Comment by pbuzbee

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.