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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>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.

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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.

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