims like “local community doesn’t exist,” and ambiguous gesturing toward it never having existed, is both untrue and unhelpful.
I didn't mean to imply said local community has never existed, only that it no longer does. I'm not convinced that the cloistered, middle class, older, and predominantly white communities that exist in every medium to large city are capable of creating art of any substance. And the art they may create certainly could not be said to represent anyone in any general way.
I'm using "local community" as a convenient placeholder for all the various things that count as community-based activities and groups.
> When there's a loneliness epidemic that is especially pronounced with young people, it seems really silly to act like local community is a general institution
One of the reasons for the loneliness epidemic is that people have stopped seeking out and participating in things that get them face-to-face with neighbors. That's a thing only those people can fix for themselves. As a light example, you said
> I am nothing like my neighbors, never have been, and have never known very much about them in any of the places I've lived.
Where in the same breath you both claim that you have nothing in common with your neighbors, and that you have never known very much about them. However, you can't know if you have anything in common with them or not unless you get to know them. A first step toward finding what community exists around you is as simple as making it a point to get to know your neighbors.
I am fairly confident that people's agency is pretty low on the list of reasons why loneliness had reached epidemic proportions. There are very obvious cultural and geographic (and ultimately economic) factors at work that none of us as individuals ever really chose, but which have been decided for us. Anomie is not something that can be overcome through sheer force of will.
I know enough about my neighbors based on small glimpses of their lifestyle to know I will never want to or need to know them. I don't make friends with child abusers. And the reality is that those sorts of value conflicts are commonplace in contemporary American life.
>Many indie works suffer from the same formulaic failings as popular works, so that doesn't seem like a solution either
I think the indie scene for a lot of media is a lot less 'independent' than we might think. This became obvious to me when I noticed the absolutely insane fights that happened on Twitter surrounding young adult literature. (Eg https://reason.com/2019/05/05/teen-fiction-twitter-is-eating...)
Science fiction and fantasy seem to be doing something a bit similar.
I think if you want more independent writers you'll have to go to places like Royalroad or /r/hfy or scribblehub.
> Those will never get popular, but at least the local community will gain a better sense of connection through the artistic expressions of their community members.
I assume you're just spitballing here. Still: what you've proposed often produces an artistic process that is possibly worse than the oligopoly you're attempting to oppose.
Prioritizing "a better sense of connection" through artistic expression is a recipe for manipulating artists into giving away their time (and, perhaps, art) for free or close to it. Moreover, de-emphasizing popularity means the local production has less money coming in. Too few dollars chasing "a better sense of connection" essentially means you'll optimized for the most manipulative ego-maniacs to hound local artists to mentor and make art for less than what they are worth.
Worst of all, the artists who get manipulated and burned out by this process aren't the ones who would have produced "garbage coming from the pseudo-anonymous void." They're the ones who would have done local community productions that have enough money to pay a minimally decent amount of money to artists. Ironically, you end up with less enthusiasm for the kind of art you're wanting to produce.
Whoa, what a weird take. I'm talking about stuff like starting a local photo club/drawing club/etc and sharing your work with like-minded people and starting exhibitions in your local town. Voluntary.
You make it sound like some weird manipulation scheme. Sounds like you've never actually done anything like this in real life.
This kind of thing always just reads as "I don't like what is in pop culture," mostly because while these metrics tell one story, the tails of the culture are bigger than they have ever been. Pop culture looks so shitty because people don't depend on it the same way they used to.
Even if there is content, statistically there is no pressure to change the whole picture.
Spotify pays less and less for niches.
Algorithms recommend more and more superstars.
People are not prepared to pay for the niche individuals more than they need to.
These individuals have harder time to make a living from that. They cannot focus on that. Over time, there is less and less individuals.
Is it true that there’s less and less individuals? All of the niche interests I personally have are much, much easier to satisfy now than they were 20 years ago - many of them have multiple full time content creators dedicated to that specific niche.
Publishing the content is as easy as it gets
, that is true.
But there are less people who can fully invest their time for that. They don't get enough compensation.
