Comment by blowski
3 months ago
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.
Independent music and independent publishing was, in my opinion, thriving even just 25 years ago in a rhizome of record shops and small venues which are getting stomped on by streaming culture and ecommerce platforms. It was certainly always hard, but also certainly doable if you put the work in to make the economics of it possible. It seems like now the same energy is going into carving out a following on ad-driven social media and streaming platforms, plus a dozen small side-hustles.
What I'm hopeful about though is that things like patreon are making the idea of supporting artists you appreciate directly somewhat more normal, but streaming platforms are not doing any favors for musicians in my opinion.
> The problem is how compensation works in streaming.
That may be ONE problem.
I think a more serious problem is that small venues are closing. It's partly gentrifcation, forcing residents into neighbourhoods that were formerly industrial (and so allowed noise). The new residents complain about noise, and a venue that's been running for 40 years gets shuttered.
See: forest hills stadium aggressively enforcing curfew this year
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.