To me this reflects the large variety and volume of content out there today. As the amount of content grows, people with less mainstream tastes spread out their consumption, but people with more mainstream tastes stick with popular choices.
For example, music. Let's say 50% of people like mainstream music and the rest have more obscure preferences. In the past, when music was harder to access, you might be exposed to 100 artists. Now, you might be exposed to over 1,000. The 50% who like more obscure music used to spread their listening out over 100, but now it's spread out over 1,000. Those who like mainstream music still mostly listen to the top 100 or so. The end result is that the top 100 is more solid than before, even though music is diversifying.
For multiplicities, I see a snowball effect: each subsequent release in a multiplicity adds more people to the snowball. As long as the quality is good enough -- and people who enjoy mainstream content arguably have a lower bar -- the audience grows with each release. I think this effect, combined with the author's "proliferation" theory and major producers wanting to make safe investments, explains the dominance of multiplicities.
Mid-price movies are the ones that have mostly gone extinct.
We have the Disney-level Mega Movies with ONE BILLION DOLLAR budgets. These are the ones that are made by a committee of producers and executive producers and shareholders. They're too big to fail, so they'll be tested and re-tested and re-shot until they WILL make a profit. Currently they will also include a Chinese movie star and won't touch any subjects too sensitive for China, because multiple tens of percents of profit will be made in there.
Then we have the Blumhouse[0] type 5-20 million dollar movies. They give a hard budget limit and won't pay the actors much - they'll get a share of the profits instead. They're cheap enough to not bankrupt the production company if it flops, but will make immense profits if they succeed. The Company won't usually affect the production much, giving the director free reign to do what they want.
What's missing in today's world are the $10-$100M, movies. These have a big enough budget to not have to cut corners much, but still small enough to not draw the attention of The Executives who want their favourite things in the movie - letting the director enact their vision. The only mid-budget movie I can think of in the recent years is Michael Bay's Ambulance[1], shot with $40M.
Everything Everywhere All At Once, currently in theaters, had a $25 million budget, and has made a respectable $38 million in the theater so far, enough that some articles are calling it a box office hit.
Also in 2019 there was Knives Out, which had a budget of $40 million and made $311 million in the box office.
I agree with your overall point, just giving a couple more examples.
>What's missing in today's world are the $10-$100M, movies.
You're 70 years too late. Life magazine in 1957 talked about how one of the consequences of the Hollywood studio system (from both TV, and the 1948 Paramount antitrust case) was the death of the "million-dollar mediocrity" (<https://books.google.com/books?id=Nz8EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA146>):
"It wasn't good entertainment and it wasn't art, and most of the movies produced had a uniform mediocrity, but they were also uniformly profitable ... The million-dollar mediocrity was the very backbone of Hollywood".
The "million-dollar mediocrity" died because the Paramount case forbade block booking, in which studios required that theaters purchase said mediocrities to also buy big films. Original TV movies appeared in the 1960s but their budgets and production values were too low to really fill the hole in Hollywood, but today's streaming companies' insatiable appetite for content has opened a new outlet for middle-tier films (and, more importantly, series).
The Northman is a 70M-90M budget movie. I guess that's how it got that kind of budget without ever having a chance at making back the money lol (it's just too weird).
>
Fortunately, there’s a cure for our cultural anemia. While the top of the charts has been oligopolized, the bottom remains a vibrant anarchy. There are weird books and funky movies and bangers from across the sea. Two of the most interesting video games of the past decade put you in the role of an immigration officer and an insurance claims adjuster. Every strange thing, wonderful and terrible, is available to you, but they’ll die out if you don’t nourish them with your attention.
This is the romantic view of the hundred (million) flowers blooming of a gatekeeper-liberated internet. I don't think it's a realistic "cure" given human nature.
Rather, I think David Foster Wallace's prediction has been proven out:
> ...this idea that the internet’s gonna become incredibly democratic? I mean if you’ve spent any time on the web, you know that it’s not gonna be, because that’s completely overwhelming. There are four trillion bits coming at you, 99% of them are shit, and it’s too much work to do triage to decide...We’re going to beg for [curation]. We are literally gonna pay for it.
After all...here we are on HN, hoping someone has curated the seething froth of new content into something manageable.
I don’t tend to consume curated art, other than the odd friend passing me musical recommendations.
Reviews and playlists are suspect to me. I also enjoy discovering and combing and deciding.
I’m extremely picky about music and cinema and books. Curated media rarely works out.
I never use Spotify and consider that sort of thing to be bad for music as an art for many reasons I won’t get into in this comment.
I’m a lifelong musician, multi instrumentalist etc… I have my tastes and preferences and desired directions of expansion of both (all, lol)
To me, as a former DJ, I drop the needle 3-4 times, skip around in the song, if I like some harmonic scenarios I am hearing I may stick around to hear how it develops and progresses.
Given the harmonic constraints of an instrument etc, is there any variety of tone, harmonic structure, technique , texture, or is it just skulking away in a corner looking at its own navel… etc…
I realize that I’m atypical, but I’m also precisely a “music power user”. We don’t matter. The industry doesn’t care about progrock, jazz fusion, afrobeat, bebop, acid jazz, classical (except the Messiah on Christmas) samba, salsa, cumbia, or music in general, it cares about tracking armies of fan consumers across the internet, tabloid entertainment news, clothing, photos, videos, good looking people posing. Forget the music, these days it’s all image…
Only in art are experts thrown on the garbage heap while moneyed interests court the brains of those more easily duped simply due to less experience.
I think this is where the competitive thing in music comes crashing hard into the reality that a good song and a really bad song can share the charts, but the bad song often remains longer…
Objectively bad, low effort, poorly structured, lacking a hook, etc, but marketing can keep it there as number one… unlike in UFC where your actual ability to fight matters.
This clearly illustrates that we went from a competency and competition of musical skill to one of marketing skill. Fair enough, but call a spade a spade
Does this mean I am old? Only if one disrespects the human race and human intellect so much that you would cheer the death of a sonic world from the warlike hand of visual glamour and stylized imagery.
A musician is just a kind of fashion photography model capable of making erudite hand gestures and choosing sponsors
So, question to all -- how have you found success at locating the fruits of this "vibrant anarchy?"
Here's an interesting, related link, that's very obviously coming from a certain perspective but still has things you can take [0].
Here are some strategies I use for books:
Go to the library and walk down a random shelf until a book calls to you. You can run your fingers down the spines and feel for the energy of the right book.
The opposite (however, somewhat sideways, rather than top-down) is pulling books from the "someone just returned this" section. And the books suggested by librarians.
I will also do full-text searches of my somewhat large library of ebooks, which gives equal weight to popular and unknown authors.
Randomness, with uncommon items weighted somewhat equal to common ones, and direct recommendations that bypass algorithmic feeds seem to work somewhat well for me as general strategies.
> So, question to all -- how have you found success at locating the fruits of this "vibrant anarchy?"
I've found that live music offers one of the best mechanisms for this. You start out with interest in <major band>, and go see their show. They're on tour with <midsize band> opening for them. You like <midsize band>'s set, so you go see them when they headline a show a few months later. Since they're a smaller band, it's a smaller show, so they have <small band> opening for them. You like <small band>'s set so you later go see them play with <local band>, and so forth.
As the shows get smaller it becomes more common for there to be 3-4 bands on the bill, so the rate of exposure increases. Combine that with the greater sense of community that's common at smaller shows as well as mechanisms like Spotify's related artists and it becomes easier and easier to find new music the deeper you get.
It would be cool if a similar thing was more common with other art forms. What if more movies were preceded by a short from an up and coming director (like Pixar tends to do)? Trailers fill a similar role, but not quite the same. Or what if books included a few recommendations from the author rather than just a list of other books from the publisher?
I have resorted to find individual curators of vibrant anarchy. Reddit and Youtube are the most common sources.
RedLetterMedia helps me find weird movies without any mainstream appeal. r/NearProg, r/ListenToThis and r/progmetal are how I find weird experimental rock artists.
For books, some subreddits has a 'I have finished book X, what should I read next?' thread. That's a good way to do Markov-Chain-esque random walk. Another is to simply rely on my favorite podcasters and bloggers. Books are a long commitment and hard to 'figure out' in a minute or an hour. So, I rarely resort to low quality and high coverage searchers like I do with music or TV media.
I did a project where I worked my way through the Dewey Decimal System, reading one book from each decade along the way. Other than the arbitrary choices of the first and last book on the shelves as I read through the DDC and one stretch of ten DDC classifications where there were only two choices of book to read, I did let myself choose from the books rather than making it purely random, but it was a great way to experience a wide variety of different topics over the course of seven(!) years.¹ https://www.dahosek.com/category/dewey-decimal-project/
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1. It’s possible that I might have finished a few months sooner had Covid-related library closures not slowed me down a bit in 2020.
Your ideas could potentially be encoded in a better ranking/recommender _algorithm_ ..
ie. recommenders using something akin to page-rank could/should inject some random items so as to allow new content to bubble up and good new content to be voted up.
It seems nature does something similar - copying DNA pretty accurately, yet allowing for some mutations to advance things and adapt to a changing environment.
That's why I love it when people find their weird media niche. You're a big fan of serialized LitRPG stories? Cool, I'm glad you found your thing out there! You like visual novels games? Neat. It's kind of sad that some obscure media interests are considered classy (ooo, old French art films!) and some are considered deeply embarrassing (eww, Harry Potter fanfic).
The system is so laser focused on very specific bits of media (these movies, these songs, these books, and that's it there is no other form of entertainment), that when people find something they really like in the big long tail of content, it's a cause for celebration.
Copyright lasting 1XX years probably has a substantial amount to do with it. If you are a media company, and you already spent the marketing budget building up the idea of Avengers, or Mario, or whatever pop culture icon you are selling, making a sequel means you get to lean on it. Should your company spend lots of extra money advertising your new video game, or just a little reminding people the next Call of Duty is coming out in a month?
Alternatively, flip this around. Would Disney spend so much on Marvel movies if other studios could make movies about the same super heroes? No way! Why should Disney let the other studios ride on their coat tails? They would need to make all new stories and heroes.
Minor nit, the Walt Disney Corporation was founded October 16, 1923 and US copyright has anything published in 1926 or earlier in the public domain.
I rather doubt, though, that the fact that The Great Gatsby just entered the public domain this year has anything to do with the concentration of the market in the hands of a declining number of producers.