Most of the growth in these spaces has been cultivated by the massive marketing power of these titans. I think viewing this as oligopolies taking over culture is misleading, rather, these massive corporations have invested huge marketing budgets into bringing consumers into the market, and the net result is that they now make up the glut of it. To use an analogy to the internet, it's not that all the intelligent discussion, homespun websites, and intimate message boards have disappeared, rather, they have been dwarfed by the influx of new people who were not participating in these spaces before they were lured in by the forces of the attention economy. This is "eternal September" writ large across the cultural landscape.
Isn't pop[ular] culture necessarily an oligopoly, in that in any sort of popularity-driven competition, popular things will always win out over less popular things?
> oligopoly: a state of limited competition, in which a market is shared by a small number of producers or sellers.
(That's an honest question, not a concrete stance.)
I think this analysis is missing something: how much money is being made per hit, and how many people are consuming it? In TV, at least, the numbers are way down. As a result, people play it safe by doing remakes.
The article briefly mentions “Hollywood greediness” as one of the possible explanations people give for the phenomenon and then switches to describe other factors.
However, this greediness to get more money from production is also reflected in risk aversion. Look it from the point of an investor: option 1 invests 10 million in a new sci-fi production with an exciting plot, and Option 2 invest 10 million in a franchise with a crappy plot. The chances of getting a more significant return from 2 are higher.
The same happens with music and other art forms.
That’s why it’s important to have incentives for local and indie productions. Many times, the critics of those incentives point out that they are biased and contrary to the “free market”. But I don’t see any other way to bring balance to the force.
Risk profiles change though. Option 1 was a better bet in the late 1970s and early '80s, when the Old Hollywood franchises had been thoroughly wrung out and demand was there for new experiences.
Anytime these discussions pop up, it's good to link to the documentary "Everything is a Remix" (here is the 2023 updated version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9RYuvPCQUA" )
It highlights how essentially everything in culture is a remix of some previous version of the culture (or some aspect of it). E.g. even language is largely a remix of earlier languages with some occasional creation of new words.
Also, while true that there is definitely an oligopoly, it's also clear that the Long Tail is both huge AND easy to access. In the past, you could only see movies by going to the movie theater and there were only a limited number of theaters. Now, you can both create and consume media in niches as small (or combined) as you want.
Part of me thinks that the law should be changed so that IP covers works but not "universes". E.g. only Disney would have the right to distribute A New Hope but anyone could create their own work set in the Star Wars universe.
This would better match the way that popular culture has worked throughout most of history where anyone could create a story about King Arthur, Robin Hood, or Sun Wukong.
There would probably need to be some sort of protections to prevent corporations from simply scooping up independent artist's work. However, that seems like something that could be worked out.
However, that seems like something that could be worked out.
That’s a pretty heavy lift for that poor sentence. The way it “works out” in my mind is that the instant an indie work pokes its head above water, Disney sweeps in and makes a franchise out of it without payment to the artist. Because your proposal works both directions.
A franchise could only become open for unauthorized developers once it has made a certain inflation adjusted revenue, or once a franchise has works created by more than a certain number of artists.
Or these changes could simply only apply to corporations. So individuals could own franchise IP but corporations could not. Or corporations would be required to compensate the original creator but independent artists would not.
It's not necessary to make a perfect system. Just one that is better than our current dysfunctional system where corporations own most of our culture.
I have no strong opinion on the premise, but the cherry-picked data in this article is... on par with what I expect from a random Substack blog, which is to say god-awful.
The most obvious offender is in the music section, where he points out that hits per famous artist have been increasing, but then ignores the chart right below that in his source (https://towardsdatascience.com/hot-or-not-analyzing-60-years...), which states that tracks stay on the chart for about 5x shorter than they used to. If there are 5x more chart-topping songs, more of them will be from famous artists, who would've thought!?
Television section relies on Nielsen and it's written in the same year when Nielsen lost its license for underreporting (they have regained it since). The books section relies on LitHub, which wasn't particularly interested in YA fiction and non-fiction, so they didn't include them. So, it's not all the books, but only "adult" fiction books.
