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Not a new development in the 21st century. The closer you get to the advent of recorded music and broadcast radio, the more homogenous the music selection was. Accessibility to alternatives was expensive/impossible. This goes for every other kind of media.

If you don't like the 'Top 20' then I presume you listen to alternatives. How did you find them? The internet perhaps?

>Not a new development in the 21st century

The global monoculture of BS commercial music is a new development in the 21st century.

Peoples and cultures used to have a huge variety of music and styles all over the world, even if "accessibility" to it from the comfort of ones home outside a specific region wasn't cheap/possible.

>If you don't like the 'Top 20' then I presume you listen to alternatives. How did you find them? The internet perhaps?

Doesn't really matter, as culture is not what people consume in private, but what most consume and influences their public discussion. Some obscure artist I only share with 10K or 100K people might as well not exist culturally.

You are simultaneously arguing that music is more homogenous, and yet has such breadth and diversity and ease of accessibility that only a small fraction of earths population could discuss your tastes.

>You are simultaneously arguing that music is more homogenous, and yet has such breadth and diversity and ease of accessibility that only a small fraction of earths population could discuss your tastes.

Nope, I am arguing that _culture_ is more homogenous (and whether there's more easy availability of diverse musical works is irrelevant to that).

Music can have (and has) one million sub-genres today, but the mainstream music (the shared stuff that's part of "the conversation" and defines the music part of our culture) is more homogenous than ever.

It’s not a monoculture if you can listen to something else. Nearly everyone I know who listens to top hits music also listens to other genres.

Top hits are just designed to be as agreeable to society as possible. That’s what makes them more popular than anything else.

It’s like claiming salt is causing a food monoculture because so many people are using it.

>It’s not a monoculture if you can listen to something else. Nearly everyone I know who listens to top hits music also listens to other genres.

A culture is what people (more or less) share. That part is very narrow today, when it wasn't e.g. in the 60s and 70s.

Niche genres people listen in addition to the top hits but don't share don't enter the cultural sphere.

>It’s like claiming salt is causing a food monoculture because so many people are using it.

No, it's like claiming that whereas once people used to see a variety of movie types in the theaters, now every second movie is a superhero one.

That's true for what people see in the main, and it's true as to what the celebrated, talked about, and influential movies are, even it's easier that ever for everyone to also download and watch some niche movie from whatever era (which most don't bother).

If every dish is measured against the most popular dishes and evaluated in terms of how much salt it uses, even dishes not falling into the salt monoculture are being consumed by the salt monoculture.

Subcultures definitely count?

Only in as much as they pollinate the mainstream culture, else its just fragmented niches that don't take part in any wider "conversation".

Things that are happening on the edge become the things that propagate through to the mainstream. It's how cultures change. Predicting which edge behaviour will cross over is the tricky bit.

>Things that are happening on the edge become the things that propagate through to the mainstream. It's how cultures change.

Well, we don't see that these days. With music, for example, we see the same mindless hits dominate the top-20. In past decades (from the 50s up to the 90s or 00s) you'd have those things "happening at the edge" become mainstream.

>In past decades (from the 50s up to the 90s or 00s) you'd have those things "happening at the edge" become mainstream.

I completely agree and I'm not sure many people would recognize how much this has changed. When "EDM" started infiltrating pop music it was the sound of the fringe creeping into the mainstream but this has since solidified and dominated to the exclusion of pretty much everything for the past decade. In my mind, this is very different from what we used to see from the likes of pop stars like Madonna that would borrow liberally from the "underground" and use it to spice up their own work.

Personally, I think this is a byproduct of our hyper-connected culture. I don't think subcultures can thrive in the internet era because they are exposed, consumed, and co-opted at too fast of a pace for them to grow.

Not your main point but it touched on something frustrating to me.

Personally I had a very hard time finding metal bands I liked until I started going to a lot of shows.

Spotify etc obviously try pretty hard, and with diligent effort you can prod it to cough up a metal band you haven't heard before that doesn't suck, but it's much better at playing music you already know about and like than it is at showing you anything new, at least for my subgenres of choice.

If you're just looking at the top 20, you're never going to see the long tail and you won't be able to tell whether people are spending more or less time on the obscure stuff.

The mid tail is more of the same for the majority of the people.

And the power law distribution means the long tail doesn't even register. So pockets of people can hear Mongolian Rap-Opera, but the social discussion, between friends, at homes, at cafes, at the media, on blogs, at watercoolers, etc. is still dominated by the heavy front-loaded top.

What the majority is doing doesn't seem so scary when it's easy to opt out. I'm using YouTube and Spotify mostly to listen to obscure accordion folk songs these days. The recommendation algorithms adapted to that pretty well and give me more good stuff.

It seems like the issue here is conceptual? If you care mostly about what the majority does then it's more of a problem than if you don't.

And although it's good to show an interest in what other people like, you can also talk a bit (not to be a bore) about what you like.

It just doesn't seem hard at all to do something the majority isn't interested in. Most people don't care what you do and will show at least polite interest. You can do what you want.

>What the majority is doing doesn't seem so scary when it's easy to opt out.

It doesn't seem scary if what scares you is "what choices I have as an individual".

What scares me, on the other hand, is how diverse and open my society in general is, and the shared culture (including pop culture) we all participate in.

>It seems like the issue here is conceptual? If you care mostly about what the majority does then it's more of a problem than if you don't.

There's a saying about politics: "It doesn't matter if you don't care for politics: politics still cares for you". In other words, one might not care "what the majority does", but what the majority does is still gonna shape the society that one is living in, and their interactions with others.

Okay, fair enough, but it seems like we've drifted pretty far away from the original article and Fahrenheit 451, which was literally about not being able to read what you want and think for yourself.

But the problem of Fahrenheit 451, as per the original article too, was a society that did this by choice.

People aren’t discussing top 40 songs at the watercooler. You’re very confused about the reason people listen to it. It’s not to absorb culture anymore than playing candy crush is to absorb culture. It’s mindless crap you put on to fill silence.

Lol, you're old (or non-mainstream; that's not a bad thing, just an observation).

The current tunes are cultural, they're part of how youths communicate and explore the World and their reaction to it. Now, of course mass media tries to own that, and tailor it to their own desire for wealth -- but it still has to work.

Cardi B fills the same spot that Madonna did 30 years ago, or Lulu did 50 (?) years ago; it's not high culture, but it's still an important aspect of life for many youths.

Sure we have Fortnite now for the kids, instead of yoyos or pogs, but it's still culture.

Not to mention farm to table restaurants and third wave coffee. No downtown is complete with out them, and Instagram ensures all the latest trends show up every where at once.

>Sure sounds like 2019 to me. In fact, far more 2019 than the era when the book was written.

You’re not living in the same world as everyone else then. Look at the two major political parties in the US alone for how we’re no longer agreeing on basic priorities for societal and economic structure.

The 2 major parties agree on almost everything (even on hating on Trump who is nominally Republican) -- with the exception of a few token societal issues to keep their members polarized.

They have never been more interchangeable.