In his article [1] he mentions the Internet as part of a possible explanation in terms of it being easier for amateurs to create and distribute material.
But I think the Internet also plays a huge part in the consolidation of fandom. Before the internet, the majority of us could really only share our opinions with those physically nearby, so there were less connections per each node. Enter the internet, now each node has 1000000x more connections, naturally pooling together the ranges of an opinion's influence. The spheres of influence expand while the overall number of spheres shrinks. Just a thought, anyway.
It's easier to distribute material. But it is not - at all - easier to market and promote material. Especially not in a persistent and effective way.
That's the real difference now. People can make near-professional movies on iPhones, musicians can make professional-quality music at home, but no amateur has access to the huge industrial PR, social, and trad ad networks that the major labels/studios can roll out to promote their projects.
I think their paper they linked in the blog post is a bit like that too, maybe even more so, although I found both interesting.
I do agree some of the trends are more convincing than others, although they're generally consistent with the overall direction the author is suggesting.
It's notable that the lower error bar for the 1920s and the upper error bar for the 2020s only differ by about 2%. Aside from the fact the plot sure looks like random noise, even the trend line is consistent with no change.
>How much does it dull our ambitions to watch 2021’s The Matrix: Resurrections, where the most interesting scene is just Neo watching the original Matrix from 1999?
Perceptions are subjective, but I don’t know how anyone wouldn’t consider the most interesting scene to be the one where Neo (and therefore the audience) is told point blank: “our beloved parent company Warner Bros. has decided to make a sequel to the trilogy.”
I’m surprised it wasn’t quoted in TFA because it’s an unusual fourth wall break that aligns with exactly the points the author is making about the inherent emptiness of endless franchises.
Not for nothing, Everything Everywhere All at Once was produced by the Russo brothers who directed Avengers Infinity Wars, Endgame and Captain America movies. Also Michelle Yeoh is a pretty huge star both here and in China. Just saying it's not exactly an indie film. But it was original, for sure.
This sure seems to be what happens when the long tail runs into the paradox of choice.
One thing I've noticed, it is now way easier to create content over this time period as well.
I now have a camera that can record beautiful 8K video, I can produce high-quality music records, and I don't have to rent or hire anyone. I've got a CNC that can crank out perfect templates for my woodworking. But there are now millions of others who can (and are) doing the same thing.
And thus, it's stupidly easy to find something new, but it's hard to find something new and consistently good. So we just gravitate to the proven because, ugh, our free time is valuable.
My only sense is that the oligopoly will persist, and probably become even more focused. But the "1000 true fans" approach for small-time producers is still the best way forward. Don't even bother trying to compete with big-time media, just try to build strong connections, thus being a "trusted" choice.
This puts its finger on something I’ve had a vague feeling about for awhile now.
Something I noticed was that being “underground” and “alternative” was considered “cool” when I was a youngster. Now, it seems all transgressive elements have been stripped from the mix and it’s all about “please like me, like my product, I’m desperate for your approval”
I’d had my own notions of this being fueled by the suit-vs-rocker dichotomy turning into the self-promoting-artist lonesome internet point of light thing.
But this article describes a bigger pattern, and I think it’s largely about commercial conquest and has little to do with the ideas inside.
There’s also the theme of nostalgia and “good old” style marketing.
How much junk food is marketed as “grandmas good olde traditional natural authentic junk food”?
What is extremely frustrating is watching mediocre output be considered best in class merely due to the rubber stamp effect of popularity, popularity due to marketing power and branding.
Clearly xyz charttopper is the best singer in the world if they are the most popular, right?
The entertainment oligopoly falsifying the appearance of democracy and choice while limiting the range of presentable choices is actually symbolic of how many authoritarian systems fake democratic parliamentary procedures and such.
Clearly the people have spoken, approving the pre approved choice. Lol.
Everyone must obviously love autotune if 9/10 top ten songs use it.
I'm in my mid-50's. I missed the 1950's and 1960's in the US, but I recall the 70's and onward vividly. It is hard to impart to today's generations just how subversive MTV was in the 1980's. Being different in school in the 70's was a mortal sin, so people who did it were either truly weird or had immense self-confidence. "Alternative radio" didn't exist in most of the country, let alone cassettes and albums: department stores only sold what big labels offered. Punk and alternative had to be sought out by college students or people in cities. MTV changed all that radically. "Nonconformity" was a big word for teens in the 70's and 80's. It is all but gone now, today my friends teen-aged kids are about fitting in, not sticking out.
Because there is no more "sticking out". Everything has been commodified and accepted. There is no longer a way to differentiate yourself from the pack, because the pack is so diverse. I think that has really shaken things up: there's nothing to rebel against, and Gen-X cynicism/nihilism has left an identity crises for Mil/GenZ. Although it appears these groups are going back to tradition and don't give a f*k about nonconformity.
Steve Albini (legendary producer) wrote an essay in "Commodify Your Dissent" from the Baffler magazine around the time of the Dead Kennedys. He hits on the ability to buy anarchy patches in department stores as fashion items when in the past they were signs of a true counterculture. I highly recommend it, it captures what you are feeling up to a point, because it refers mostly to the 80's and 90's, and not the utter weirdness of today.
>It is all but gone now, today my friends teen-aged kids are about fitting in,
Wait, doesn't that sound like the same thing? Presumably some kids are still non-conforming, and they are still the minority (because most kids of all generations have prioritized fitting in).
Be very wary of survivor bias when looking back in time, especially when there is a risk of nostalgia. There was plenty of popular garbage in the 70s and 80s, there is plenty of good music being made now. The only real difference is that we have yet to apply the "is this good enough to keep around" filter to modern culture.
Watch "Century of the Self" (and "Hypernormalization") by Adam Curtis. Pop culture, marketing, and advertisement are in many ways the products of wartime propaganda techniques being applied to civilians by corporations during peacetime. Also watch Zizek for his thoughts on how corporations like Starbucks get people to try and practice their morals through consumerism. And since you mentioned falsified democracy, might as well look into Chomsky and his thoughts on Manufacturing Consent. These are legitimate, calculated phenomena that it's worth being aware of.
True that; there’s a government paper trail detailing the transfer of military propaganda research to university marketing and advertising programs.
Check out Hyman Rickover, a proponent of a nuclear Navy that pushed members of Congress to vote mothball 10 years of thorium reactor research for uranium reactors so they had weapons material.
I laugh at the notion we have a free market since the basis of our system is 50-70 year old back room deals that boosted families like Gates, Musk, Andreesen, Bezos.
There’s zero science that explains how they’re ahead of anyone else in skill and intelligence. Plenty to suggest typical old fashion political propaganda and corruption.
The commodification of dissent. In the 50's, counter-culture was far more delineated from corporate squareness, which is why those old 50's ads are so funny to us now. Business evolved to where now it has the ability to coopt any emerging dissent and counter-culture almost immediately.
It's still corporate but it's much less visible. Now many things look cool and transgressive - including elements of startup culture - but the goals are still corporate.
In a real counter culture the goals are aggressively anti-corporate.
The most impressive part is the way that individualism has become almost entirely a corporate creation. You "express yourself" by choosing and displaying products, all of which are either corporate or sold through a corporate monopoly (Amazon, Ebay, Etsy). The middle classes are allowed some artisanal choices, but only because they signal a more refined and informed kind of consumerism.
There really isn't much evidence of individualism which isn't assembled from some combination of corporate-friendly competitive ambition, Veblen signalling, standardised rebellion/outsider tropes, and political and religious tribalism.
> to co-opt any emerging dissent and counter-culture almost immediately
It has to do with the nature of the dissenters themselves. Nowadays they are politics / social media wannabees. When corporates coopot your movement, they make you rich and famous. Nothing makes a 'ladder climber' more happy.
The nature of dissent in the 50s was more about the problems than the status assigned to the people. You couldn't easily lure them away with sneaky gifts.
Worst of all, the 50s-esque true believers do exist. But they get cannibalized and spit out by the exact cabal of milque-toast corporate activism. The ones that don't are so radical that they only serve as red-flags on the danger of true belief, because all the reasonable ones got squash under corporate America's feet.
> Something I noticed was that being “underground” and “alternative” was considered “cool” when I was a youngster. Now, it seems all transgressive elements have been stripped from the mix and it’s all about “please like me, like my product, I’m desperate for your approval”
Not everybody considered those things cool - obviously they were specifically NOT the mainstream pop crowd, or else there was nothing to be "underground" or "alternative" against.
There's certainly still underground/alternative pop culture. More than ever before! In some ways its harder to find (e.g. your search bubble isn't going to pop it up to you if it doesn't think you want it), ironically!
But with that new bubble of being in your sub-community largely comes less need to "act out" against the rest of the crowd. This is largely good, except in cases of e.g. violent incel egging-on spiral-downward communities or your more "old fashioned" sorts of violent radicalism that continue to exist.
(Here's a trivially simple example: the author claims that a smaller and smaller group is claiming a larger and larger share of the market in TV. But then look at something like this from wikipedia's I Love Lucy page: 'The episode "Lucy Goes to the Hospital", which first aired on Monday, January 19, 1953, garnered a record 15.105 million homes reached, equivalent to 44 million viewers resulting from 71.7% share of all households with television sets at the time having been tuned in to view the program.[69] That record is surpassed only by Elvis Presley's first of three appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show, which aired on September 9, 1956 (82.6% share, 60.710 million viewers and a 57.1 rating ).[69] The overall rating of 67.3 for the entire 1952 season of I Love Lucy continues to be the highest average rating for any single season of a TV show.[70]' No show or musician commands anything close to that now. )
> it seems all transgressive elements have been stripped from the mix and it’s all about “please like me, like my product, I’m desperate for your approval”
I think you're just commenting from your bubble, and using the flawed argument from the article to rationalize it (not to mention the fact that the people you're most likely to see are the minority vying for your attention).
In 1977 the top 20 grossing movies were probably watched by over 50% of movie watchers because there were just so few options. What do you think that proportion is now? I'm willing to bet that if you sampled random movie watchers, fewer than 10% of them will have watched any of the top 20 movies this year. There's just so much content out there, I don't think the top grossing movies mean as much anymore.
People's attention is spread very thin across hundreds of thousands of small creators these days. And consider that if you're a small YouTuber with a few thousand core fans, you're roughly as successful as the most underground punk rock bands/indie film directors of the 70s. As I see it, the "alternative" culture is bigger than it's ever been. I could be a die-hard fan of a dozen different works that I consider very mainstream, and yet my next door neighbor will not be familiar with any of them.