I think that piece of data reinforces the point. If the "stayers" fall off the charts faster, there ought to be no reason, outside the oligopoly argument, to presume that the replacements would be from the same set of artists. Were it not the same stuff over and over again, wouldn't you expect something novel (i.e. some other artist) to replace them, at some level? But, it doesn't look like that's what happens, and also that it's happening less frequently than it once did.
> Were it not the same stuff over and over again, wouldn't you expect something novel (i.e. some other artist) to replace them, at some level?
Well, they do? It's clearly visible from the "number of artists on the chart" that the number has been steadily increasing back up since its 2012 low. I'd also say that more modern artists like Lil Wayne and Drake are far more likely to record a verse in someone else's track than the Beatles, which also makes drawn conclusions pretty meaningless.
But even if none of that were true, yes, I still believe more songs = more songs performed by the most popular artists. I don't think any chart-topping artist from decades ago could compare to, say, Taylor Swift's 4 original albums and 4 re-recorded albums released within the past 5 years! That alone explains, what, 50, a hundred of chart-topping songs by one artist?
The only thing I'm convinced from looking at a source is these three things: 1) musicians release way more stuff than they used to, 2) musicians collab way more often, and 3) songs that end up on these charts stay there for much shorter. Or to summarise it in one claim: trends come and go at a much faster pace than they used to.
For a non-music example of this speed, just check out Fallout. Released barely over 2 months ago, critically aclaimed, nearly everyone liked it... and now, just two months later, who's talking about it?
I won't disagree with your summary. Points 1 and 3 are more supported than point 2, but "trends come and go more quickly" seems both intuitively correct, and supported by the data.
> Until the year 2000, about 25% of top-grossing movies were prequels, sequels, spinoffs, remakes, reboots, or cinematic universe expansions. Since 2010, it’s been over 50% ever year. In recent years, it’s been close to 100%.
Coincidentally, it was about then (2010) that I stopped going to mainstream movies. Or perhaps not so coincidentally. I stopped because I stopped liking the movies that I did see, and perhaps that list explains why.
Instead of going out to the movies, I started going out to see live theater.
And eventually, the model sinks. Just look at Disney. It may take another decade or more, but either they will shift their approach, or they will die and get split up and sold off.
The most interesting cultural artifacts have always been media…in large part because that was all which has survived since antiquity, excepting a few lucky buildings.
But this is not necessarily inherent to media.
Perhaps the most interesting, long-standing cultural artifacts we are currently creating are not in the realm of media at all.
Space travel
The internet
Generative AI
Even though movies are undoubtedly dominated by a few stars, I don’t think the legacy of our time will be the movie Legally Blonde 2. When people think about the period 1950-2050, they will write more about the rise of companies which were capable of mass producing intelligent and what people did with them.
The article doesn't cover the most relevant part (and a huge contributing factor, imo): that most media products at that scale are simply investment vehicles. The first and often the only thing you hear about some blockbuster movie is how much money it made at the box office. Studio execs evaluate potential projects primarily by their potential to generate a return.
No surprise this leads to reruns and repeats, as everything slowly turns into multicoloured sludge. Investors look back at Super Movie VIII, and fund Super Movie IX because they can be reasonably confident in making a 100% profit. [1]
To be so immensely popular, these products have cater to the lowest common denominator. They're optimized for sellability, not quality. The "stars" come and go as their arcs play out, but the studios behind them remain a constant. The most successful ones make stock market insider-trading politicians look like children in a sandbox. They just pump out the sausage, sell it at a 100% mark up, and we gobble it up because it's pre-chewed and an easy distraction from the daily struggles.
This doesn't explain why this has started happening in the last 40 years for media types that have existed for far longer than that. Even movies have been around for long enough to build up a large catalogue and for investors to catch on, so why didn't we start seeing a rise in remakes and sequels until recently?
134 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 216 ms ] threadAside from streaming, commercial breaks are getting longer and episode content shorter. Content is only half the runtime now. If they put a rerun between each new episode, viewers stay engaged, but they get a whole bunch more commercial spaces for free.
We can't even have books any more to get content at our own pace. AI is going to produce too much crap to sort through, unless you stick to the known authors, but that just confirms this article's point.
