The idea that there are emergent, systematic issues that are damaging our culture is always very compelling. The first 100 articles of that style had me so utterly convinced. It's taken 10-THOUSAND of those articles for me to start questioning whether there is an alternative hypothesis.
Maybe all of the apparent poverty in our culture's discourse, art, social cohesion, etc. isn't caused by broad tragedies of the commons that make for intriguing blog posts. Isn't the more parsimonious explanation that our culture is now composed of poor critical thinkers who are poorly educated, lack sophistication and nuance, and accordingly have terrible taste? We keep trying to invent these just-so stories for why we keep selecting for horrible, simplistic ideas when so many good ideas already exist. Rather than inventing a hundred different perverse incentive models and technology-changing-the-landscape theories, Occam's razor would favor the explanation that there has been a 'continental drift' in our cultural tastes and maturity. The observation that we keep voting for crappy stuff is best explained by... us preferring crappy stuff.
"Isn't the more parsimonious explanation that our culture is now composed of poor critical thinkers who are poorly educated, lack sophistication and nuance, and accordingly have terrible taste?"
Hasn't this always been true though? Widespread public education systems did not exist for 99.9999% of human history. How could it be that education is more present in the world than it has ever been in history yet we somehow have worse critical thinking skills? Blaming the ills of society on education doesn't make much sense when we've had societies much longer than we've had public education.
I don't read it as blaming the education system. In my mind it's an indictment of all the trends of the past 20 years in the public education system: austerity, lack of autonomy for teachers, heavy reliance on metrics and standardized testing to establish success. What we're getting now out the other end of that is a lack of critical thinking and a reduction in traits that can't be quantified like critical thinking.
Basically if our education system sucks, it's because we've spent 20 years cutting corners, cheaping out, over-relying on metrics, and enforcing top-down control over teaching and curriculum. No wonder it sucks. Our public policy has been to stamp the outliers out of the system and crush it into mediocre mush.
> Blaming the ills of society on education doesn't make much sense when we've had societies much longer than we've had public education
Why? Education may easily have negative impact. Modern education was created to teach people to read instructions how to operate factory machinery. Critical thinking is not needed for that. In fact, society without much critical thinking is easier to work with.
I have a take on this. As technology makes it cheaper to distribute things (I'm thinking all the way from printing press to VHS to streaming) the target audience grows. Each revolution in distribution broadens the pool of consumers. A book in the 1500s was only available to (and therefore likely directed at) wealthy and highly-educated people. Today, many (or most?) people can afford a Netflix account. Almost any Western person can watch a Tiktok video. I'm not trying to say that richer people are somehow better than the average person but I hope it's fair to say that, as media can reach more and more people, the target audience becomes less "sophisticated".
> book in the 1500s was only available to (and therefore likely directed at) wealthy and highly-educated people
Those people also had to compete, in the long run, for their positions. Broadening scope from a selected sample to the population necessarily degrades quality as the common denominator is pursued.
On the other hand, it creates tremendous wealth which allows niche art to flourish. (On the third hand, populism hates niche art.)
We've always liked crappy stuff. Try reading 1930s pulp. (Sci-fi, Westerns, adventure stories, detective novels, what have you.) It's almost all garbage, even if you can set aside the chauvinism of the age. The difference I see between then and now is that the dominant media outlets are elevating garbage as their premier product, where in the past they occasionally produced prestige works that went for highbrow appeal. It's not that the median has shifted down; if anything, it's slightly better garbage than it used to be. It's that there's doesn't seem to be anything at the top anymore.
Yeah I think sometime in the last 20 years it became very uncool to appear to be elitist about anything cultural. As a result there is no cachet in appearing to have elevated tastes and no stigma in liking trash. Personally that suits me as I like both Pulp and the Canon, for example. But on the other hand I think it is destructive for current writers who are doing anything remarkable as it usually does take tastemakers of some kind to bring their work to general attention.
From an investor's perspective, would you prefer to invest $100M in a movie franchise where the last 4 titles have done really well and become borderline cultural landmarks, or a novel title with absolutely no backstory? The reality is that the former wins out most of the time and this is the explanation Occam's razor really favors. No one wants to make a bad movie--it just so happens that some stories are less risky than others.
Nowadays, every new series or movie is set in a pre-existing universe that dates from the late 80s or 90s. Everything must be part of become a franchise to be funded, even if the team behind have little or nothing to do with the original creators. I do understand that producers want predictability and anything with a established fanbase is much less risky than betting on the next Jurassic Park, but they are simply killing the golden goose at this point.
But the problem is less with the source material and more with the execution of the movie. Look at Game of Thrones and what happened when they ran out of source material.
Something about the (modern?) movie making process just sucks out the good.
If culture is a random walk around a center of mass but without a strong negative feedback mechanism to keep that center of mass where we (we who?) want it, then it could easily go in any direction and keep going. However when you add our ability to collectively enjoy hedonistic culture more than intellectual culture, then it makes sense that there is just one direction that this random walk is going to take. Moreover, over time that preference of "culture" to move in one direction will be amplified by each generation, thus the trend should accelerate.
> Isn't the more parsimonious explanation that our culture is now composed of poor critical thinkers who are poorly educated, lack sophistication and nuance, and accordingly have terrible taste?
On first read this opinion just sounded like some misanthropic two-bit Nietzsche take
OTOH I've thought the same thing reading reddit comments, some people really are just fucking stupid and the only thing you can do about them is get away
The way I see it: the common culture can go fuck itself. Find your own people and ride off into the sunset
On an individual level, the way to solve it is to stop watching the popular stuff and go with indie-made things. In general, it's a good idea to consume less media anyway.
On a cultural level, the key is to promote local productions. Those will never get popular, but at least the local community will gain a better sense of connection through the artistic expressions of their community members. So for example: photo exhibitions, short film screenings, art galleries, all tailored to local productions.
Personally, I have no interest in the formulaic garbage coming from the pseudo-anonymous void.
> On an individual level, the way to solve it is to stop watching the popular stuff and go with indie-made things. On a cultural level, the key is to promote local productions.
You’re not wrong, but these are mostly untenable solutions at present.
The reason this situation has come to be is because of the newsfeed algorithms (pick your app) that sanitize or destroy local and niche influence/barriers and create a deep downhill rut towards amalgamated culture.
If our feeds only showed us what our followers post, the way it used to be, as opposed to showing us not-so-random content from all across the country/world, we wouldn’t have this problem so severely
Sounds a bit pessimistic. It has never been that easy to create music, videogames, produce videos, comics, and distribute them. Nowadays basically anyone can do it, so the amount of content available is gigantic. Moreover, alternative ways of getting money have appeared: patreon, kickstarter, various donation websites, partnerships...
On top of that there are still countless communities, free of any monetized algorithm, thanks to forums and things like discord.
So I think that it's more "tenable" than ever, and I don't thing that the cultural situation is worse than it was before, actually I think it's way better. It's just so easy to find a new think to dive into, connect to other hobbyists, discuss it, and for the most motivated, create content.
> You’re not wrong, but these are mostly untenable solutions at present.
In the past, it was a lot worse. There was a lot more "shared culture" that seemingly everyone tuned in to, that you kind of had to grin and bear. If you didn't know what happened on Seinfeld last night (90s), or on the Simpsons (2000s), or Game of Thrones (2010s), then you really had nothing to talk about at the water cooler. Nowadays, there really isn't much popular stuff that -everyone- watches, so it's easier than ever to drop that popular stuff.
A sticky notable exception is still national sports. There's still so much shared pop culture in knowing what the local city's Sportsball team sportsed about during last night's game that you have to kind of put up with if you want to socialize at the water cooler.
The way it used to be was that, if you wanted a newsfeed, you had to pay a curation company to print you off some stories and leave them on your doorstep in the morning. The era of non-algorithmic social media feeds was maybe 5 years long if I’m being generous, and I’m skeptical it could have become load bearing in that time.