> Now, it seems all transgressive elements have been stripped from the mix and it’s all about “please like me, like my product, I’m desperate for your approval”
It's all a matter of perspective, I don't see this trend as necessarily good or bad. There were some positives to the "underground" and "alternative" aesthetic, like being independent-minded and an emphasis on doing things that were new and original. There were some downsides too, like being jaded about everything, being too cool to show enthusiasm, and ultimately sometimes just blindly conforming to the "alternative" view for the sake of opposing the mainstream view.
Similarly I think there are positives to how I see young people behaving today, the flip-side to the negatives you mentioned. Being genuine and showing emotion is cool again, and, perhaps ironically, since there is less cultural pressure to be "alternative" people are arguably being more honest with themselves by openly seeking approval. We're all humans after all and we all seek approval from others, maybe it's good that there is no longer any stigma around that in the influencer age.
>Something I noticed was that being “underground” and “alternative” was considered “cool” when I was a youngster. Now, it seems all transgressive elements have been stripped from the mix and it’s all about “please like me, like my product, I’m desperate for your approval”
I think it's because anti-institutional cynicism has become the new norm with the rise of gen-x and the "ironic" hipsterdom of the early 2000s.
So much of modern culture is about operating in the negative space of the "normal" which takes significantly less effort than actively defining what you value and who you are.
Ah, the joy of being a snob. I mean this in a mildly self deprecating way. But to put it more mildly, it's the joy of being self confident in following one's own tastes.
The word you are looking for is "contemporary" and nobody is spending money to make contemporary things appealing to you anymore.
The collorary is your "counter culture" was bought and sold too. That one stung to find out, but alternative lifestyles have been manufactured for a long, long time
Punk got commodified pretty quickly, so did grunge, so much that the fashion part of grunge already got a second or maybe even third revival. Any subculture or trend that picks up steam gets commodified pretty much instantly, creating anything alternative or vaguely subversive into a cash cow for selling t-shirts pretty quickly.
most of it is the result of wealth inequality. no one can afford to be cancelled. if you want a vision of the future watch chinese youtube iq.com where everything is hollow and empty. every show just becomes a tool of the state, all entertainment is an arm of the MCI. we’re heading there slowly. every single creator today faces a black box known as “the algorithm”, on tiktok, instagram reels and youtube shorts. those are the only platforms you can get any views today. vertical videos. the things we all collectively said Rotate your phone and film in landscape mode, about. your videos didn’t get popular? they must’ve just been bad, now watch this 15 year old girl twerk in spandex. francis ford Coppola never had to compete with girls in spandex, but today’s entertainment does.
> In books: lightning-quick plots and chapter-ending cliffhangers. Nobody thinks The Da Vinci Code is high literature, but it’s a book that really really wants you to read it. And a lot of people did!
I know folks in literary circles like hating on Dan Brown, but I do love that all his books have very short chapters. It’s refreshing to have frequent stopping places, rather than tucking in for a 70 page chapter-that-should-have-been-a-novella. I feel like I get through books with shorter chapters faster.
I wish some of these charts weren’t normalized. Instead of percent of the market, I want to see the overall volume. Because my hunch is that these markets are just expanding unevenly. If it use to be 10 novel movies and 1 superhero movie, and now it’s 15 novel movies and 10 superhero movies, it’s a decrease in market share, but it’s still an increase.
Ok devil’s advocate. What’s more original? Thor 3: Ragnarok? Or Jojo Rabbit? Both great films imo; both by Taika Waititi.
The former features marvel’s Thor, who’s commercial af. But it goes to a new world, has a markedly different tone, humor, themes, and plot. The plot hits themes of humility and identity and the specifics of the ending were, imo, not very predictable.
Jojo rabbit is set in WWII with all original characters with some great bits, but an overall plot that’s fairly predictable.
You could easily argue it’s still Jojo rabbit, but is there anything obviously bad about how original Thor 3 is? I think no.
And there have been lots of great movies in the past year even. Everything everywhere, Last Night in Soho, massive talent, etc.
Edit: the formulaic rom coms and action movies and comedies were the bigger issue to me. A mildly novel setting, or perhaps, novel buddy cop duo, added far less interesting material than things complained about here.
Sure if you look at box office numbers and the billboard hot 100 you will see this picture, but that is really just telling you about older millennials and above. What about artists who post their music to SoundCloud or Bandcamp? What about all the short-form content on YouTube? What about true crime podcasts? What about big name production houses who skip theaters and go direct to streaming on Netflix or Apple TV? What about all the people whose primary form of content consumption isn't any of these but rather TikTok and Snapchat?
The real conclusion IMO is that the methods of distributing "pop culture" have been turned on their head, and traditional media is now playing catch up. Nielsen numbers and Billboard charts and all similar metrics are now irrelevant to the conversation.
Actually Neilsen uses ultrasonic signals which many platforms, big and small, rush to support to satisfy their creators. At least that was my experience as a Neilsen household then SWE at a SAAS serving radio stations (including white-labeled streaming apps).
It's not a conspiracy. There's just some sort of fundamental structure of systems having selection and variable-rewards that leads to this sort of distribution over time.
These are natural examples of ecosystems evolving toward a pareto distribution after a punctuated equalibrium. Think of it as another example of the great winnowing of variations that followed the Cambrian explosion. The cultural explosions were the invention of books, radio, television, internet, etc. Those disrupted the prior pareto distributions, and it took time to reestablish them.
It's a general feature of complex ecologies rather than a specialty of cultural or economic ecologies.
This looks like statistics being wielded poorly to arrive at the opposite conclusion from reality.
Consider if the whole of media were an iceberg: It seems to me that in 1977, almost the entire iceburg was poking up out of the water. Today on the other hand, while there is a much larger visible chunk sticking out of the water, it's just a tiny insignificant prick compared to what's going on underneath. The number you actually want is the size of the rest of the berg in 1977 vs today.
Because it seems to me that as popular as the things I watch are, if I went and asked random people on the street about them, 99% of them would have no idea what I'm talking about. But if I were to do the same thing 50 years ago, more people would be familiar with the same smaller set of shows and movies and books.
To me this is most evident based on the viewership of tv show finales. To this day, the most watched tv finale of all time is MASH at over 100 million viewers. Modern shows, even GoT don't even come close. I believe this is because there is so much content out there being produced that our attention is much more spread out. The "top 20" means less and less as the proportion of people who actually consume that stuff goes lower and lower.
Growing up in the 80s it seemed like there was a whole host of serious music and films made for my parents whether it was Phil Collins, Luther Vandross, Out of Africa or MASH. There was a market back then whether it was considered less than high brow however that is no longer the case. I would go so far as to say if Steve Jobs was alive things might be slightly different but not much.
I don't think the author's argument is that convincing except for the rise of movie franchises, but that's not a observation. Ppl have been complaining about formulaic movies for years.
While there may be a smaller number of musicians dominating the Top 100 or Top 40, less people listen to that music than ever because there are tons of other artists putting out good music.
I started watching Netflix regularly over the last couple of years, prior to that I mainly watched good film and the occasional series like breaking bad or game of thrones.
I feel so burnt out from Netflix series, they are all the same, crime, murder, replicas of game of thrones (vikings) etc. And the majority of films they list are mediocre, all the good ones I have seen multiple times.
I can't remember the last new good film I watched, maybe Tenet. I lost track of new things coming out.
In situationist terminology - the spectacle is compounding upon itself towards oblivion. This is good! It makes it easier for people to see it for what it is.
If we had the pre-1994 telecommunications act radio ownership structure, music would sound different every decade because local djs would find bands they liked and promote them. I bet recent music movements that have been ignored by the mainstream like Synthwave would probably be the new thing defining the 2020s.
Pop culture has always been an oligopoly. Even before the days of the Beatles or the Olympians or even the Octoads.
You can’t change this because pop culture and the star system are for the masses. Art is for early adopters. It’s that same concept of the technical chasm we have.
Sixty years ago, the TVs in most American households got three channels, and each channel spent eight or ten hours broadcasting its test pattern. There weren't that many radio stations. The entertainment/distraction available was vastly less than today.
Are movies really still influencing pop culture like they used to? I don't think so. Top box office numbers only reflect how many movie watchers watched a movie. My kids don't give a single fuck about movies.
Could this effect also explain why a lot of seemingly truly original music came out in the 80s .. roughly coincident with a peak in wealth distribution in the middle class ?
My reasoning : a post-war relatively wealthy middle class and free University education meant more time for things like attending political protests, tinkering with emerging electronics/computers, engineering projects and garage bands.
We have wonderful flat screens now, much better comms .. and yet nothing seems fixable, were killing the planet with our carbon emissions and not many people seem concerned, and our best most energetic young minds are slaves to servicing their student debt.
Isn't it somehow related to series being more and more popular in the last 20 years? Maybe people just like being in a comfortable place, seing the same stuff?
this to me is a symptom of greed. It's people not wanting to pay for others efforts (possibly because they are not promoted or showcased or hidden) but they expect it for their efforts.
The pop music industry has seen at least three disruptions to its controlling gatekeepers since the 1950s (1956-60, ~2000 with Napster, and presently with Spotify and YouTube), but each time a dominant hegenomy re-emerges. I doubt this time will be different, though the brief renaissance will doubtless be appreciated.
Charles Perrow wrote of this in the mid-1980s:
After the critical period from about 1956 to 1960, when tastes were unfrozen, competition was intense, and demand soared, consolidation appeared. The number of firms stabilized at about forty. New corporate entries appeared, such as MGM and Warner Brothers, sensing, one supposes, the opportunity that vastly expanding sales indicated. Some independents grew large. The eight-firm concentration ratio also stabilized (though not yet the four-firm ratio). The market became sluggish, however, as the early stars died, were forced into retirement because of legal problems, or in the notable case of Elvis Presley, were drafted by an impinging environment. Near the end of this period the majors decided that the new sounds were not a fad and began to buy up the contracts of established artists and successfully picked and promoted new ones, notably The Beach Boys and Bob Dylan. A new generation (e.g., The Beatles) appeared from 1964 to 1969, and sales again soared.(
But now the concentration ratios soared also. From 1962 to 1973, the four-firm ratio went from 25 to 51 percent; the eight-firm ratio from 46 to 81 percent, almost back to the pre-1955 levels. The number of different firms having hits declined from forty-six to only sixteen. Six of the eight giants were diversified conglomerates, some of which led in the earlier period; one was a new independent, the other a product of of mergers.*
How did they do it? The major companies asserted “increasing central control over the creative process”[352] through deliberate creation and extensive promotion of new groups, long-range contracts for groups, and reduced autonomy for producers. In addition, legal and illegal promotion costs (drug payola to disc jockeys, for example) rose in the competitive race and now exceeded the resources of small independents. Finally, the majors “have also moved to regain a controlling position in record distribution by buying chains of retail stores.”[353] The diversity is still greater than it had been in the past, and may remain high, but it is ominous that the majors have all the segments covered. As an executive said, “Columbia Records will have a major entry into whatever new area is broached by the vagaries of public tastes.” But for a concentrated industry, the “vagaries of public tastes” are not economical; it is preferable to stabilize and consolidate them. This would be possible through further control over the creative process and marketing.