There will be money to be made in manual curation again soon.
As in magazine style, not influencer style. Where it's not the producer paying for an ad, but the readers paying for the editor doing their job.
If it has been done for writing for a couple hundred years, it can be done for video entertainment as well. It's already done for video games to a point, although some review sites look like payola now.
To be fair, there is the odd exception where one writer just single-handedly cranks out the scripts (e.g. Joe Straczynski writing all of season 3 of Babylon 5), but that's the exception for a reason.
When? It'll be 3 years late when you discover a cult classic that was canceled for abysmal ratings after 6 episodes. Which is why they'll never make it.
But I think perhaps the top 10 only seems more dominant because the long tail is so much longer and deeper. For example, my 10 year old son prefers to listen to obscure electronic music on Spotify (tracks with fewer than 10K listens), over Taylor Swift or Muse.
We are all goths now.
Perhaps this is what's going on. It's hard for new obscure stuff to make money and so there's less of it, but old obscure stuff (which doesn't need to make money) is more popular than ever.
When piracy came along I had access to a lot more music I had only heard about, or heard from a friend's bootleg recording that was a copy of a copy of a cassette tape someone had. Streaming happened and I felt much better than having to pirate some poor souls hard work.
Bandcamp is still there for selling albums digitally which is much better for not popular artists to reach their fans than the old ways.
Music was never compensated enough for the work done, it's always been tough, the culprit is not streaming.
What I'm hopeful about though is that things like patreon are making the idea of supporting artists you appreciate directly somewhat more normal, but streaming platforms are not doing any favors for musicians in my opinion.
That may be ONE problem.
I think a more serious problem is that small venues are closing. It's partly gentrifcation, forcing residents into neighbourhoods that were formerly industrial (and so allowed noise). The new residents complain about noise, and a venue that's been running for 40 years gets shuttered.
Now distribution to the entire world is basically free and you don't need to pony up money to print CDs.
Anyone pining for the way things used to be, wasn't there and is looking through rose colored glasses.
I agree with the long tail part, but goths rose to a subculture status that most things never will again.
A meme with a short shelf life is the most external acknowledgement most subcultures will see these days. Usually it's just mocking a caricature of the people who have that shared trait and are also obnoxious enough to gain social media prominence. And nobody ever really believed it was representative of the thing in the first place (unless you're in traditional media, in which case it's taken as axiomatic).
I suspected it was contagious when I first saw a Hot Topic and mall goths oh so many years ago.
Just to take one top of mind example: Recently when watching TV with my kids, we've been going down a "science and engineering" youtuber rabbit hole, and I think there is essentially no end to it. There are at least tens of popular creators in this genre, and hundreds, maybe thousands, of people doing it. When I was a kid, essentially this entire segment of pop culture was comprised of Bill Nye.
And I see this all over the place. We had Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera. Now there are hundreds of singers in a niche like that who have a following.
So which of these worlds is the oligopoly? Not the one today, I think...
I think the problem here is with the definition of "pop culture" that the article is using. It's true that lots of segments of pop culture that were dominant in the past have been hollowed out. But pop culture has itself just massively broadened out.
On a cultural level, the key is to promote local productions. Those will never get popular, but at least the local community will gain a better sense of connection through the artistic expressions of their community members. So for example: photo exhibitions, short film screenings, art galleries, all tailored to local productions.
Personally, I have no interest in the formulaic garbage coming from the pseudo-anonymous void.
You’re not wrong, but these are mostly untenable solutions at present.
The reason this situation has come to be is because of the newsfeed algorithms (pick your app) that sanitize or destroy local and niche influence/barriers and create a deep downhill rut towards amalgamated culture.
If our feeds only showed us what our followers post, the way it used to be, as opposed to showing us not-so-random content from all across the country/world, we wouldn’t have this problem so severely
On top of that there are still countless communities, free of any monetized algorithm, thanks to forums and things like discord.
So I think that it's more "tenable" than ever, and I don't thing that the cultural situation is worse than it was before, actually I think it's way better. It's just so easy to find a new think to dive into, connect to other hobbyists, discuss it, and for the most motivated, create content.