There is no "local community," so there is no local production in any meaningful sense anymore. I am nothing like my neighbors, never have been, and have never known very much about them in any of the places I've lived. That suggestion is entirely untenable.
Many indie works suffer from the same formulaic failings as popular works, so that doesn't seem like a solution either. The same old hero story with a black or gay protagonist is not suddenly more interesting, yet that's a large portion of what's coming out of the indie scene.
In the US, there is no solution. We are all shackled to the cultural carcass that is late modernity. Retelling the same stories we have for decades, just with different colors.
> There is no "local community," so there is no local production in any meaningful sense anymore.
This is absolutely not true everywhere in the US. In every place I've lived, there has been local community. More vibrant in some places than others, but always there.
I can't know if that's the case in all parts of the US, but I suspect it's true in the majority.
> I am nothing like my neighbors, never have been, and have never known very much about them in any of the places I've lived.
Perhaps you've been opting not to engage with the local communities you've been in?
>Many indie works suffer from the same formulaic failings as popular works, so that doesn't seem like a solution either
I think the indie scene for a lot of media is a lot less 'independent' than we might think. This became obvious to me when I noticed the absolutely insane fights that happened on Twitter surrounding young adult literature. (Eg https://reason.com/2019/05/05/teen-fiction-twitter-is-eating...)
Science fiction and fantasy seem to be doing something a bit similar.
I think if you want more independent writers you'll have to go to places like Royalroad or /r/hfy or scribblehub.
> Those will never get popular, but at least the local community will gain a better sense of connection through the artistic expressions of their community members.
I assume you're just spitballing here. Still: what you've proposed often produces an artistic process that is possibly worse than the oligopoly you're attempting to oppose.
Prioritizing "a better sense of connection" through artistic expression is a recipe for manipulating artists into giving away their time (and, perhaps, art) for free or close to it. Moreover, de-emphasizing popularity means the local production has less money coming in. Too few dollars chasing "a better sense of connection" essentially means you'll optimized for the most manipulative ego-maniacs to hound local artists to mentor and make art for less than what they are worth.
Worst of all, the artists who get manipulated and burned out by this process aren't the ones who would have produced "garbage coming from the pseudo-anonymous void." They're the ones who would have done local community productions that have enough money to pay a minimally decent amount of money to artists. Ironically, you end up with less enthusiasm for the kind of art you're wanting to produce.
Whoa, what a weird take. I'm talking about stuff like starting a local photo club/drawing club/etc and sharing your work with like-minded people and starting exhibitions in your local town. Voluntary.
You make it sound like some weird manipulation scheme. Sounds like you've never actually done anything like this in real life.
> On a cultural level, the key is to promote local productions.
If an important selling point for a media product is that it’s locally produced, then it’s probably bad (as local productions usually are).
The real solution imo is just to consume less media. If consuming media takes up a significant portion of your time, then to me that sounds like a fundamentally boring life. I’d recommend one should fix their boring life problem before they start worrying about their boring media problem.
Books are media too. I've been an avid reader from early childhood and I don't consider my life boring. I guess what a "boring life" is, is up to every individual.
I chose those two because they were fairly famous local acts in Texas long before they became nationally famous.
ZZ Top in particular used to open for a lot of bands who would tour Texas. They were noted for bringing along a set of local fans who would help sell tickets for your tour.
2) One must suck before one gets good
If you can't make a living while you notionally "suck", you lose the pipeline to "good". I would, in fact, argue that this is really what is dragging down a lot of our "pop culture" right now. We are finally seeing the results of that pipeline collapsing around Y2K.
The article doesn't cover the most relevant part (and a huge contributing factor, imo): that most media products at that scale are simply investment vehicles. The first and often the only thing you hear about some blockbuster movie is how much money it made at the box office. Studio execs evaluate potential projects primarily by their potential to generate a return.
No surprise this leads to reruns and repeats, as everything slowly turns into multicoloured sludge. Investors look back at Super Movie VIII, and fund Super Movie IX because they can be reasonably confident in making a 100% profit. [1]
To be so immensely popular, these products have cater to the lowest common denominator. They're optimized for sellability, not quality. The "stars" come and go as their arcs play out, but the studios behind them remain a constant. The most successful ones make stock market insider-trading politicians look like children in a sandbox. They just pump out the sausage, sell it at a 100% mark up, and we gobble it up because it's pre-chewed and an easy distraction from the daily struggles.
This doesn't explain why this has started happening in the last 40 years for media types that have existed for far longer than that. Even movies have been around for long enough to build up a large catalogue and for investors to catch on, so why didn't we start seeing a rise in remakes and sequels until recently?
I have no strong opinion on the premise, but the cherry-picked data in this article is... on par with what I expect from a random Substack blog, which is to say god-awful.
The most obvious offender is in the music section, where he points out that hits per famous artist have been increasing, but then ignores the chart right below that in his source (https://towardsdatascience.com/hot-or-not-analyzing-60-years...), which states that tracks stay on the chart for about 5x shorter than they used to. If there are 5x more chart-topping songs, more of them will be from famous artists, who would've thought!?
Television section relies on Nielsen and it's written in the same year when Nielsen lost its license for underreporting (they have regained it since). The books section relies on LitHub, which wasn't particularly interested in YA fiction and non-fiction, so they didn't include them. So, it's not all the books, but only "adult" fiction books.
I think that piece of data reinforces the point. If the "stayers" fall off the charts faster, there ought to be no reason, outside the oligopoly argument, to presume that the replacements would be from the same set of artists. Were it not the same stuff over and over again, wouldn't you expect something novel (i.e. some other artist) to replace them, at some level? But, it doesn't look like that's what happens, and also that it's happening less frequently than it once did.
> Were it not the same stuff over and over again, wouldn't you expect something novel (i.e. some other artist) to replace them, at some level?
Well, they do? It's clearly visible from the "number of artists on the chart" that the number has been steadily increasing back up since its 2012 low. I'd also say that more modern artists like Lil Wayne and Drake are far more likely to record a verse in someone else's track than the Beatles, which also makes drawn conclusions pretty meaningless.
But even if none of that were true, yes, I still believe more songs = more songs performed by the most popular artists. I don't think any chart-topping artist from decades ago could compare to, say, Taylor Swift's 4 original albums and 4 re-recorded albums released within the past 5 years! That alone explains, what, 50, a hundred of chart-topping songs by one artist?
The only thing I'm convinced from looking at a source is these three things: 1) musicians release way more stuff than they used to, 2) musicians collab way more often, and 3) songs that end up on these charts stay there for much shorter. Or to summarise it in one claim: trends come and go at a much faster pace than they used to.
For a non-music example of this speed, just check out Fallout. Released barely over 2 months ago, critically aclaimed, nearly everyone liked it... and now, just two months later, who's talking about it?
I have no data to back me up, so take this with a big pinch of salt.
But I think perhaps the top 10 only seems more dominant because the long tail is so much longer and deeper. For example, my 10 year old son prefers to listen to obscure electronic music on Spotify (tracks with fewer than 10K listens), over Taylor Swift or Muse.
Yep, this is my impression as well. The article seemed very dissonant to what I actually see when comparing between pop culture during my 90s childhood and today.
Just to take one top of mind example: Recently when watching TV with my kids, we've been going down a "science and engineering" youtuber rabbit hole, and I think there is essentially no end to it. There are at least tens of popular creators in this genre, and hundreds, maybe thousands, of people doing it. When I was a kid, essentially this entire segment of pop culture was comprised of Bill Nye.
And I see this all over the place. We had Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera. Now there are hundreds of singers in a niche like that who have a following.
So which of these worlds is the oligopoly? Not the one today, I think...
I think the problem here is with the definition of "pop culture" that the article is using. It's true that lots of segments of pop culture that were dominant in the past have been hollowed out. But pop culture has itself just massively broadened out.