Charles Perrow, Complex organizations : a critical essay, 1972, 1985. pp. 186--187.
The "content problem" has several legs: creation, production, curation, marketing, and distribution. Where costs of creation, production, and distribution fall (as they have), costs of curation (whether centralised or distributed) and marketing increase. We're seeing a shift in just that direction.
Alice neutered the tech patent race, the pivot to copyrightable content creation and rent seeking via essentially lifetime copyright as everyone alive will be dead, began; streaming services for everyone.
What do you expect from technocrats who grew up on dystopian capitalist cyberpunk? One touch purchases was a capitalist brand itself; Uncle Pauly G has NFT bucks for cyber punks that ship!
Music is the most age dependant business. It's literally impossible to discover your favorite song at age 35+ and it's most likely already buried in your brain forever between 14 and 20.
Same things for movies, franchises sell because there is a familiarity to it. Stuff that isn't franchise just doesn't sell. A possible exception would be biopics.
I predict a huuuge amount of high budget biopic to integrate revenues from franchises.
JFK, MLK, Reagan, Hendrix, the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, The Eagles, Michael Jackson, Michael Jordan...they will all get a biopic with a budget of no less than 175M a pop.
> It's literally impossible to discover your favorite song at age 35+ and it's most likely already buried in your brain forever between 14 and 20.
With all due respect, this sounds like a comment from someone who's not really into music.
I did a quick check with a musical friend to see if he shared my initial reaction... "what's your favourite song?" resulted in "I have no idea how to answer that question. Maybe ask me my top 100 favourites?"
I'm well over that age now, and I have a new "favourite song" every week or two. Easing into more free time as the kids get older and am using some of that to go see more live music from local bands.
It's a very "consumes music as a mass market product" vibe. My preferred genres have changed over and over, and since I've had a Spotify account since they came to the US, I can easily scroll back over playlists and see that. Hell, I started practicing making music as a hobby at the age of 29.
In the last decade alone (I'm 30), I went from primarily classic rock and folk music mixed with some movie soundtracks to metal to Eurobeat to J-Pop. My favorite song when I was 14 was probably something by Feist or the Beatles, maybe something by Queen. Now it's definitely something from a J-Pop or Vocaloid artist. Somewhere between that I'd have said something by Franz Ferdinand or White Stripes (and to be fair, I do listen to them quite a bit).
Approaching age 40. Most of my favorite songs are probably from the 60s and 70s (5-20 years before I was born), but I only heard most of them (the ones that are my favorites) after age 35. I like plenty of newer music, too. I discover great new-to-me stuff from many decades, including the current one, all the time. This seems pretty normal in my social circle, though few of us are super into music.
There aren't a ton of albums that I liked between the ages of 14 and 20 that I'd still defend as "good", though a handful are still nostalgia-listens for me. I had pretty shit taste in music then, really.
There is something I saw on YT a year or so ago from a guitar teacher who said that his students have changed over the past 15 years: they used to come in and say "I want to learn this song from my favorite band" - and now, overwhelmingly, when asked what they want to learn, they shrug and start scrolling through their phone to try to find an answer. They want to learn, but not anything specifically. And often when they have something, it could be the most random old thing, from any era.
That is, the song catalogue has stopped being something that has turnover, it just keeps accumulating into a library of dusty shelves, and that makes it hard for young people to assert norms as in days past and tell everyone "this band that was marketed to my demographic is totally the best and nothing will ever beat them" - which is where a concept of "best song" is going to come from, because hardly anyone is trying to assign letter grades to their listening.
Instead you'll see a more apocalyptic Fall-of-Rome tone in the comments of old hits: "I'm only 13 but I wish I were in the 80's, best decade for music nothing like today's crap". It's so common a sentiment as to be memetic and widely riffed upon.
Something has definitely changed in the music business.
There are elements where sound has deteriorated, functionally, from what used to be common practice. (this is of interest to me as it's 9/10ths of my day job)
Handled properly, modern digital audio is easily capable of containing the magic sounds of particular classic time periods: not just the 80s, if you really work at it you can get late 70s represented properly, even without using period recording equipment. But you cannot mess around, you have to do it a particular way.
People aren't significantly different from the 70s or the 60s or the 80s, as far as music creation goes. But the common practices are wildly different, and technology had a forcing effect causing the sounds of a decade (or time period) to take on a consistent quality based on the available tools and distribution media. That's all. You know it's not just 70s and 80s: there's electronic genres where the 90s fill a similar nostalgia role, and coincidentally have an obvious, distinct sound that is not heard today, and can to large effect be recalled through determinedly sticking to the period tools…
I'm an avid music listener (in my 30s), and it'd be hard for me to name just 1 (or 10 or even 30) of my favorite songs. A couple of albums I keep in high regard came out in the last several years. Also, I seem to wear out music over time: you can only listen to Loveless or SAW 89-92 or Astral Weeks or Velvet Underground and Nico so many times. I know, yes, those albums are some of the best music made, but I don't find pleasure in re-listening them for the 100th time - I'd rather listen to something new.
I probably took after my dad when it comes to music listening. He's in his 60s and still actively searching for and finding new favorites.
Right, my favourite song definitely changes over time. I don't get people whose musical preferences freeze in place in their twenties. I mean, I also don't get my friends who like Folk but there's no accounting for taste, freezing at that specific age just seems even weirder.
The article seems unhappy about sampling, but basically sampling has been important more or less since it became practical. There was a rash of songs a while back that I thought were all sampling an old favourite I bought as a CD single last century. But they aren't! They're just using the same sample it does which is from a 1932 trumpet line.
And sampling empowers the outsiders they're enthusiastic about. Lil Nas X wouldn't be anywhere without (almost certainly illegally until he was signed and somebody papered over the cracks with $$$ and co-writing credits) sampling Nine Inch Nails "34 Ghosts IV". Yes that's a great old timey banjo sound, but it ain't sampled from some obscure old banjo tune, Trent and Atticus put a bunch of work into making it sound that way.
I'm in my early 40s, I've just discovered Kino [1], I think they're really damn great. I "discovered" Ornella Vanoni and Mina when I was in my mid 30s, me and my SO have formed a habit of listening to this Mina song [2] each New Year's Eve, at exactly midnight (it also helps our dog and cat focus on us and on the music inside the house, and not on the fireworks outside).
Between 14 and 20 years of age I was listening to some cool music, too (it was that interesting period just after grunge and as brit-pop was taking off), but, to be honest, the lyrics from those songs and even the music itself don't speak to me that much anymore.
> Music is the most age dependant business. It's literally impossible to discover your favorite song at age 35+ and it's most likely already buried in your brain forever between 14 and 20.
Nah. When I was a teenager, I was listening to classic rock and folk music. When I was in my mid 20s, I got into metal. Now I'm 30 and would absolutely give you a list of J-Pop songs competing for the title of "favorite song."
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31245559, but we merged that thread hither)
To me this reflects the large variety and volume of content out there today. As the amount of content grows, people with less mainstream tastes spread out their consumption, but people with more mainstream tastes stick with popular choices.
For example, music. Let's say 50% of people like mainstream music and the rest have more obscure preferences. In the past, when music was harder to access, you might be exposed to 100 artists. Now, you might be exposed to over 1,000. The 50% who like more obscure music used to spread their listening out over 100, but now it's spread out over 1,000. Those who like mainstream music still mostly listen to the top 100 or so. The end result is that the top 100 is more solid than before, even though music is diversifying.
For multiplicities, I see a snowball effect: each subsequent release in a multiplicity adds more people to the snowball. As long as the quality is good enough -- and people who enjoy mainstream content arguably have a lower bar -- the audience grows with each release. I think this effect, combined with the author's "proliferation" theory and major producers wanting to make safe investments, explains the dominance of multiplicities.
Mid-price movies are the ones that have mostly gone extinct.
We have the Disney-level Mega Movies with ONE BILLION DOLLAR budgets. These are the ones that are made by a committee of producers and executive producers and shareholders. They're too big to fail, so they'll be tested and re-tested and re-shot until they WILL make a profit. Currently they will also include a Chinese movie star and won't touch any subjects too sensitive for China, because multiple tens of percents of profit will be made in there.
Then we have the Blumhouse[0] type 5-20 million dollar movies. They give a hard budget limit and won't pay the actors much - they'll get a share of the profits instead. They're cheap enough to not bankrupt the production company if it flops, but will make immense profits if they succeed. The Company won't usually affect the production much, giving the director free reign to do what they want.
What's missing in today's world are the $10-$100M, movies. These have a big enough budget to not have to cut corners much, but still small enough to not draw the attention of The Executives who want their favourite things in the movie - letting the director enact their vision. The only mid-budget movie I can think of in the recent years is Michael Bay's Ambulance[1], shot with $40M.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blumhouse_Productions [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambulance_(film)
Everything Everywhere All At Once, currently in theaters, had a $25 million budget, and has made a respectable $38 million in the theater so far, enough that some articles are calling it a box office hit.
Also in 2019 there was Knives Out, which had a budget of $40 million and made $311 million in the box office.
I agree with your overall point, just giving a couple more examples.
Until recently, Denis Villeneuve's movies were in this range as well:
* Prisoners: US$ 46M
* Sicario: US$ 30M
* Arrival: US$ 47M
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_Villeneuve#Reception
His first three movies were <$7M. He went up market (>$160M) with BR2049 and Dune.
>What's missing in today's world are the $10-$100M, movies.