And legitimately so.
> It has never been that easy to create music, videogames, produce videos, comics, and distribute them. Nowadays basically anyone can do it, so the amount of content available is gigantic.
And they all compete in one giant global marketplace, which often undermines the viability of "local productions."
There's probably some counter-intuitive principle that infinite choice has a homogenizing effect. It's probably because people generally lazy, but historically have lived in environments with more barriers to that laziness that kept it in check (e.g. no one's becoming a solo game playing hikikomori in 1800, because they'd quickly become bored out of their minds). In the past local culture was unavoidable and required no special effort, because of travel and communication barriers. How the travel and communication barriers are gone, which means local culture requires special effort to maintain, and the lazy will hook into the homogenized culture that requires less effort.
> On top of that there are still countless communities, free or any monetized algorithms, thanks to forums and things like discord.
IIRC, forums have been dying off for a decade or more.
And they'll keep "dying off" for many more decades.
John Bentinck, fifth Duke of Portland? He had England's biggest ballroom built, and a billiard room with multiple billiard tables, but never threw a party, hated meeting people, and lived underground. He had all the above ground rooms in Welbeck Abbey painted bright pink, with a toilet in the corner of each one. Any workman who acknowledged he existed was dismissed.
I have got old now and the medium of artistic expression that young people are into is not the same as when I was young.
In 40 years old people will complain no one makes crazy tiktok videos like they use to.
Of course in the moment, no one considers social media videos art. Just like at one point rap was noise, rock music was noise, the electric guitar was noise. William S Burroughs, jazz, blues, on and on back.
Same narrative over and over by old people. "My youth was filled with high art while kids these days like such trash."
In the past, it was a lot worse. There was a lot more "shared culture" that seemingly everyone tuned in to, that you kind of had to grin and bear. If you didn't know what happened on Seinfeld last night (90s), or on the Simpsons (2000s), or Game of Thrones (2010s), then you really had nothing to talk about at the water cooler. Nowadays, there really isn't much popular stuff that -everyone- watches, so it's easier than ever to drop that popular stuff.
A sticky notable exception is still national sports. There's still so much shared pop culture in knowing what the local city's Sportsball team sportsed about during last night's game that you have to kind of put up with if you want to socialize at the water cooler.
If an important selling point for a media product is that it’s locally produced, then it’s probably bad (as local productions usually are).
The real solution imo is just to consume less media. If consuming media takes up a significant portion of your time, then to me that sounds like a fundamentally boring life. I’d recommend one should fix their boring life problem before they start worrying about their boring media problem.
I chose those two because they were fairly famous local acts in Texas long before they became nationally famous.
ZZ Top in particular used to open for a lot of bands who would tour Texas. They were noted for bringing along a set of local fans who would help sell tickets for your tour.
2) One must suck before one gets good
If you can't make a living while you notionally "suck", you lose the pipeline to "good". I would, in fact, argue that this is really what is dragging down a lot of our "pop culture" right now. We are finally seeing the results of that pipeline collapsing around Y2K.
Many indie works suffer from the same formulaic failings as popular works, so that doesn't seem like a solution either. The same old hero story with a black or gay protagonist is not suddenly more interesting, yet that's a large portion of what's coming out of the indie scene.
In the US, there is no solution. We are all shackled to the cultural carcass that is late modernity. Retelling the same stories we have for decades, just with different colors.
This is absolutely not true everywhere in the US. In every place I've lived, there has been local community. More vibrant in some places than others, but always there.
I can't know if that's the case in all parts of the US, but I suspect it's true in the majority.
> I am nothing like my neighbors, never have been, and have never known very much about them in any of the places I've lived.
Perhaps you've been opting not to engage with the local communities you've been in?
When there's a loneliness epidemic that is especially pronounced with young people, it seems really silly to act like local community is a general institution that most people actively participate in. It might be true in your neck of the woods. It is certainly not in mine.