Agreed. I upvoted the article because I think it's interesting to consider, but a statement like "the number of artists on the Billboard Hot 100 has been decreasing for decades" is entirely compatible with the notion that the proportion of the population listening to the long tail rather than the artists on the Billboard 100 could be higher than ever. Taylor Swift is big, but she's still no Michael Jackson or The Beatles in terms of cultural penetration, and probably never will be.
The problem is how compensation works in streaming. Those long tail artists are now paid less than they would make off of a few hundred CD sales. The Taylor Swifts and Muses of the world still get the bulk of the subscription you pay every month.
These long tail artists almost didn't sell their albums before streaming though. I've always been into obscure music since I was a teenager, to find it I'd have to dig through many record stores' bins, and get lucky enough to get my hands on second hand stuff. There was never a place they were stocked (perhaps except for some local store around where the artists' themselves were located).
When piracy came along I had access to a lot more music I had only heard about, or heard from a friend's bootleg recording that was a copy of a copy of a cassette tape someone had. Streaming happened and I felt much better than having to pirate some poor souls hard work.
Bandcamp is still there for selling albums digitally which is much better for not popular artists to reach their fans than the old ways.
Music was never compensated enough for the work done, it's always been tough, the culprit is not streaming.
> The problem is how compensation works in streaming.
That may be ONE problem.
I think a more serious problem is that small venues are closing. It's partly gentrifcation, forcing residents into neighbourhoods that were formerly industrial (and so allowed noise). The new residents complain about noise, and a venue that's been running for 40 years gets shuttered.
That's not it. You need to pony up a few thousand dollars for a minimum CD order. Back then selling a few hundred CDs meant you broke even. Distribution was via your shows or email lists and mailing them.
Now distribution to the entire world is basically free and you don't need to pony up money to print CDs.
Anyone pining for the way things used to be, wasn't there and is looking through rose colored glasses.
I think for music that certainly seems likely - 99% of my listening is artists who I will never hear on the radio. Books too, probably. But I don't know how relevant that is for something like movies. Outside of the occasional independent theatres, movies force us into a relatively limited selection. But if anything that media is becoming irrelevant as new media like YouTube and Twitch rises to prominence.
I would argue even with movies it holds true. 30 years ago, it was very difficult and expensive to buy, say, 1950s film noir. Now it takes 5 minutes to torrent.
Perhaps this is what's going on. It's hard for new obscure stuff to make money and so there's less of it, but old obscure stuff (which doesn't need to make money) is more popular than ever.
I agree with the long tail part, but goths rose to a subculture status that most things never will again.
A meme with a short shelf life is the most external acknowledgement most subcultures will see these days. Usually it's just mocking a caricature of the people who have that shared trait and are also obnoxious enough to gain social media prominence. And nobody ever really believed it was representative of the thing in the first place (unless you're in traditional media, in which case it's taken as axiomatic).
I think that's very true. And it applies to film and other media as well. There's vastly more content available to far larger audiences than ever. There may very well be more concentration on the business side, but not on the creative side. I watched American Fiction on Prime Video this week and it was really outstanding. It turned a modest profit on a $10M budget at the box office which makes it barely a blip on box office records, but on the flip side it's the kind of film that would have had zero chance of getting made 30+ years ago.
Thats definitely what's happening, at least with music. When radio was dominant, the "hot 100" lists were pretty diverse because everyone was exposed to the same set of ~70-150 hit songs every year, that were curated by record companies and radio stations. This system let weirder or more ambitious music occasionally trickle to the top. Without everyone listening to the same programming, the only artists that can be the most popular are the most widely appealing musicians.
> Until the year 2000, about 25% of top-grossing movies were prequels, sequels, spinoffs, remakes, reboots, or cinematic universe expansions. Since 2010, it’s been over 50% ever year. In recent years, it’s been close to 100%.
Coincidentally, it was about then (2010) that I stopped going to mainstream movies. Or perhaps not so coincidentally. I stopped because I stopped liking the movies that I did see, and perhaps that list explains why.
Instead of going out to the movies, I started going out to see live theater.
Things were different in 1960s/1970s since at that time there weren't huge catalogues of works owned by a just few media companies, although there were far fewer channels (with less and more expensive bandwidth.)
In our time, most of the rights to 100 years of pop culture is owned by three big media companies, and they own stakes in distribution channels. The catalogues give them power to bargain for promotion in various channels. That's how it used to work in radio [0], and is suspected to work in music streaming [1].
I suspect revoking extensions to copyright/IP laws [2, for example] would change the picture.
The article briefly mentions “Hollywood greediness” as one of the possible explanations people give for the phenomenon and then switches to describe other factors.
However, this greediness to get more money from production is also reflected in risk aversion. Look it from the point of an investor: option 1 invests 10 million in a new sci-fi production with an exciting plot, and Option 2 invest 10 million in a franchise with a crappy plot. The chances of getting a more significant return from 2 are higher.
The same happens with music and other art forms.
That’s why it’s important to have incentives for local and indie productions. Many times, the critics of those incentives point out that they are biased and contrary to the “free market”. But I don’t see any other way to bring balance to the force.
Risk profiles change though. Option 1 was a better bet in the late 1970s and early '80s, when the Old Hollywood franchises had been thoroughly wrung out and demand was there for new experiences.
The only graph in that article that shows a strong trend supporting the thesis is the first one - essentially, "movies that are remakes or sequels to previous movies". It goes from 25% in the 1980s to ~80% today.
But doesn't that follow sort of naturally? Filmmaking took off as an industry not that long ago - roughly in the 1960s. Of course you didn't have too many remakes of old movies back when you just didn't have that many movies to begin with. And cinematic universes - often centered around superhero action - started popping up only in the 1980s. Before that, it wasn't easy to make a sequel to "Gone with the Wind" or "To Kill a Mockingbird". It was a literary problem, not a matter of corporate consolidation.
And it's dictated to a large extent by audience preferences. We like sequels, prequels, and remakes of the films we remember from our childhood. The same goes for video games; it's a lot harder to sell a brand new idea than it is to market Fallout 5 or Dragon Age IV. It's not the studios doing it to us, it's what we want to play.
I don't know. I don't find the thesis particularly compelling. On the flip side: it used to be that everyone was watching the same TV shows at once, because you only had so much choice. Now, you have far more variety than you used to (albeit the average quality has probably gone down). The same goes for music - sure, "top 100" lists are still dominated by studio-produced albums, but what percentage of people is listening to "top 100" when we all get personalized streams?
My theory is that culture back then was way more common and shared among people, so old stuff got a great mindshare that is really hard to recreate with new movies.
And it seems like people are nostalgic for things they never was there to experience. Like, some fake nostalgia, that is transferred between generations and cultures that had nothing to do with it.
Even if there is content, statistically there is no pressure to change the whole picture.
Spotify pays less and less for niches.
Algorithms recommend more and more superstars.
People are not prepared to pay for the niche individuals more than they need to.
These individuals have harder time to make a living from that. They cannot focus on that. Over time, there is less and less individuals.
Is it true that there’s less and less individuals? All of the niche interests I personally have are much, much easier to satisfy now than they were 20 years ago - many of them have multiple full time content creators dedicated to that specific niche.
Most of the growth in these spaces has been cultivated by the massive marketing power of these titans. I think viewing this as oligopolies taking over culture is misleading, rather, these massive corporations have invested huge marketing budgets into bringing consumers into the market, and the net result is that they now make up the glut of it. To use an analogy to the internet, it's not that all the intelligent discussion, homespun websites, and intimate message boards have disappeared, rather, they have been dwarfed by the influx of new people who were not participating in these spaces before they were lured in by the forces of the attention economy. This is "eternal September" writ large across the cultural landscape.
This is not oligopoly, but the result of technology as an enhancer delivering more value to the leader.