You're 70 years too late. Life magazine in 1957 talked about how one of the consequences of the Hollywood studio system (from both TV, and the 1948 Paramount antitrust case) was the death of the "million-dollar mediocrity" (<https://books.google.com/books?id=Nz8EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA146>):
"It wasn't good entertainment and it wasn't art, and most of the movies produced had a uniform mediocrity, but they were also uniformly profitable ... The million-dollar mediocrity was the very backbone of Hollywood".
The "million-dollar mediocrity" died because the Paramount case forbade block booking, in which studios required that theaters purchase said mediocrities to also buy big films. Original TV movies appeared in the 1960s but their budgets and production values were too low to really fill the hole in Hollywood, but today's streaming companies' insatiable appetite for content has opened a new outlet for middle-tier films (and, more importantly, series).
Matt Damon agrees and gives some good insights about why the industry is moving in that direction. Short answer: because streaming replaced DVDs.
https://youtu.be/yaXma6K9mzo?t=837
Yes, DVDs were the second wind for many movies. Even if they failed in theatres they could be a hit on DVD.
I've got a ton of movies in my collection I would've never watched in a theatre setting, but have enjoyed on DVD multiple times.
LadyBird had a $10M budget, and is outstanding. (Not detracting to your point; an exception to the rule, and an example of movies we need more of)
The Northman is a 70M-90M budget movie. I guess that's how it got that kind of budget without ever having a chance at making back the money lol (it's just too weird).
A very well written essay.
I very much agree with one of the conclusions:
> Fortunately, there’s a cure for our cultural anemia. While the top of the charts has been oligopolized, the bottom remains a vibrant anarchy. There are weird books and funky movies and bangers from across the sea. Two of the most interesting video games of the past decade put you in the role of an immigration officer and an insurance claims adjuster. Every strange thing, wonderful and terrible, is available to you, but they’ll die out if you don’t nourish them with your attention.
I found it funny that in an article pushing for variation, used two video games examples(https://papersplea.se/ & https://obradinn.com/) from the same author
To be fair, the only thing they have in common is the author. They are different in pretty much everything else, and absolutely unique experiences.
(This is the only time I can share this with you, but beware, spoiler alert. Papers Please - The Short Film: https://youtu.be/YFHHGETsxkE)
I came here to make this exact same comment, but I'm not surprised someone else beat me to it!
Maybe Papers Please and Undertale would make better examples.
This is the romantic view of the hundred (million) flowers blooming of a gatekeeper-liberated internet. I don't think it's a realistic "cure" given human nature.
Rather, I think David Foster Wallace's prediction has been proven out:
> ...this idea that the internet’s gonna become incredibly democratic? I mean if you’ve spent any time on the web, you know that it’s not gonna be, because that’s completely overwhelming. There are four trillion bits coming at you, 99% of them are shit, and it’s too much work to do triage to decide...We’re going to beg for [curation]. We are literally gonna pay for it.
After all...here we are on HN, hoping someone has curated the seething froth of new content into something manageable.
I don’t tend to consume curated art, other than the odd friend passing me musical recommendations.
Reviews and playlists are suspect to me. I also enjoy discovering and combing and deciding.
I’m extremely picky about music and cinema and books. Curated media rarely works out.
I never use Spotify and consider that sort of thing to be bad for music as an art for many reasons I won’t get into in this comment.
I’m a lifelong musician, multi instrumentalist etc… I have my tastes and preferences and desired directions of expansion of both (all, lol)
To me, as a former DJ, I drop the needle 3-4 times, skip around in the song, if I like some harmonic scenarios I am hearing I may stick around to hear how it develops and progresses. Given the harmonic constraints of an instrument etc, is there any variety of tone, harmonic structure, technique , texture, or is it just skulking away in a corner looking at its own navel… etc…
I realize that I’m atypical, but I’m also precisely a “music power user”. We don’t matter. The industry doesn’t care about progrock, jazz fusion, afrobeat, bebop, acid jazz, classical (except the Messiah on Christmas) samba, salsa, cumbia, or music in general, it cares about tracking armies of fan consumers across the internet, tabloid entertainment news, clothing, photos, videos, good looking people posing. Forget the music, these days it’s all image…
Only in art are experts thrown on the garbage heap while moneyed interests court the brains of those more easily duped simply due to less experience. I think this is where the competitive thing in music comes crashing hard into the reality that a good song and a really bad song can share the charts, but the bad song often remains longer…
Objectively bad, low effort, poorly structured, lacking a hook, etc, but marketing can keep it there as number one… unlike in UFC where your actual ability to fight matters.
This clearly illustrates that we went from a competency and competition of musical skill to one of marketing skill. Fair enough, but call a spade a spade
Does this mean I am old? Only if one disrespects the human race and human intellect so much that you would cheer the death of a sonic world from the warlike hand of visual glamour and stylized imagery.
A musician is just a kind of fashion photography model capable of making erudite hand gestures and choosing sponsors
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Do you know, I think you are right about one thing: we basically still need a search engine, but in many realms beyond textual content
So, question to all -- how have you found success at locating the fruits of this "vibrant anarchy?"
Here's an interesting, related link, that's very obviously coming from a certain perspective but still has things you can take [0].
Here are some strategies I use for books:
Go to the library and walk down a random shelf until a book calls to you. You can run your fingers down the spines and feel for the energy of the right book.
The opposite (however, somewhat sideways, rather than top-down) is pulling books from the "someone just returned this" section. And the books suggested by librarians.
I will also do full-text searches of my somewhat large library of ebooks, which gives equal weight to popular and unknown authors.
Randomness, with uncommon items weighted somewhat equal to common ones, and direct recommendations that bypass algorithmic feeds seem to work somewhat well for me as general strategies.
[0] https://www.epsilontheory.com/25-anti-mimetic-tactics-for-li...
> So, question to all -- how have you found success at locating the fruits of this "vibrant anarchy?"
I've found that live music offers one of the best mechanisms for this. You start out with interest in <major band>, and go see their show. They're on tour with <midsize band> opening for them. You like <midsize band>'s set, so you go see them when they headline a show a few months later. Since they're a smaller band, it's a smaller show, so they have <small band> opening for them. You like <small band>'s set so you later go see them play with <local band>, and so forth.
As the shows get smaller it becomes more common for there to be 3-4 bands on the bill, so the rate of exposure increases. Combine that with the greater sense of community that's common at smaller shows as well as mechanisms like Spotify's related artists and it becomes easier and easier to find new music the deeper you get.
It would be cool if a similar thing was more common with other art forms. What if more movies were preceded by a short from an up and coming director (like Pixar tends to do)? Trailers fill a similar role, but not quite the same. Or what if books included a few recommendations from the author rather than just a list of other books from the publisher?
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I have resorted to find individual curators of vibrant anarchy. Reddit and Youtube are the most common sources.
RedLetterMedia helps me find weird movies without any mainstream appeal. r/NearProg, r/ListenToThis and r/progmetal are how I find weird experimental rock artists.
For books, some subreddits has a 'I have finished book X, what should I read next?' thread. That's a good way to do Markov-Chain-esque random walk. Another is to simply rely on my favorite podcasters and bloggers. Books are a long commitment and hard to 'figure out' in a minute or an hour. So, I rarely resort to low quality and high coverage searchers like I do with music or TV media.
I did a project where I worked my way through the Dewey Decimal System, reading one book from each decade along the way. Other than the arbitrary choices of the first and last book on the shelves as I read through the DDC and one stretch of ten DDC classifications where there were only two choices of book to read, I did let myself choose from the books rather than making it purely random, but it was a great way to experience a wide variety of different topics over the course of seven(!) years.¹ https://www.dahosek.com/category/dewey-decimal-project/
⸻
1. It’s possible that I might have finished a few months sooner had Covid-related library closures not slowed me down a bit in 2020.
Your ideas could potentially be encoded in a better ranking/recommender _algorithm_ ..
ie. recommenders using something akin to page-rank could/should inject some random items so as to allow new content to bubble up and good new content to be voted up.
It seems nature does something similar - copying DNA pretty accurately, yet allowing for some mutations to advance things and adapt to a changing environment.
That's why I love it when people find their weird media niche. You're a big fan of serialized LitRPG stories? Cool, I'm glad you found your thing out there! You like visual novels games? Neat. It's kind of sad that some obscure media interests are considered classy (ooo, old French art films!) and some are considered deeply embarrassing (eww, Harry Potter fanfic).
The system is so laser focused on very specific bits of media (these movies, these songs, these books, and that's it there is no other form of entertainment), that when people find something they really like in the big long tail of content, it's a cause for celebration.
Copyright lasting 1XX years probably has a substantial amount to do with it. If you are a media company, and you already spent the marketing budget building up the idea of Avengers, or Mario, or whatever pop culture icon you are selling, making a sequel means you get to lean on it. Should your company spend lots of extra money advertising your new video game, or just a little reminding people the next Call of Duty is coming out in a month?
Alternatively, flip this around. Would Disney spend so much on Marvel movies if other studios could make movies about the same super heroes? No way! Why should Disney let the other studios ride on their coat tails? They would need to make all new stories and heroes.
Disney has held their copyrights for over 100 years, but this phenomenon seems to be one of the last decade. I don’t think it is the cause, but you might be right that fixing © would help.
Minor nit, the Walt Disney Corporation was founded October 16, 1923 and US copyright has anything published in 1926 or earlier in the public domain.
I rather doubt, though, that the fact that The Great Gatsby just entered the public domain this year has anything to do with the concentration of the market in the hands of a declining number of producers.
In his article [1] he mentions the Internet as part of a possible explanation in terms of it being easier for amateurs to create and distribute material.
But I think the Internet also plays a huge part in the consolidation of fandom. Before the internet, the majority of us could really only share our opinions with those physically nearby, so there were less connections per each node. Enter the internet, now each node has 1000000x more connections, naturally pooling together the ranges of an opinion's influence. The spheres of influence expand while the overall number of spheres shrinks. Just a thought, anyway.
[1] https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/pop-culture-has-b...
It's easier to distribute material. But it is not - at all - easier to market and promote material. Especially not in a persistent and effective way.
That's the real difference now. People can make near-professional movies on iPhones, musicians can make professional-quality music at home, but no amateur has access to the huge industrial PR, social, and trad ad networks that the major labels/studios can roll out to promote their projects.
Some of these graphs are more convincing than others, this in particular seems to be fairly creative use of statistics.
https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_p...