> When there's a loneliness epidemic that is especially pronounced with young people, it seems really silly to act like local community is a general institution
One of the reasons for the loneliness epidemic is that people have stopped seeking out and participating in things that get them face-to-face with neighbors. That's a thing only those people can fix for themselves. As a light example, you said
> I am nothing like my neighbors, never have been, and have never known very much about them in any of the places I've lived.
Where in the same breath you both claim that you have nothing in common with your neighbors, and that you have never known very much about them. However, you can't know if you have anything in common with them or not unless you get to know them. A first step toward finding what community exists around you is as simple as making it a point to get to know your neighbors.
I know enough about my neighbors based on small glimpses of their lifestyle to know I will never want to or need to know them. I don't make friends with child abusers. And the reality is that those sorts of value conflicts are commonplace in contemporary American life.
I think the indie scene for a lot of media is a lot less 'independent' than we might think. This became obvious to me when I noticed the absolutely insane fights that happened on Twitter surrounding young adult literature. (Eg https://reason.com/2019/05/05/teen-fiction-twitter-is-eating...)
Science fiction and fantasy seem to be doing something a bit similar.
I think if you want more independent writers you'll have to go to places like Royalroad or /r/hfy or scribblehub.
I assume you're just spitballing here. Still: what you've proposed often produces an artistic process that is possibly worse than the oligopoly you're attempting to oppose.
Prioritizing "a better sense of connection" through artistic expression is a recipe for manipulating artists into giving away their time (and, perhaps, art) for free or close to it. Moreover, de-emphasizing popularity means the local production has less money coming in. Too few dollars chasing "a better sense of connection" essentially means you'll optimized for the most manipulative ego-maniacs to hound local artists to mentor and make art for less than what they are worth.
Worst of all, the artists who get manipulated and burned out by this process aren't the ones who would have produced "garbage coming from the pseudo-anonymous void." They're the ones who would have done local community productions that have enough money to pay a minimally decent amount of money to artists. Ironically, you end up with less enthusiasm for the kind of art you're wanting to produce.
You make it sound like some weird manipulation scheme. Sounds like you've never actually done anything like this in real life.
The problem is pop culture gives everyone a shared interest to talk about and contributes to social cohesion.
Imagine talking with your friends about Jaws, or Nirvana when they first came out.
I can still find quality content but the people I can talk with it about are limited.
Pop culture provided sort of a commonality between people where we could unite over various pieces of art.
Now we have sports though.
Note how you don't apply any term that would imply you'd be discerning or have agency, like viewer or god forbid customer.
And you don't call the 'content' art, entertainment or anything like that.
When was it not?
Spotify pays less and less for niches. Algorithms recommend more and more superstars.
People are not prepared to pay for the niche individuals more than they need to. These individuals have harder time to make a living from that. They cannot focus on that. Over time, there is less and less individuals.
The studios are going to die. You don't need their capital to build your vision.
> oligopoly: a state of limited competition, in which a market is shared by a small number of producers or sellers.
(That's an honest question, not a concrete stance.)
However, this greediness to get more money from production is also reflected in risk aversion. Look it from the point of an investor: option 1 invests 10 million in a new sci-fi production with an exciting plot, and Option 2 invest 10 million in a franchise with a crappy plot. The chances of getting a more significant return from 2 are higher.
The same happens with music and other art forms.
That’s why it’s important to have incentives for local and indie productions. Many times, the critics of those incentives point out that they are biased and contrary to the “free market”. But I don’t see any other way to bring balance to the force.
It highlights how essentially everything in culture is a remix of some previous version of the culture (or some aspect of it). E.g. even language is largely a remix of earlier languages with some occasional creation of new words.
Also, while true that there is definitely an oligopoly, it's also clear that the Long Tail is both huge AND easy to access. In the past, you could only see movies by going to the movie theater and there were only a limited number of theaters. Now, you can both create and consume media in niches as small (or combined) as you want.
This would better match the way that popular culture has worked throughout most of history where anyone could create a story about King Arthur, Robin Hood, or Sun Wukong.
There would probably need to be some sort of protections to prevent corporations from simply scooping up independent artist's work. However, that seems like something that could be worked out.