E.g., in the 1990's vehicles for commercializing movies took off. Toys, fast-food tie-in's with well-timed ad campaigns and printed bags, etc.: all this technology took time to develop, but resulted in the major movies making more money from tie-in's than the box office. That results in more "producers", i.e., people dedicated to making commercial success out of stories, and the most successful of those can translate those skills to new artists (whether movie directors or pop stars) -- much like the Bush and Clinton political teams picked new horses to run for a decade or more. Their secondary offerings may be successful mainly because their producers are good, but that effect peters out with fashion fatigue.
The underlying intuition is that "popular" culture, by virtue of being many, many people, is somehow a test of reality, a stochastic scale. But any measurable effect is largely a function of followers - some fast, some slow - that reflect different types of network and investment effects.
Anytime these discussions pop up, it's good to link to the documentary "Everything is a Remix" (here is the 2023 updated version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9RYuvPCQUA" )
It highlights how essentially everything in culture is a remix of some previous version of the culture (or some aspect of it). E.g. even language is largely a remix of earlier languages with some occasional creation of new words.
Also, while true that there is definitely an oligopoly, it's also clear that the Long Tail is both huge AND easy to access. In the past, you could only see movies by going to the movie theater and there were only a limited number of theaters. Now, you can both create and consume media in niches as small (or combined) as you want.
The most interesting cultural artifacts have always been media…in large part because that was all which has survived since antiquity, excepting a few lucky buildings.
But this is not necessarily inherent to media.
Perhaps the most interesting, long-standing cultural artifacts we are currently creating are not in the realm of media at all.
Space travel
The internet
Generative AI
Even though movies are undoubtedly dominated by a few stars, I don’t think the legacy of our time will be the movie Legally Blonde 2. When people think about the period 1950-2050, they will write more about the rise of companies which were capable of mass producing intelligent and what people did with them.
I think this analysis is missing something: how much money is being made per hit, and how many people are consuming it? In TV, at least, the numbers are way down. As a result, people play it safe by doing remakes.
Around 2000 (+- 5) someone claimed that with the internet you only need 1000 (or I believe 3000) dedicated fans to make something like a blog.
And around 2010 (+- 5) there was a Wired, I believe, article that did show that also the most popular things are more concentrated, while the Long Tail eats the former successful mid-range.
If anybody has references, the first could be Chris Anderson's The long tail, but I think that thesis was around earlier. The second I didn't find anything.
One way around it is to stop looking at only media from your own country (specifically if you're in the US) and look at what other countries are doing. With the internet there is no reason to only listen to American bands, watch American movies, etc. K-pop for example has grown outside of Korea.
The conclusion from the music analysis is off because of changes in media consumption and chart calculations. When a top (or even a mid) act drops an album (so, every week), the entire album is listened on the apps by many people and it is not unusual to have all songs in the top 100 that week.
Isn't pop[ular] culture necessarily an oligopoly, in that in any sort of popularity-driven competition, popular things will always win out over less popular things?
> oligopoly: a state of limited competition, in which a market is shared by a small number of producers or sellers.
(That's an honest question, not a concrete stance.)
This kind of thing always just reads as "I don't like what is in pop culture," mostly because while these metrics tell one story, the tails of the culture are bigger than they have ever been. Pop culture looks so shitty because people don't depend on it the same way they used to.
And eventually, the model sinks. Just look at Disney. It may take another decade or more, but either they will shift their approach, or they will die and get split up and sold off.
Part of me thinks that the law should be changed so that IP covers works but not "universes". E.g. only Disney would have the right to distribute A New Hope but anyone could create their own work set in the Star Wars universe.
This would better match the way that popular culture has worked throughout most of history where anyone could create a story about King Arthur, Robin Hood, or Sun Wukong.
There would probably need to be some sort of protections to prevent corporations from simply scooping up independent artist's work. However, that seems like something that could be worked out.
However, that seems like something that could be worked out.
That’s a pretty heavy lift for that poor sentence. The way it “works out” in my mind is that the instant an indie work pokes its head above water, Disney sweeps in and makes a franchise out of it without payment to the artist. Because your proposal works both directions.
A franchise could only become open for unauthorized developers once it has made a certain inflation adjusted revenue, or once a franchise has works created by more than a certain number of artists.
Or these changes could simply only apply to corporations. So individuals could own franchise IP but corporations could not. Or corporations would be required to compensate the original creator but independent artists would not.
It's not necessary to make a perfect system. Just one that is better than our current dysfunctional system where corporations own most of our culture.
Shorter attention span these days. Viewers want a payoff immediately and don't want to wait a whole season.
Aside from streaming, commercial breaks are getting longer and episode content shorter. Content is only half the runtime now. If they put a rerun between each new episode, viewers stay engaged, but they get a whole bunch more commercial spaces for free.
We can't even have books any more to get content at our own pace. AI is going to produce too much crap to sort through, unless you stick to the known authors, but that just confirms this article's point.
> AI is going to produce too much crap to sort through
There will be money to be made in manual curation again soon.
As in magazine style, not influencer style. Where it's not the producer paying for an ad, but the readers paying for the editor doing their job.
If it has been done for writing for a couple hundred years, it can be done for video entertainment as well. It's already done for video games to a point, although some review sites look like payola now.
I think one component of it is the devaluing of writing in the industry. A big issue in the most recent WGA strike (mostly glossed over in favor of obsessing over the AI stuff) was studios pushing really hard to turn writing into one-off gig work instead of a stable position. A lot of successful shows have a first season that is lackluster or just plain "off" because they hadn't figured out what the show was actually about, and I suspect that excessive commoditization of the writing process is a recipe for producing that "weird first season" every season.
Devaluating writers probably hurts, but you see the "weird first season" even in older shows. The 1960s series Get Smart and Dick Van Dyke Show had first seasons that were much weaker than what the show would become, to cite a couple of examples. There probably is no substitute for a period of getting your sea legs under you as a writer.
>when do we get the next alias that has 24 episodes a season and 8 or 9 seasons
When? It'll be 3 years late when you discover a cult classic that was canceled for abysmal ratings after 6 episodes. Which is why they'll never make it.
The idea that there are emergent, systematic issues that are damaging our culture is always very compelling. The first 100 articles of that style had me so utterly convinced. It's taken 10-THOUSAND of those articles for me to start questioning whether there is an alternative hypothesis.
Maybe all of the apparent poverty in our culture's discourse, art, social cohesion, etc. isn't caused by broad tragedies of the commons that make for intriguing blog posts. Isn't the more parsimonious explanation that our culture is now composed of poor critical thinkers who are poorly educated, lack sophistication and nuance, and accordingly have terrible taste? We keep trying to invent these just-so stories for why we keep selecting for horrible, simplistic ideas when so many good ideas already exist. Rather than inventing a hundred different perverse incentive models and technology-changing-the-landscape theories, Occam's razor would favor the explanation that there has been a 'continental drift' in our cultural tastes and maturity. The observation that we keep voting for crappy stuff is best explained by... us preferring crappy stuff.
"Isn't the more parsimonious explanation that our culture is now composed of poor critical thinkers who are poorly educated, lack sophistication and nuance, and accordingly have terrible taste?"
Hasn't this always been true though? Widespread public education systems did not exist for 99.9999% of human history. How could it be that education is more present in the world than it has ever been in history yet we somehow have worse critical thinking skills? Blaming the ills of society on education doesn't make much sense when we've had societies much longer than we've had public education.
I don't read it as blaming the education system. In my mind it's an indictment of all the trends of the past 20 years in the public education system: austerity, lack of autonomy for teachers, heavy reliance on metrics and standardized testing to establish success. What we're getting now out the other end of that is a lack of critical thinking and a reduction in traits that can't be quantified like critical thinking.
Basically if our education system sucks, it's because we've spent 20 years cutting corners, cheaping out, over-relying on metrics, and enforcing top-down control over teaching and curriculum. No wonder it sucks. Our public policy has been to stamp the outliers out of the system and crush it into mediocre mush.