I think their paper they linked in the blog post is a bit like that too, maybe even more so, although I found both interesting.
I do agree some of the trends are more convincing than others, although they're generally consistent with the overall direction the author is suggesting.
It's notable that the lower error bar for the 1920s and the upper error bar for the 2020s only differ by about 2%. Aside from the fact the plot sure looks like random noise, even the trend line is consistent with no change.
I am a bit suspicious because the specific metric used for each type of media is different. That suggests some amount of cherry-picking.
Error bars nice and tight!
>How much does it dull our ambitions to watch 2021’s The Matrix: Resurrections, where the most interesting scene is just Neo watching the original Matrix from 1999?
Perceptions are subjective, but I don’t know how anyone wouldn’t consider the most interesting scene to be the one where Neo (and therefore the audience) is told point blank: “our beloved parent company Warner Bros. has decided to make a sequel to the trilogy.”
I’m surprised it wasn’t quoted in TFA because it’s an unusual fourth wall break that aligns with exactly the points the author is making about the inherent emptiness of endless franchises.
As counterpoint we just experienced one of the most original movies ever, which made it to the top 3:
https://www.boxofficemojo.com/release/rl3861218049/ (Everything Everywhere All at Once)
On minimal budget and marketing
Not for nothing, Everything Everywhere All at Once was produced by the Russo brothers who directed Avengers Infinity Wars, Endgame and Captain America movies. Also Michelle Yeoh is a pretty huge star both here and in China. Just saying it's not exactly an indie film. But it was original, for sure.
This sure seems to be what happens when the long tail runs into the paradox of choice.
One thing I've noticed, it is now way easier to create content over this time period as well.
I now have a camera that can record beautiful 8K video, I can produce high-quality music records, and I don't have to rent or hire anyone. I've got a CNC that can crank out perfect templates for my woodworking. But there are now millions of others who can (and are) doing the same thing.
And thus, it's stupidly easy to find something new, but it's hard to find something new and consistently good. So we just gravitate to the proven because, ugh, our free time is valuable.
My only sense is that the oligopoly will persist, and probably become even more focused. But the "1000 true fans" approach for small-time producers is still the best way forward. Don't even bother trying to compete with big-time media, just try to build strong connections, thus being a "trusted" choice.
This puts its finger on something I’ve had a vague feeling about for awhile now.
Something I noticed was that being “underground” and “alternative” was considered “cool” when I was a youngster. Now, it seems all transgressive elements have been stripped from the mix and it’s all about “please like me, like my product, I’m desperate for your approval”
I’d had my own notions of this being fueled by the suit-vs-rocker dichotomy turning into the self-promoting-artist lonesome internet point of light thing.
But this article describes a bigger pattern, and I think it’s largely about commercial conquest and has little to do with the ideas inside.
There’s also the theme of nostalgia and “good old” style marketing. How much junk food is marketed as “grandmas good olde traditional natural authentic junk food”?
What is extremely frustrating is watching mediocre output be considered best in class merely due to the rubber stamp effect of popularity, popularity due to marketing power and branding.
Clearly xyz charttopper is the best singer in the world if they are the most popular, right?
The entertainment oligopoly falsifying the appearance of democracy and choice while limiting the range of presentable choices is actually symbolic of how many authoritarian systems fake democratic parliamentary procedures and such.
Clearly the people have spoken, approving the pre approved choice. Lol.
Everyone must obviously love autotune if 9/10 top ten songs use it.
I'm in my mid-50's. I missed the 1950's and 1960's in the US, but I recall the 70's and onward vividly. It is hard to impart to today's generations just how subversive MTV was in the 1980's. Being different in school in the 70's was a mortal sin, so people who did it were either truly weird or had immense self-confidence. "Alternative radio" didn't exist in most of the country, let alone cassettes and albums: department stores only sold what big labels offered. Punk and alternative had to be sought out by college students or people in cities. MTV changed all that radically. "Nonconformity" was a big word for teens in the 70's and 80's. It is all but gone now, today my friends teen-aged kids are about fitting in, not sticking out.
Because there is no more "sticking out". Everything has been commodified and accepted. There is no longer a way to differentiate yourself from the pack, because the pack is so diverse. I think that has really shaken things up: there's nothing to rebel against, and Gen-X cynicism/nihilism has left an identity crises for Mil/GenZ. Although it appears these groups are going back to tradition and don't give a f*k about nonconformity.
Steve Albini (legendary producer) wrote an essay in "Commodify Your Dissent" from the Baffler magazine around the time of the Dead Kennedys. He hits on the ability to buy anarchy patches in department stores as fashion items when in the past they were signs of a true counterculture. I highly recommend it, it captures what you are feeling up to a point, because it refers mostly to the 80's and 90's, and not the utter weirdness of today.
https://www.amazon.com/Commodify-Your-Dissent-Salvos-Baffler...
>It is all but gone now, today my friends teen-aged kids are about fitting in,
Wait, doesn't that sound like the same thing? Presumably some kids are still non-conforming, and they are still the minority (because most kids of all generations have prioritized fitting in).
Be very wary of survivor bias when looking back in time, especially when there is a risk of nostalgia. There was plenty of popular garbage in the 70s and 80s, there is plenty of good music being made now. The only real difference is that we have yet to apply the "is this good enough to keep around" filter to modern culture.
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I’m similar in age, and this rings true. Remember “conformist” being a derogatory term in the outgroups?
> “Conformist,” he sneered, averting his eyes in disgust and flipping his dyed black hair over his eyes. :D
I assume this is the Albini essay:
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-problem-with-music
Watch "Century of the Self" (and "Hypernormalization") by Adam Curtis. Pop culture, marketing, and advertisement are in many ways the products of wartime propaganda techniques being applied to civilians by corporations during peacetime. Also watch Zizek for his thoughts on how corporations like Starbucks get people to try and practice their morals through consumerism. And since you mentioned falsified democracy, might as well look into Chomsky and his thoughts on Manufacturing Consent. These are legitimate, calculated phenomena that it's worth being aware of.
True that; there’s a government paper trail detailing the transfer of military propaganda research to university marketing and advertising programs.
Check out Hyman Rickover, a proponent of a nuclear Navy that pushed members of Congress to vote mothball 10 years of thorium reactor research for uranium reactors so they had weapons material.
I laugh at the notion we have a free market since the basis of our system is 50-70 year old back room deals that boosted families like Gates, Musk, Andreesen, Bezos.
There’s zero science that explains how they’re ahead of anyone else in skill and intelligence. Plenty to suggest typical old fashion political propaganda and corruption.
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The commodification of dissent. In the 50's, counter-culture was far more delineated from corporate squareness, which is why those old 50's ads are so funny to us now. Business evolved to where now it has the ability to coopt any emerging dissent and counter-culture almost immediately.
It's still corporate but it's much less visible. Now many things look cool and transgressive - including elements of startup culture - but the goals are still corporate.
In a real counter culture the goals are aggressively anti-corporate.
The most impressive part is the way that individualism has become almost entirely a corporate creation. You "express yourself" by choosing and displaying products, all of which are either corporate or sold through a corporate monopoly (Amazon, Ebay, Etsy). The middle classes are allowed some artisanal choices, but only because they signal a more refined and informed kind of consumerism.
There really isn't much evidence of individualism which isn't assembled from some combination of corporate-friendly competitive ambition, Veblen signalling, standardised rebellion/outsider tropes, and political and religious tribalism.
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> to co-opt any emerging dissent and counter-culture almost immediately
It has to do with the nature of the dissenters themselves. Nowadays they are politics / social media wannabees. When corporates coopot your movement, they make you rich and famous. Nothing makes a 'ladder climber' more happy.
The nature of dissent in the 50s was more about the problems than the status assigned to the people. You couldn't easily lure them away with sneaky gifts.
Worst of all, the 50s-esque true believers do exist. But they get cannibalized and spit out by the exact cabal of milque-toast corporate activism. The ones that don't are so radical that they only serve as red-flags on the danger of true belief, because all the reasonable ones got squash under corporate America's feet.
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I just posted the same thing.
Did you read this?
https://www.amazon.com/Commodify-Your-Dissent-Salvos-Baffler...
> Something I noticed was that being “underground” and “alternative” was considered “cool” when I was a youngster. Now, it seems all transgressive elements have been stripped from the mix and it’s all about “please like me, like my product, I’m desperate for your approval”
Not everybody considered those things cool - obviously they were specifically NOT the mainstream pop crowd, or else there was nothing to be "underground" or "alternative" against.
There's certainly still underground/alternative pop culture. More than ever before! In some ways its harder to find (e.g. your search bubble isn't going to pop it up to you if it doesn't think you want it), ironically!
But with that new bubble of being in your sub-community largely comes less need to "act out" against the rest of the crowd. This is largely good, except in cases of e.g. violent incel egging-on spiral-downward communities or your more "old fashioned" sorts of violent radicalism that continue to exist.
(Here's a trivially simple example: the author claims that a smaller and smaller group is claiming a larger and larger share of the market in TV. But then look at something like this from wikipedia's I Love Lucy page: 'The episode "Lucy Goes to the Hospital", which first aired on Monday, January 19, 1953, garnered a record 15.105 million homes reached, equivalent to 44 million viewers resulting from 71.7% share of all households with television sets at the time having been tuned in to view the program.[69] That record is surpassed only by Elvis Presley's first of three appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show, which aired on September 9, 1956 (82.6% share, 60.710 million viewers and a 57.1 rating ).[69] The overall rating of 67.3 for the entire 1952 season of I Love Lucy continues to be the highest average rating for any single season of a TV show.[70]' No show or musician commands anything close to that now. )
> it seems all transgressive elements have been stripped from the mix and it’s all about “please like me, like my product, I’m desperate for your approval”
I think you're just commenting from your bubble, and using the flawed argument from the article to rationalize it (not to mention the fact that the people you're most likely to see are the minority vying for your attention).
In 1977 the top 20 grossing movies were probably watched by over 50% of movie watchers because there were just so few options. What do you think that proportion is now? I'm willing to bet that if you sampled random movie watchers, fewer than 10% of them will have watched any of the top 20 movies this year. There's just so much content out there, I don't think the top grossing movies mean as much anymore.