That’s a pretty heavy lift for that poor sentence. The way it “works out” in my mind is that the instant an indie work pokes its head above water, Disney sweeps in and makes a franchise out of it without payment to the artist. Because your proposal works both directions.
A franchise could only become open for unauthorized developers once it has made a certain inflation adjusted revenue, or once a franchise has works created by more than a certain number of artists.
Or these changes could simply only apply to corporations. So individuals could own franchise IP but corporations could not. Or corporations would be required to compensate the original creator but independent artists would not.
It's not necessary to make a perfect system. Just one that is better than our current dysfunctional system where corporations own most of our culture.
Historically culture has relied as much on retelling the same stories (with slight modifications) as it has on creating related ones.
The most obvious offender is in the music section, where he points out that hits per famous artist have been increasing, but then ignores the chart right below that in his source (https://towardsdatascience.com/hot-or-not-analyzing-60-years...), which states that tracks stay on the chart for about 5x shorter than they used to. If there are 5x more chart-topping songs, more of them will be from famous artists, who would've thought!?
Television section relies on Nielsen and it's written in the same year when Nielsen lost its license for underreporting (they have regained it since). The books section relies on LitHub, which wasn't particularly interested in YA fiction and non-fiction, so they didn't include them. So, it's not all the books, but only "adult" fiction books.
Well, they do? It's clearly visible from the "number of artists on the chart" that the number has been steadily increasing back up since its 2012 low. I'd also say that more modern artists like Lil Wayne and Drake are far more likely to record a verse in someone else's track than the Beatles, which also makes drawn conclusions pretty meaningless.
But even if none of that were true, yes, I still believe more songs = more songs performed by the most popular artists. I don't think any chart-topping artist from decades ago could compare to, say, Taylor Swift's 4 original albums and 4 re-recorded albums released within the past 5 years! That alone explains, what, 50, a hundred of chart-topping songs by one artist?
The only thing I'm convinced from looking at a source is these three things: 1) musicians release way more stuff than they used to, 2) musicians collab way more often, and 3) songs that end up on these charts stay there for much shorter. Or to summarise it in one claim: trends come and go at a much faster pace than they used to.
For a non-music example of this speed, just check out Fallout. Released barely over 2 months ago, critically aclaimed, nearly everyone liked it... and now, just two months later, who's talking about it?
I don't see how that negates their argument. Can you elaborate?
Coincidentally, it was about then (2010) that I stopped going to mainstream movies. Or perhaps not so coincidentally. I stopped because I stopped liking the movies that I did see, and perhaps that list explains why.
Instead of going out to the movies, I started going out to see live theater.
Maybe a new spaghetti (noodle?) superhero movie genre emerges…
The 20th century was the century of Bernays.
https://theconversation.com/the-manipulation-of-the-american...
In the 20th century, teenagers were invented. Their purpose? An advertising target.
https://www.ushistory.org/us/46c.asp
The pop culture in the article seems to mostly be the culture of teenagers. This was always an entirely constructed racket.
But this is not necessarily inherent to media.
Perhaps the most interesting, long-standing cultural artifacts we are currently creating are not in the realm of media at all.
Space travel The internet Generative AI
Even though movies are undoubtedly dominated by a few stars, I don’t think the legacy of our time will be the movie Legally Blonde 2. When people think about the period 1950-2050, they will write more about the rise of companies which were capable of mass producing intelligent and what people did with them.
No surprise this leads to reruns and repeats, as everything slowly turns into multicoloured sludge. Investors look back at Super Movie VIII, and fund Super Movie IX because they can be reasonably confident in making a 100% profit. [1]
To be so immensely popular, these products have cater to the lowest common denominator. They're optimized for sellability, not quality. The "stars" come and go as their arcs play out, but the studios behind them remain a constant. The most successful ones make stock market insider-trading politicians look like children in a sandbox. They just pump out the sausage, sell it at a 100% mark up, and we gobble it up because it's pre-chewed and an easy distraction from the daily struggles.
1: https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/budgets
Maybe the infinite supply of money has something to do with these changes.
Pop culture has become an oligopoly - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31239268 - May 2022 (146 comments)