The illiterate weren't able to communicate outside of their immediate vicinity. They simply weren't part of the conversation
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Why do you equate widespread public education systems with amount of critical thinking?
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> Blaming the ills of society on education doesn't make much sense when we've had societies much longer than we've had public education
Why? Education may easily have negative impact. Modern education was created to teach people to read instructions how to operate factory machinery. Critical thinking is not needed for that. In fact, society without much critical thinking is easier to work with.
I have a take on this. As technology makes it cheaper to distribute things (I'm thinking all the way from printing press to VHS to streaming) the target audience grows. Each revolution in distribution broadens the pool of consumers. A book in the 1500s was only available to (and therefore likely directed at) wealthy and highly-educated people. Today, many (or most?) people can afford a Netflix account. Almost any Western person can watch a Tiktok video. I'm not trying to say that richer people are somehow better than the average person but I hope it's fair to say that, as media can reach more and more people, the target audience becomes less "sophisticated".
> book in the 1500s was only available to (and therefore likely directed at) wealthy and highly-educated people
Those people also had to compete, in the long run, for their positions. Broadening scope from a selected sample to the population necessarily degrades quality as the common denominator is pursued.
On the other hand, it creates tremendous wealth which allows niche art to flourish. (On the third hand, populism hates niche art.)
Content creators too. "Democratizing" tech is almost by definition a race to the lowest common denominator.
We've always liked crappy stuff. Try reading 1930s pulp. (Sci-fi, Westerns, adventure stories, detective novels, what have you.) It's almost all garbage, even if you can set aside the chauvinism of the age. The difference I see between then and now is that the dominant media outlets are elevating garbage as their premier product, where in the past they occasionally produced prestige works that went for highbrow appeal. It's not that the median has shifted down; if anything, it's slightly better garbage than it used to be. It's that there's doesn't seem to be anything at the top anymore.
Yeah I think sometime in the last 20 years it became very uncool to appear to be elitist about anything cultural. As a result there is no cachet in appearing to have elevated tastes and no stigma in liking trash. Personally that suits me as I like both Pulp and the Canon, for example. But on the other hand I think it is destructive for current writers who are doing anything remarkable as it usually does take tastemakers of some kind to bring their work to general attention.
> our culture is now composed of poor critical thinkers who are poorly educated, lack sophistication and nuance, and accordingly have terrible taste
That’s really begging the question, isn’t it? Can you explain why your claim above should be true today (and especially not true/less true years ago)?
From an investor's perspective, would you prefer to invest $100M in a movie franchise where the last 4 titles have done really well and become borderline cultural landmarks, or a novel title with absolutely no backstory? The reality is that the former wins out most of the time and this is the explanation Occam's razor really favors. No one wants to make a bad movie--it just so happens that some stories are less risky than others.
Nowadays, every new series or movie is set in a pre-existing universe that dates from the late 80s or 90s. Everything must be part of become a franchise to be funded, even if the team behind have little or nothing to do with the original creators. I do understand that producers want predictability and anything with a established fanbase is much less risky than betting on the next Jurassic Park, but they are simply killing the golden goose at this point.
But the problem is less with the source material and more with the execution of the movie. Look at Game of Thrones and what happened when they ran out of source material.
Something about the (modern?) movie making process just sucks out the good.
If culture is a random walk around a center of mass but without a strong negative feedback mechanism to keep that center of mass where we (we who?) want it, then it could easily go in any direction and keep going. However when you add our ability to collectively enjoy hedonistic culture more than intellectual culture, then it makes sense that there is just one direction that this random walk is going to take. Moreover, over time that preference of "culture" to move in one direction will be amplified by each generation, thus the trend should accelerate.
> Isn't the more parsimonious explanation that our culture is now composed of poor critical thinkers who are poorly educated, lack sophistication and nuance, and accordingly have terrible taste?
On first read this opinion just sounded like some misanthropic two-bit Nietzsche take
OTOH I've thought the same thing reading reddit comments, some people really are just fucking stupid and the only thing you can do about them is get away
The way I see it: the common culture can go fuck itself. Find your own people and ride off into the sunset
"I don't know, maybe they're stupid" — Butthead
On an individual level, the way to solve it is to stop watching the popular stuff and go with indie-made things. In general, it's a good idea to consume less media anyway.
On a cultural level, the key is to promote local productions. Those will never get popular, but at least the local community will gain a better sense of connection through the artistic expressions of their community members. So for example: photo exhibitions, short film screenings, art galleries, all tailored to local productions.
Personally, I have no interest in the formulaic garbage coming from the pseudo-anonymous void.
> On an individual level, the way to solve it is to stop watching the popular stuff and go with indie-made things. On a cultural level, the key is to promote local productions.
You’re not wrong, but these are mostly untenable solutions at present.
The reason this situation has come to be is because of the newsfeed algorithms (pick your app) that sanitize or destroy local and niche influence/barriers and create a deep downhill rut towards amalgamated culture.
If our feeds only showed us what our followers post, the way it used to be, as opposed to showing us not-so-random content from all across the country/world, we wouldn’t have this problem so severely
Sounds a bit pessimistic. It has never been that easy to create music, videogames, produce videos, comics, and distribute them. Nowadays basically anyone can do it, so the amount of content available is gigantic. Moreover, alternative ways of getting money have appeared: patreon, kickstarter, various donation websites, partnerships...
On top of that there are still countless communities, free of any monetized algorithm, thanks to forums and things like discord.
So I think that it's more "tenable" than ever, and I don't thing that the cultural situation is worse than it was before, actually I think it's way better. It's just so easy to find a new think to dive into, connect to other hobbyists, discuss it, and for the most motivated, create content.
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> You’re not wrong, but these are mostly untenable solutions at present.
In the past, it was a lot worse. There was a lot more "shared culture" that seemingly everyone tuned in to, that you kind of had to grin and bear. If you didn't know what happened on Seinfeld last night (90s), or on the Simpsons (2000s), or Game of Thrones (2010s), then you really had nothing to talk about at the water cooler. Nowadays, there really isn't much popular stuff that -everyone- watches, so it's easier than ever to drop that popular stuff.
A sticky notable exception is still national sports. There's still so much shared pop culture in knowing what the local city's Sportsball team sportsed about during last night's game that you have to kind of put up with if you want to socialize at the water cooler.
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The way it used to be was that, if you wanted a newsfeed, you had to pay a curation company to print you off some stories and leave them on your doorstep in the morning. The era of non-algorithmic social media feeds was maybe 5 years long if I’m being generous, and I’m skeptical it could have become load bearing in that time.
Somebody should make content selection algorithm customizable by users.
There is no "local community," so there is no local production in any meaningful sense anymore. I am nothing like my neighbors, never have been, and have never known very much about them in any of the places I've lived. That suggestion is entirely untenable.
Many indie works suffer from the same formulaic failings as popular works, so that doesn't seem like a solution either. The same old hero story with a black or gay protagonist is not suddenly more interesting, yet that's a large portion of what's coming out of the indie scene.
In the US, there is no solution. We are all shackled to the cultural carcass that is late modernity. Retelling the same stories we have for decades, just with different colors.
> There is no "local community," so there is no local production in any meaningful sense anymore.
This is absolutely not true everywhere in the US. In every place I've lived, there has been local community. More vibrant in some places than others, but always there.
I can't know if that's the case in all parts of the US, but I suspect it's true in the majority.
> I am nothing like my neighbors, never have been, and have never known very much about them in any of the places I've lived.
Perhaps you've been opting not to engage with the local communities you've been in?
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>Many indie works suffer from the same formulaic failings as popular works, so that doesn't seem like a solution either
I think the indie scene for a lot of media is a lot less 'independent' than we might think. This became obvious to me when I noticed the absolutely insane fights that happened on Twitter surrounding young adult literature. (Eg https://reason.com/2019/05/05/teen-fiction-twitter-is-eating...)
Science fiction and fantasy seem to be doing something a bit similar.
