Comment by input_sh
12 days ago
I have no strong opinion on the premise, but the cherry-picked data in this article is... on par with what I expect from a random Substack blog, which is to say god-awful.
The most obvious offender is in the music section, where he points out that hits per famous artist have been increasing, but then ignores the chart right below that in his source (https://towardsdatascience.com/hot-or-not-analyzing-60-years...), which states that tracks stay on the chart for about 5x shorter than they used to. If there are 5x more chart-topping songs, more of them will be from famous artists, who would've thought!?
Television section relies on Nielsen and it's written in the same year when Nielsen lost its license for underreporting (they have regained it since). The books section relies on LitHub, which wasn't particularly interested in YA fiction and non-fiction, so they didn't include them. So, it's not all the books, but only "adult" fiction books.
I think that piece of data reinforces the point. If the "stayers" fall off the charts faster, there ought to be no reason, outside the oligopoly argument, to presume that the replacements would be from the same set of artists. Were it not the same stuff over and over again, wouldn't you expect something novel (i.e. some other artist) to replace them, at some level? But, it doesn't look like that's what happens, and also that it's happening less frequently than it once did.
> Were it not the same stuff over and over again, wouldn't you expect something novel (i.e. some other artist) to replace them, at some level?
Well, they do? It's clearly visible from the "number of artists on the chart" that the number has been steadily increasing back up since its 2012 low. I'd also say that more modern artists like Lil Wayne and Drake are far more likely to record a verse in someone else's track than the Beatles, which also makes drawn conclusions pretty meaningless.
But even if none of that were true, yes, I still believe more songs = more songs performed by the most popular artists. I don't think any chart-topping artist from decades ago could compare to, say, Taylor Swift's 4 original albums and 4 re-recorded albums released within the past 5 years! That alone explains, what, 50, a hundred of chart-topping songs by one artist?
The only thing I'm convinced from looking at a source is these three things: 1) musicians release way more stuff than they used to, 2) musicians collab way more often, and 3) songs that end up on these charts stay there for much shorter. Or to summarise it in one claim: trends come and go at a much faster pace than they used to.
For a non-music example of this speed, just check out Fallout. Released barely over 2 months ago, critically aclaimed, nearly everyone liked it... and now, just two months later, who's talking about it?
I won't disagree with your summary. Points 1 and 3 are more supported than point 2, but "trends come and go more quickly" seems both intuitively correct, and supported by the data.
>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?