People's attention is spread very thin across hundreds of thousands of small creators these days. And consider that if you're a small YouTuber with a few thousand core fans, you're roughly as successful as the most underground punk rock bands/indie film directors of the 70s. As I see it, the "alternative" culture is bigger than it's ever been. I could be a die-hard fan of a dozen different works that I consider very mainstream, and yet my next door neighbor will not be familiar with any of them.
> Now, it seems all transgressive elements have been stripped from the mix and it’s all about “please like me, like my product, I’m desperate for your approval”
It's all a matter of perspective, I don't see this trend as necessarily good or bad. There were some positives to the "underground" and "alternative" aesthetic, like being independent-minded and an emphasis on doing things that were new and original. There were some downsides too, like being jaded about everything, being too cool to show enthusiasm, and ultimately sometimes just blindly conforming to the "alternative" view for the sake of opposing the mainstream view.
Similarly I think there are positives to how I see young people behaving today, the flip-side to the negatives you mentioned. Being genuine and showing emotion is cool again, and, perhaps ironically, since there is less cultural pressure to be "alternative" people are arguably being more honest with themselves by openly seeking approval. We're all humans after all and we all seek approval from others, maybe it's good that there is no longer any stigma around that in the influencer age.
>Something I noticed was that being “underground” and “alternative” was considered “cool” when I was a youngster. Now, it seems all transgressive elements have been stripped from the mix and it’s all about “please like me, like my product, I’m desperate for your approval”
I think it's because anti-institutional cynicism has become the new norm with the rise of gen-x and the "ironic" hipsterdom of the early 2000s.
So much of modern culture is about operating in the negative space of the "normal" which takes significantly less effort than actively defining what you value and who you are.
Ah, the joy of being a snob. I mean this in a mildly self deprecating way. But to put it more mildly, it's the joy of being self confident in following one's own tastes.
The word you are looking for is "contemporary" and nobody is spending money to make contemporary things appealing to you anymore.
The collorary is your "counter culture" was bought and sold too. That one stung to find out, but alternative lifestyles have been manufactured for a long, long time
Punk got commodified pretty quickly, so did grunge, so much that the fashion part of grunge already got a second or maybe even third revival. Any subculture or trend that picks up steam gets commodified pretty much instantly, creating anything alternative or vaguely subversive into a cash cow for selling t-shirts pretty quickly.
most of it is the result of wealth inequality. no one can afford to be cancelled. if you want a vision of the future watch chinese youtube iq.com where everything is hollow and empty. every show just becomes a tool of the state, all entertainment is an arm of the MCI. we’re heading there slowly. every single creator today faces a black box known as “the algorithm”, on tiktok, instagram reels and youtube shorts. those are the only platforms you can get any views today. vertical videos. the things we all collectively said Rotate your phone and film in landscape mode, about. your videos didn’t get popular? they must’ve just been bad, now watch this 15 year old girl twerk in spandex. francis ford Coppola never had to compete with girls in spandex, but today’s entertainment does.
Honestly it just sounds like you’re no longer a youngster.
That's probably the most facile cliche answer, amounting to "it has always been this way". TFA, for one, shows tons of ways it isn't so...
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> In books: lightning-quick plots and chapter-ending cliffhangers. Nobody thinks The Da Vinci Code is high literature, but it’s a book that really really wants you to read it. And a lot of people did!
I know folks in literary circles like hating on Dan Brown, but I do love that all his books have very short chapters. It’s refreshing to have frequent stopping places, rather than tucking in for a 70 page chapter-that-should-have-been-a-novella. I feel like I get through books with shorter chapters faster.
I wish some of these charts weren’t normalized. Instead of percent of the market, I want to see the overall volume. Because my hunch is that these markets are just expanding unevenly. If it use to be 10 novel movies and 1 superhero movie, and now it’s 15 novel movies and 10 superhero movies, it’s a decrease in market share, but it’s still an increase.
Ok devil’s advocate. What’s more original? Thor 3: Ragnarok? Or Jojo Rabbit? Both great films imo; both by Taika Waititi.
The former features marvel’s Thor, who’s commercial af. But it goes to a new world, has a markedly different tone, humor, themes, and plot. The plot hits themes of humility and identity and the specifics of the ending were, imo, not very predictable.
Jojo rabbit is set in WWII with all original characters with some great bits, but an overall plot that’s fairly predictable.
You could easily argue it’s still Jojo rabbit, but is there anything obviously bad about how original Thor 3 is? I think no.
And there have been lots of great movies in the past year even. Everything everywhere, Last Night in Soho, massive talent, etc.
Edit: the formulaic rom coms and action movies and comedies were the bigger issue to me. A mildly novel setting, or perhaps, novel buddy cop duo, added far less interesting material than things complained about here.
Romcoms are the romantic equivalent of B-budget action movies.
You know exactly how it goes, but that's the reason you enjoy it =)
Sure if you look at box office numbers and the billboard hot 100 you will see this picture, but that is really just telling you about older millennials and above. What about artists who post their music to SoundCloud or Bandcamp? What about all the short-form content on YouTube? What about true crime podcasts? What about big name production houses who skip theaters and go direct to streaming on Netflix or Apple TV? What about all the people whose primary form of content consumption isn't any of these but rather TikTok and Snapchat?
The real conclusion IMO is that the methods of distributing "pop culture" have been turned on their head, and traditional media is now playing catch up. Nielsen numbers and Billboard charts and all similar metrics are now irrelevant to the conversation.
Actually Neilsen uses ultrasonic signals which many platforms, big and small, rush to support to satisfy their creators. At least that was my experience as a Neilsen household then SWE at a SAAS serving radio stations (including white-labeled streaming apps).
It's not a conspiracy. There's just some sort of fundamental structure of systems having selection and variable-rewards that leads to this sort of distribution over time.
These are natural examples of ecosystems evolving toward a pareto distribution after a punctuated equalibrium. Think of it as another example of the great winnowing of variations that followed the Cambrian explosion. The cultural explosions were the invention of books, radio, television, internet, etc. Those disrupted the prior pareto distributions, and it took time to reestablish them.
It's a general feature of complex ecologies rather than a specialty of cultural or economic ecologies.
This looks like statistics being wielded poorly to arrive at the opposite conclusion from reality.
Consider if the whole of media were an iceberg: It seems to me that in 1977, almost the entire iceburg was poking up out of the water. Today on the other hand, while there is a much larger visible chunk sticking out of the water, it's just a tiny insignificant prick compared to what's going on underneath. The number you actually want is the size of the rest of the berg in 1977 vs today.
Because it seems to me that as popular as the things I watch are, if I went and asked random people on the street about them, 99% of them would have no idea what I'm talking about. But if I were to do the same thing 50 years ago, more people would be familiar with the same smaller set of shows and movies and books.
To me this is most evident based on the viewership of tv show finales. To this day, the most watched tv finale of all time is MASH at over 100 million viewers. Modern shows, even GoT don't even come close. I believe this is because there is so much content out there being produced that our attention is much more spread out. The "top 20" means less and less as the proportion of people who actually consume that stuff goes lower and lower.
Growing up in the 80s it seemed like there was a whole host of serious music and films made for my parents whether it was Phil Collins, Luther Vandross, Out of Africa or MASH. There was a market back then whether it was considered less than high brow however that is no longer the case. I would go so far as to say if Steve Jobs was alive things might be slightly different but not much.
Most of the charts look like snow. like this one
https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q...
I don't think the author's argument is that convincing except for the rise of movie franchises, but that's not a observation. Ppl have been complaining about formulaic movies for years.
The trendline is a bit sketchy but just comparing pre- and post-2000 there does seem to be a significant change in that chart.
While there may be a smaller number of musicians dominating the Top 100 or Top 40, less people listen to that music than ever because there are tons of other artists putting out good music.
Youtube, Spotify, TikTok, Soundcloud, etc. are far more relevant to pop culture, even if they don't bring in as much revenue.
>less people listen to that music than ever because there are tons of other artists putting out good music.
You'd be surprised. Most people only listen to what's popular, same as always. It's just that what is popular is much more constrained.
I started watching Netflix regularly over the last couple of years, prior to that I mainly watched good film and the occasional series like breaking bad or game of thrones.
I feel so burnt out from Netflix series, they are all the same, crime, murder, replicas of game of thrones (vikings) etc. And the majority of films they list are mediocre, all the good ones I have seen multiple times.
I can't remember the last new good film I watched, maybe Tenet. I lost track of new things coming out.
In situationist terminology - the spectacle is compounding upon itself towards oblivion. This is good! It makes it easier for people to see it for what it is.
Perhaps we should introduce a "purge" that happens every 10 years or so, and replaces all the popular figures by new ones.
Isn't that what the music industry does, already?
If we had the pre-1994 telecommunications act radio ownership structure, music would sound different every decade because local djs would find bands they liked and promote them. I bet recent music movements that have been ignored by the mainstream like Synthwave would probably be the new thing defining the 2020s.
Pop culture has always been an oligopoly. Even before the days of the Beatles or the Olympians or even the Octoads.
You can’t change this because pop culture and the star system are for the masses. Art is for early adopters. It’s that same concept of the technical chasm we have.
Chart-topping original music has also gone "extinct"[0]
0: https://www.billboard.com/music/chart-beat/no-2022-hits-harr...
Sixty years ago, the TVs in most American households got three channels, and each channel spent eight or ten hours broadcasting its test pattern. There weren't that many radio stations. The entertainment/distraction available was vastly less than today.
Right, so it's surprising that we see things even more concentrated now.
Are movies really still influencing pop culture like they used to? I don't think so. Top box office numbers only reflect how many movie watchers watched a movie. My kids don't give a single fuck about movies.
> remake
and then you have things like the book series of The Expanse and the follow on TV/streaming series, which are an entirely new thing.
or a movie like "ex machina".
nothing mandates watching endless remakes...
Could this effect also explain why a lot of seemingly truly original music came out in the 80s .. roughly coincident with a peak in wealth distribution in the middle class ?
My reasoning : a post-war relatively wealthy middle class and free University education meant more time for things like attending political protests, tinkering with emerging electronics/computers, engineering projects and garage bands.
We have wonderful flat screens now, much better comms .. and yet nothing seems fixable, were killing the planet with our carbon emissions and not many people seem concerned, and our best most energetic young minds are slaves to servicing their student debt.
Or maybe music executives are the only ones who read Fukuyama?
Isn't it somehow related to series being more and more popular in the last 20 years? Maybe people just like being in a comfortable place, seing the same stuff?