I think if you want more independent writers you'll have to go to places like Royalroad or /r/hfy or scribblehub.
Local community continues to exist even though you choose not to participate in it.
> Those will never get popular, but at least the local community will gain a better sense of connection through the artistic expressions of their community members.
I assume you're just spitballing here. Still: what you've proposed often produces an artistic process that is possibly worse than the oligopoly you're attempting to oppose.
Prioritizing "a better sense of connection" through artistic expression is a recipe for manipulating artists into giving away their time (and, perhaps, art) for free or close to it. Moreover, de-emphasizing popularity means the local production has less money coming in. Too few dollars chasing "a better sense of connection" essentially means you'll optimized for the most manipulative ego-maniacs to hound local artists to mentor and make art for less than what they are worth.
Worst of all, the artists who get manipulated and burned out by this process aren't the ones who would have produced "garbage coming from the pseudo-anonymous void." They're the ones who would have done local community productions that have enough money to pay a minimally decent amount of money to artists. Ironically, you end up with less enthusiasm for the kind of art you're wanting to produce.
Whoa, what a weird take. I'm talking about stuff like starting a local photo club/drawing club/etc and sharing your work with like-minded people and starting exhibitions in your local town. Voluntary.
You make it sound like some weird manipulation scheme. Sounds like you've never actually done anything like this in real life.
> On a cultural level, the key is to promote local productions.
If an important selling point for a media product is that it’s locally produced, then it’s probably bad (as local productions usually are).
The real solution imo is just to consume less media. If consuming media takes up a significant portion of your time, then to me that sounds like a fundamentally boring life. I’d recommend one should fix their boring life problem before they start worrying about their boring media problem.
Books are media too. I've been an avid reader from early childhood and I don't consider my life boring. I guess what a "boring life" is, is up to every individual.
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1) Was ZZ Top bad? Was Pantera bad?
I chose those two because they were fairly famous local acts in Texas long before they became nationally famous.
ZZ Top in particular used to open for a lot of bands who would tour Texas. They were noted for bringing along a set of local fans who would help sell tickets for your tour.
2) One must suck before one gets good
If you can't make a living while you notionally "suck", you lose the pipeline to "good". I would, in fact, argue that this is really what is dragging down a lot of our "pop culture" right now. We are finally seeing the results of that pipeline collapsing around Y2K.
We are on matrix or discord sharing art and performing for each other.
The article doesn't cover the most relevant part (and a huge contributing factor, imo): that most media products at that scale are simply investment vehicles. The first and often the only thing you hear about some blockbuster movie is how much money it made at the box office. Studio execs evaluate potential projects primarily by their potential to generate a return.
No surprise this leads to reruns and repeats, as everything slowly turns into multicoloured sludge. Investors look back at Super Movie VIII, and fund Super Movie IX because they can be reasonably confident in making a 100% profit. [1]
To be so immensely popular, these products have cater to the lowest common denominator. They're optimized for sellability, not quality. The "stars" come and go as their arcs play out, but the studios behind them remain a constant. The most successful ones make stock market insider-trading politicians look like children in a sandbox. They just pump out the sausage, sell it at a 100% mark up, and we gobble it up because it's pre-chewed and an easy distraction from the daily struggles.
1: https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/budgets
This doesn't explain why this has started happening in the last 40 years for media types that have existed for far longer than that. Even movies have been around for long enough to build up a large catalogue and for investors to catch on, so why didn't we start seeing a rise in remakes and sequels until recently?
When did the US get off the gold standard, early 70's?
Maybe the infinite supply of money has something to do with these changes.
I have no strong opinion on the premise, but the cherry-picked data in this article is... on par with what I expect from a random Substack blog, which is to say god-awful.
The most obvious offender is in the music section, where he points out that hits per famous artist have been increasing, but then ignores the chart right below that in his source (https://towardsdatascience.com/hot-or-not-analyzing-60-years...), which states that tracks stay on the chart for about 5x shorter than they used to. If there are 5x more chart-topping songs, more of them will be from famous artists, who would've thought!?
Television section relies on Nielsen and it's written in the same year when Nielsen lost its license for underreporting (they have regained it since). The books section relies on LitHub, which wasn't particularly interested in YA fiction and non-fiction, so they didn't include them. So, it's not all the books, but only "adult" fiction books.
I think that piece of data reinforces the point. If the "stayers" fall off the charts faster, there ought to be no reason, outside the oligopoly argument, to presume that the replacements would be from the same set of artists. Were it not the same stuff over and over again, wouldn't you expect something novel (i.e. some other artist) to replace them, at some level? But, it doesn't look like that's what happens, and also that it's happening less frequently than it once did.
> Were it not the same stuff over and over again, wouldn't you expect something novel (i.e. some other artist) to replace them, at some level?
Well, they do? It's clearly visible from the "number of artists on the chart" that the number has been steadily increasing back up since its 2012 low. I'd also say that more modern artists like Lil Wayne and Drake are far more likely to record a verse in someone else's track than the Beatles, which also makes drawn conclusions pretty meaningless.
But even if none of that were true, yes, I still believe more songs = more songs performed by the most popular artists. I don't think any chart-topping artist from decades ago could compare to, say, Taylor Swift's 4 original albums and 4 re-recorded albums released within the past 5 years! That alone explains, what, 50, a hundred of chart-topping songs by one artist?
The only thing I'm convinced from looking at a source is these three things: 1) musicians release way more stuff than they used to, 2) musicians collab way more often, and 3) songs that end up on these charts stay there for much shorter. Or to summarise it in one claim: trends come and go at a much faster pace than they used to.
For a non-music example of this speed, just check out Fallout. Released barely over 2 months ago, critically aclaimed, nearly everyone liked it... and now, just two months later, who's talking about it?
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>If there are 5x more chart-topping songs, more of them will be from famous artists, who would've thought!?
I don't see how that negates their argument. Can you elaborate?
I have no data to back me up, so take this with a big pinch of salt.
But I think perhaps the top 10 only seems more dominant because the long tail is so much longer and deeper. For example, my 10 year old son prefers to listen to obscure electronic music on Spotify (tracks with fewer than 10K listens), over Taylor Swift or Muse.
We are all goths now.
Yep, this is my impression as well. The article seemed very dissonant to what I actually see when comparing between pop culture during my 90s childhood and today.
Just to take one top of mind example: Recently when watching TV with my kids, we've been going down a "science and engineering" youtuber rabbit hole, and I think there is essentially no end to it. There are at least tens of popular creators in this genre, and hundreds, maybe thousands, of people doing it. When I was a kid, essentially this entire segment of pop culture was comprised of Bill Nye.
And I see this all over the place. We had Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera. Now there are hundreds of singers in a niche like that who have a following.
So which of these worlds is the oligopoly? Not the one today, I think...
I think the problem here is with the definition of "pop culture" that the article is using. It's true that lots of segments of pop culture that were dominant in the past have been hollowed out. But pop culture has itself just massively broadened out.
Agreed. I upvoted the article because I think it's interesting to consider, but a statement like "the number of artists on the Billboard Hot 100 has been decreasing for decades" is entirely compatible with the notion that the proportion of the population listening to the long tail rather than the artists on the Billboard 100 could be higher than ever. Taylor Swift is big, but she's still no Michael Jackson or The Beatles in terms of cultural penetration, and probably never will be.
The problem is how compensation works in streaming. Those long tail artists are now paid less than they would make off of a few hundred CD sales. The Taylor Swifts and Muses of the world still get the bulk of the subscription you pay every month.
These long tail artists almost didn't sell their albums before streaming though. I've always been into obscure music since I was a teenager, to find it I'd have to dig through many record stores' bins, and get lucky enough to get my hands on second hand stuff. There was never a place they were stocked (perhaps except for some local store around where the artists' themselves were located).
When piracy came along I had access to a lot more music I had only heard about, or heard from a friend's bootleg recording that was a copy of a copy of a cassette tape someone had. Streaming happened and I felt much better than having to pirate some poor souls hard work.
Bandcamp is still there for selling albums digitally which is much better for not popular artists to reach their fans than the old ways.
Music was never compensated enough for the work done, it's always been tough, the culprit is not streaming.
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> The problem is how compensation works in streaming.
That may be ONE problem.
I think a more serious problem is that small venues are closing. It's partly gentrifcation, forcing residents into neighbourhoods that were formerly industrial (and so allowed noise). The new residents complain about noise, and a venue that's been running for 40 years gets shuttered.
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That's not it. You need to pony up a few thousand dollars for a minimum CD order. Back then selling a few hundred CDs meant you broke even. Distribution was via your shows or email lists and mailing them.
Now distribution to the entire world is basically free and you don't need to pony up money to print CDs.
Anyone pining for the way things used to be, wasn't there and is looking through rose colored glasses.
I think for music that certainly seems likely - 99% of my listening is artists who I will never hear on the radio. Books too, probably. But I don't know how relevant that is for something like movies. Outside of the occasional independent theatres, movies force us into a relatively limited selection. But if anything that media is becoming irrelevant as new media like YouTube and Twitch rises to prominence.
I would argue even with movies it holds true. 30 years ago, it was very difficult and expensive to buy, say, 1950s film noir. Now it takes 5 minutes to torrent.
Perhaps this is what's going on. It's hard for new obscure stuff to make money and so there's less of it, but old obscure stuff (which doesn't need to make money) is more popular than ever.
> We are all goths now.
I agree with the long tail part, but goths rose to a subculture status that most things never will again.
A meme with a short shelf life is the most external acknowledgement most subcultures will see these days. Usually it's just mocking a caricature of the people who have that shared trait and are also obnoxious enough to gain social media prominence. And nobody ever really believed it was representative of the thing in the first place (unless you're in traditional media, in which case it's taken as axiomatic).
I think that's very true. And it applies to film and other media as well. There's vastly more content available to far larger audiences than ever. There may very well be more concentration on the business side, but not on the creative side. I watched American Fiction on Prime Video this week and it was really outstanding. It turned a modest profit on a $10M budget at the box office which makes it barely a blip on box office records, but on the flip side it's the kind of film that would have had zero chance of getting made 30+ years ago.
Thats definitely what's happening, at least with music. When radio was dominant, the "hot 100" lists were pretty diverse because everyone was exposed to the same set of ~70-150 hit songs every year, that were curated by record companies and radio stations. This system let weirder or more ambitious music occasionally trickle to the top. Without everyone listening to the same programming, the only artists that can be the most popular are the most widely appealing musicians.
> We are all goths now
I suspected it was contagious when I first saw a Hot Topic and mall goths oh so many years ago.
> Until the year 2000, about 25% of top-grossing movies were prequels, sequels, spinoffs, remakes, reboots, or cinematic universe expansions. Since 2010, it’s been over 50% ever year. In recent years, it’s been close to 100%.
Coincidentally, it was about then (2010) that I stopped going to mainstream movies. Or perhaps not so coincidentally. I stopped because I stopped liking the movies that I did see, and perhaps that list explains why.
Instead of going out to the movies, I started going out to see live theater.
Yup. Superhero movies took over. Most boring, infantile genre there is.
Would we prefer Western cowboy movies instead?
Maybe a new spaghetti (noodle?) superhero movie genre emerges…
Things were different in 1960s/1970s since at that time there weren't huge catalogues of works owned by a just few media companies, although there were far fewer channels (with less and more expensive bandwidth.)
In our time, most of the rights to 100 years of pop culture is owned by three big media companies, and they own stakes in distribution channels. The catalogues give them power to bargain for promotion in various channels. That's how it used to work in radio [0], and is suspected to work in music streaming [1].
I suspect revoking extensions to copyright/IP laws [2, for example] would change the picture.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payola
[1] https://www.billboard.com/pro/playola-promotion-streaming-se...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
The article briefly mentions “Hollywood greediness” as one of the possible explanations people give for the phenomenon and then switches to describe other factors.
However, this greediness to get more money from production is also reflected in risk aversion. Look it from the point of an investor: option 1 invests 10 million in a new sci-fi production with an exciting plot, and Option 2 invest 10 million in a franchise with a crappy plot. The chances of getting a more significant return from 2 are higher.
The same happens with music and other art forms.
That’s why it’s important to have incentives for local and indie productions. Many times, the critics of those incentives point out that they are biased and contrary to the “free market”. But I don’t see any other way to bring balance to the force.
Risk profiles change though. Option 1 was a better bet in the late 1970s and early '80s, when the Old Hollywood franchises had been thoroughly wrung out and demand was there for new experiences.
The only graph in that article that shows a strong trend supporting the thesis is the first one - essentially, "movies that are remakes or sequels to previous movies". It goes from 25% in the 1980s to ~80% today.
But doesn't that follow sort of naturally? Filmmaking took off as an industry not that long ago - roughly in the 1960s. Of course you didn't have too many remakes of old movies back when you just didn't have that many movies to begin with. And cinematic universes - often centered around superhero action - started popping up only in the 1980s. Before that, it wasn't easy to make a sequel to "Gone with the Wind" or "To Kill a Mockingbird". It was a literary problem, not a matter of corporate consolidation.
And it's dictated to a large extent by audience preferences. We like sequels, prequels, and remakes of the films we remember from our childhood. The same goes for video games; it's a lot harder to sell a brand new idea than it is to market Fallout 5 or Dragon Age IV. It's not the studios doing it to us, it's what we want to play.
I don't know. I don't find the thesis particularly compelling. On the flip side: it used to be that everyone was watching the same TV shows at once, because you only had so much choice. Now, you have far more variety than you used to (albeit the average quality has probably gone down). The same goes for music - sure, "top 100" lists are still dominated by studio-produced albums, but what percentage of people is listening to "top 100" when we all get personalized streams?
My theory is that culture back then was way more common and shared among people, so old stuff got a great mindshare that is really hard to recreate with new movies.
And it seems like people are nostalgic for things they never was there to experience. Like, some fake nostalgia, that is transferred between generations and cultures that had nothing to do with it.
There's tons of content to consume nowadays you don't have to be limited to pop culture.
The problem is pop culture gives everyone a shared interest to talk about and contributes to social cohesion.
Imagine talking with your friends about Jaws, or Nirvana when they first came out.
I can still find quality content but the people I can talk with it about are limited.
Pop culture provided sort of a commonality between people where we could unite over various pieces of art.
Now we have sports though.
That's the problem exactly :) Entertainment is now a content factory for consumers.
Note how you don't apply any term that would imply you'd be discerning or have agency, like viewer or god forbid customer.
And you don't call the 'content' art, entertainment or anything like that.
> Entertainment is now a content factory for consumers.
When was it not?
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Even if there is content, statistically there is no pressure to change the whole picture.
Spotify pays less and less for niches. Algorithms recommend more and more superstars.
People are not prepared to pay for the niche individuals more than they need to. These individuals have harder time to make a living from that. They cannot focus on that. Over time, there is less and less individuals.
Is it true that there’s less and less individuals? All of the niche interests I personally have are much, much easier to satisfy now than they were 20 years ago - many of them have multiple full time content creators dedicated to that specific niche.
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Most of the growth in these spaces has been cultivated by the massive marketing power of these titans. I think viewing this as oligopolies taking over culture is misleading, rather, these massive corporations have invested huge marketing budgets into bringing consumers into the market, and the net result is that they now make up the glut of it. To use an analogy to the internet, it's not that all the intelligent discussion, homespun websites, and intimate message boards have disappeared, rather, they have been dwarfed by the influx of new people who were not participating in these spaces before they were lured in by the forces of the attention economy. This is "eternal September" writ large across the cultural landscape.
This is not oligopoly, but the result of technology as an enhancer delivering more value to the leader.