Isn't this all explained by power law effects? There was an HN thread digging up an old Shirky.com article on this not too long ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31038660
TL;DR: power laws predictably mean the top <whatever> looks really big, but that doesn't mean the long tail doesn't matter either.
As usual, the cause is below-trend GDP growth, and the solution is to increase the EROI of our energy systems.
What do we know about winner take all phenomena from biology? How do they work in a petri dish?
In forests it’s usually when an invasive species is introduced and results in a less efficient use of energy in the ecosystem.
this to me is a symptom of greed. It's people not wanting to pay for others efforts (possibly because they are not promoted or showcased or hidden) but they expect it for their efforts.
the consumer is to blame
Everything in our society has become an oligopoly.
The pop music industry has seen at least three disruptions to its controlling gatekeepers since the 1950s (1956-60, ~2000 with Napster, and presently with Spotify and YouTube), but each time a dominant hegenomy re-emerges. I doubt this time will be different, though the brief renaissance will doubtless be appreciated.
Charles Perrow wrote of this in the mid-1980s:
After the critical period from about 1956 to 1960, when tastes were unfrozen, competition was intense, and demand soared, consolidation appeared. The number of firms stabilized at about forty. New corporate entries appeared, such as MGM and Warner Brothers, sensing, one supposes, the opportunity that vastly expanding sales indicated. Some independents grew large. The eight-firm concentration ratio also stabilized (though not yet the four-firm ratio). The market became sluggish, however, as the early stars died, were forced into retirement because of legal problems, or in the notable case of Elvis Presley, were drafted by an impinging environment. Near the end of this period the majors decided that the new sounds were not a fad and began to buy up the contracts of established artists and successfully picked and promoted new ones, notably The Beach Boys and Bob Dylan. A new generation (e.g., The Beatles) appeared from 1964 to 1969, and sales again soared.(
But now the concentration ratios soared also. From 1962 to 1973, the four-firm ratio went from 25 to 51 percent; the eight-firm ratio from 46 to 81 percent, almost back to the pre-1955 levels. The number of different firms having hits declined from forty-six to only sixteen. Six of the eight giants were diversified conglomerates, some of which led in the earlier period; one was a new independent, the other a product of of mergers.*
How did they do it? The major companies asserted “increasing central control over the creative process”[352] through deliberate creation and extensive promotion of new groups, long-range contracts for groups, and reduced autonomy for producers. In addition, legal and illegal promotion costs (drug payola to disc jockeys, for example) rose in the competitive race and now exceeded the resources of small independents. Finally, the majors “have also moved to regain a controlling position in record distribution by buying chains of retail stores.”[353] The diversity is still greater than it had been in the past, and may remain high, but it is ominous that the majors have all the segments covered. As an executive said, “Columbia Records will have a major entry into whatever new area is broached by the vagaries of public tastes.” But for a concentrated industry, the “vagaries of public tastes” are not economical; it is preferable to stabilize and consolidate them. This would be possible through further control over the creative process and marketing.
Charles Perrow, Complex organizations : a critical essay, 1972, 1985. pp. 186--187.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29734146
The "content problem" has several legs: creation, production, curation, marketing, and distribution. Where costs of creation, production, and distribution fall (as they have), costs of curation (whether centralised or distributed) and marketing increase. We're seeing a shift in just that direction.
always has been
Alice neutered the tech patent race, the pivot to copyrightable content creation and rent seeking via essentially lifetime copyright as everyone alive will be dead, began; streaming services for everyone.
What do you expect from technocrats who grew up on dystopian capitalist cyberpunk? One touch purchases was a capitalist brand itself; Uncle Pauly G has NFT bucks for cyber punks that ship!
The population is getting older too.
Music is the most age dependant business. It's literally impossible to discover your favorite song at age 35+ and it's most likely already buried in your brain forever between 14 and 20.
Same things for movies, franchises sell because there is a familiarity to it. Stuff that isn't franchise just doesn't sell. A possible exception would be biopics.
I predict a huuuge amount of high budget biopic to integrate revenues from franchises.
JFK, MLK, Reagan, Hendrix, the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, The Eagles, Michael Jackson, Michael Jordan...they will all get a biopic with a budget of no less than 175M a pop.
> It's literally impossible to discover your favorite song at age 35+ and it's most likely already buried in your brain forever between 14 and 20.
With all due respect, this sounds like a comment from someone who's not really into music.
I did a quick check with a musical friend to see if he shared my initial reaction... "what's your favourite song?" resulted in "I have no idea how to answer that question. Maybe ask me my top 100 favourites?"
I'm well over that age now, and I have a new "favourite song" every week or two. Easing into more free time as the kids get older and am using some of that to go see more live music from local bands.
It's a very "consumes music as a mass market product" vibe. My preferred genres have changed over and over, and since I've had a Spotify account since they came to the US, I can easily scroll back over playlists and see that. Hell, I started practicing making music as a hobby at the age of 29.
In the last decade alone (I'm 30), I went from primarily classic rock and folk music mixed with some movie soundtracks to metal to Eurobeat to J-Pop. My favorite song when I was 14 was probably something by Feist or the Beatles, maybe something by Queen. Now it's definitely something from a J-Pop or Vocaloid artist. Somewhere between that I'd have said something by Franz Ferdinand or White Stripes (and to be fair, I do listen to them quite a bit).
Approaching age 40. Most of my favorite songs are probably from the 60s and 70s (5-20 years before I was born), but I only heard most of them (the ones that are my favorites) after age 35. I like plenty of newer music, too. I discover great new-to-me stuff from many decades, including the current one, all the time. This seems pretty normal in my social circle, though few of us are super into music.
There aren't a ton of albums that I liked between the ages of 14 and 20 that I'd still defend as "good", though a handful are still nostalgia-listens for me. I had pretty shit taste in music then, really.
Exactly how I feel at 37.
I hope when I’m in my 30s and 40s and decades after I’m still finding and enjoying new music from times before I was born to times after my youth.
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There is something I saw on YT a year or so ago from a guitar teacher who said that his students have changed over the past 15 years: they used to come in and say "I want to learn this song from my favorite band" - and now, overwhelmingly, when asked what they want to learn, they shrug and start scrolling through their phone to try to find an answer. They want to learn, but not anything specifically. And often when they have something, it could be the most random old thing, from any era.
That is, the song catalogue has stopped being something that has turnover, it just keeps accumulating into a library of dusty shelves, and that makes it hard for young people to assert norms as in days past and tell everyone "this band that was marketed to my demographic is totally the best and nothing will ever beat them" - which is where a concept of "best song" is going to come from, because hardly anyone is trying to assign letter grades to their listening.
Instead you'll see a more apocalyptic Fall-of-Rome tone in the comments of old hits: "I'm only 13 but I wish I were in the 80's, best decade for music nothing like today's crap". It's so common a sentiment as to be memetic and widely riffed upon.
Something has definitely changed in the music business.
There are elements where sound has deteriorated, functionally, from what used to be common practice. (this is of interest to me as it's 9/10ths of my day job)
Handled properly, modern digital audio is easily capable of containing the magic sounds of particular classic time periods: not just the 80s, if you really work at it you can get late 70s represented properly, even without using period recording equipment. But you cannot mess around, you have to do it a particular way.
People aren't significantly different from the 70s or the 60s or the 80s, as far as music creation goes. But the common practices are wildly different, and technology had a forcing effect causing the sounds of a decade (or time period) to take on a consistent quality based on the available tools and distribution media. That's all. You know it's not just 70s and 80s: there's electronic genres where the 90s fill a similar nostalgia role, and coincidentally have an obvious, distinct sound that is not heard today, and can to large effect be recalled through determinedly sticking to the period tools…
>It's literally impossible to discover your favorite song at age 35+ and it's most likely already buried in your brain forever between 14 and 20.
I don't have a single favorite song, but the band Ghost is high in my personal rotation -and they didn't even make a record until I was 44.
And I didn't discover most of my favorite bands until I was in my 20's.
I'm an avid music listener (in my 30s), and it'd be hard for me to name just 1 (or 10 or even 30) of my favorite songs. A couple of albums I keep in high regard came out in the last several years. Also, I seem to wear out music over time: you can only listen to Loveless or SAW 89-92 or Astral Weeks or Velvet Underground and Nico so many times. I know, yes, those albums are some of the best music made, but I don't find pleasure in re-listening them for the 100th time - I'd rather listen to something new.
I probably took after my dad when it comes to music listening. He's in his 60s and still actively searching for and finding new favorites.
Sounds very much like me. I like to keep listening too new music.
No it’s not literally impossible to discover your favorite song when you are 35 or older. You just have to continue to seek out new music.
Right, my favourite song definitely changes over time. I don't get people whose musical preferences freeze in place in their twenties. I mean, I also don't get my friends who like Folk but there's no accounting for taste, freezing at that specific age just seems even weirder.
The article seems unhappy about sampling, but basically sampling has been important more or less since it became practical. There was a rash of songs a while back that I thought were all sampling an old favourite I bought as a CD single last century. But they aren't! They're just using the same sample it does which is from a 1932 trumpet line.
And sampling empowers the outsiders they're enthusiastic about. Lil Nas X wouldn't be anywhere without (almost certainly illegally until he was signed and somebody papered over the cracks with $$$ and co-writing credits) sampling Nine Inch Nails "34 Ghosts IV". Yes that's a great old timey banjo sound, but it ain't sampled from some obscure old banjo tune, Trent and Atticus put a bunch of work into making it sound that way.
I'm in my early 40s, I've just discovered Kino [1], I think they're really damn great. I "discovered" Ornella Vanoni and Mina when I was in my mid 30s, me and my SO have formed a habit of listening to this Mina song [2] each New Year's Eve, at exactly midnight (it also helps our dog and cat focus on us and on the music inside the house, and not on the fireworks outside).
Between 14 and 20 years of age I was listening to some cool music, too (it was that interesting period just after grunge and as brit-pop was taking off), but, to be honest, the lyrics from those songs and even the music itself don't speak to me that much anymore.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kino_(band)
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGcX5wopq3M
> Music is the most age dependant business. It's literally impossible to discover your favorite song at age 35+ and it's most likely already buried in your brain forever between 14 and 20.
Nah. When I was a teenager, I was listening to classic rock and folk music. When I was in my mid 20s, I got into metal. Now I'm 30 and would absolutely give you a list of J-Pop songs competing for the title of "favorite song."
What nonsense. I'm 37 and my favourite song changes all the time.