E.g., in the 1990's vehicles for commercializing movies took off. Toys, fast-food tie-in's with well-timed ad campaigns and printed bags, etc.: all this technology took time to develop, but resulted in the major movies making more money from tie-in's than the box office. That results in more "producers", i.e., people dedicated to making commercial success out of stories, and the most successful of those can translate those skills to new artists (whether movie directors or pop stars) -- much like the Bush and Clinton political teams picked new horses to run for a decade or more. Their secondary offerings may be successful mainly because their producers are good, but that effect peters out with fashion fatigue.
The underlying intuition is that "popular" culture, by virtue of being many, many people, is somehow a test of reality, a stochastic scale. But any measurable effect is largely a function of followers - some fast, some slow - that reflect different types of network and investment effects.
Anytime these discussions pop up, it's good to link to the documentary "Everything is a Remix" (here is the 2023 updated version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9RYuvPCQUA" )
It highlights how essentially everything in culture is a remix of some previous version of the culture (or some aspect of it). E.g. even language is largely a remix of earlier languages with some occasional creation of new words.
Also, while true that there is definitely an oligopoly, it's also clear that the Long Tail is both huge AND easy to access. In the past, you could only see movies by going to the movie theater and there were only a limited number of theaters. Now, you can both create and consume media in niches as small (or combined) as you want.
Is there anything which isn't an oligopoly today?
The most interesting cultural artifacts have always been media…in large part because that was all which has survived since antiquity, excepting a few lucky buildings.
But this is not necessarily inherent to media.
Perhaps the most interesting, long-standing cultural artifacts we are currently creating are not in the realm of media at all.
Space travel The internet Generative AI
Even though movies are undoubtedly dominated by a few stars, I don’t think the legacy of our time will be the movie Legally Blonde 2. When people think about the period 1950-2050, they will write more about the rise of companies which were capable of mass producing intelligent and what people did with them.
"Has become" is a bit of a stretch.
The 20th century was the century of Bernays.
https://theconversation.com/the-manipulation-of-the-american...
In the 20th century, teenagers were invented. Their purpose? An advertising target.
https://www.ushistory.org/us/46c.asp
The pop culture in the article seems to mostly be the culture of teenagers. This was always an entirely constructed racket.
I think this analysis is missing something: how much money is being made per hit, and how many people are consuming it? In TV, at least, the numbers are way down. As a result, people play it safe by doing remakes.
Frontline (US) made this same argument in the Merchants of Cool. only thing missing are the modern actors like Youtube and Tiktok. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cool/ https://www.pbs.org/video/frontline-merchants-cool/
I read a long time ago related articles:
Around 2000 (+- 5) someone claimed that with the internet you only need 1000 (or I believe 3000) dedicated fans to make something like a blog.
And around 2010 (+- 5) there was a Wired, I believe, article that did show that also the most popular things are more concentrated, while the Long Tail eats the former successful mid-range.
If anybody has references, the first could be Chris Anderson's The long tail, but I think that thesis was around earlier. The second I didn't find anything.
I believe you're thinking of Kevin Kelly's "1,000 True Fans". That should help you refine your search.
In ten years time, most "prestige" content will be made outside of a big studio setting.
The studios are going to die. You don't need their capital to build your vision.
One way around it is to stop looking at only media from your own country (specifically if you're in the US) and look at what other countries are doing. With the internet there is no reason to only listen to American bands, watch American movies, etc. K-pop for example has grown outside of Korea.
The conclusion from the music analysis is off because of changes in media consumption and chart calculations. When a top (or even a mid) act drops an album (so, every week), the entire album is listened on the apps by many people and it is not unusual to have all songs in the top 100 that week.
Isn't pop[ular] culture necessarily an oligopoly, in that in any sort of popularity-driven competition, popular things will always win out over less popular things?
> oligopoly: a state of limited competition, in which a market is shared by a small number of producers or sellers.
(That's an honest question, not a concrete stance.)
This kind of thing always just reads as "I don't like what is in pop culture," mostly because while these metrics tell one story, the tails of the culture are bigger than they have ever been. Pop culture looks so shitty because people don't depend on it the same way they used to.
The only thing to be done is to drop out and participate in at least sponsoring, if not creating culture.
Discussed at the time (of the article):
Pop culture has become an oligopoly - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31239268 - May 2022 (146 comments)
And eventually, the model sinks. Just look at Disney. It may take another decade or more, but either they will shift their approach, or they will die and get split up and sold off.
Part of me thinks that the law should be changed so that IP covers works but not "universes". E.g. only Disney would have the right to distribute A New Hope but anyone could create their own work set in the Star Wars universe.
This would better match the way that popular culture has worked throughout most of history where anyone could create a story about King Arthur, Robin Hood, or Sun Wukong.
There would probably need to be some sort of protections to prevent corporations from simply scooping up independent artist's work. However, that seems like something that could be worked out.
However, that seems like something that could be worked out.
That’s a pretty heavy lift for that poor sentence. The way it “works out” in my mind is that the instant an indie work pokes its head above water, Disney sweeps in and makes a franchise out of it without payment to the artist. Because your proposal works both directions.
There's lots of ways that this could be done.
A franchise could only become open for unauthorized developers once it has made a certain inflation adjusted revenue, or once a franchise has works created by more than a certain number of artists.
Or these changes could simply only apply to corporations. So individuals could own franchise IP but corporations could not. Or corporations would be required to compensate the original creator but independent artists would not.
It's not necessary to make a perfect system. Just one that is better than our current dysfunctional system where corporations own most of our culture.
Why not throw out the rest of the "IP" bs?
Historically culture has relied as much on retelling the same stories (with slight modifications) as it has on creating related ones.
I don't understand why TV sucks so bad. I mean when do we get the next alias that has 24 episodes a season and 8 or 9 seasons.
Shorter attention span these days. Viewers want a payoff immediately and don't want to wait a whole season.
Aside from streaming, commercial breaks are getting longer and episode content shorter. Content is only half the runtime now. If they put a rerun between each new episode, viewers stay engaged, but they get a whole bunch more commercial spaces for free.
We can't even have books any more to get content at our own pace. AI is going to produce too much crap to sort through, unless you stick to the known authors, but that just confirms this article's point.
> AI is going to produce too much crap to sort through
There will be money to be made in manual curation again soon.
As in magazine style, not influencer style. Where it's not the producer paying for an ad, but the readers paying for the editor doing their job.
If it has been done for writing for a couple hundred years, it can be done for video entertainment as well. It's already done for video games to a point, although some review sites look like payola now.
I think one component of it is the devaluing of writing in the industry. A big issue in the most recent WGA strike (mostly glossed over in favor of obsessing over the AI stuff) was studios pushing really hard to turn writing into one-off gig work instead of a stable position. A lot of successful shows have a first season that is lackluster or just plain "off" because they hadn't figured out what the show was actually about, and I suspect that excessive commoditization of the writing process is a recipe for producing that "weird first season" every season.
Devaluating writers probably hurts, but you see the "weird first season" even in older shows. The 1960s series Get Smart and Dick Van Dyke Show had first seasons that were much weaker than what the show would become, to cite a couple of examples. There probably is no substitute for a period of getting your sea legs under you as a writer.
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>when do we get the next alias that has 24 episodes a season and 8 or 9 seasons
When? It'll be 3 years late when you discover a cult classic that was canceled for abysmal ratings after 6 episodes. Which is why they'll never make it.
We'll never have the same experience as Alias when we no longer have to revolve our schedules around the broadcast time!
It’s more superhero movies, no?
They aren’t really cinema, like WWF-style wrestling isn’t really sport.
(in the Olympic sense)
This is an article where we need "in the US" in the title.
Megacorps don't do innovation. As in technology, so in culture.
I think AT&T/Bell Labs disproves that assertion
Fair. It would be interesting to compare the way Bell Labs was funded with modern economic / legal conditions.
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