Pop culture has become an oligopoly
experimentalhistory.substack.com
experimentalhistory.substack.com
(via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31245559, but we merged that thread hither)
For example, music. Let's say 50% of people like mainstream music and the rest have more obscure preferences. In the past, when music was harder to access, you might be exposed to 100 artists. Now, you might be exposed to over 1,000. The 50% who like more obscure music used to spread their listening out over 100, but now it's spread out over 1,000. Those who like mainstream music still mostly listen to the top 100 or so. The end result is that the top 100 is more solid than before, even though music is diversifying.
For multiplicities, I see a snowball effect: each subsequent release in a multiplicity adds more people to the snowball. As long as the quality is good enough -- and people who enjoy mainstream content arguably have a lower bar -- the audience grows with each release. I think this effect, combined with the author's "proliferation" theory and major producers wanting to make safe investments, explains the dominance of multiplicities.
We have the Disney-level Mega Movies with ONE BILLION DOLLAR budgets. These are the ones that are made by a committee of producers and executive producers and shareholders. They're too big to fail, so they'll be tested and re-tested and re-shot until they WILL make a profit. Currently they will also include a Chinese movie star and won't touch any subjects too sensitive for China, because multiple tens of percents of profit will be made in there.
Then we have the Blumhouse[0] type 5-20 million dollar movies. They give a hard budget limit and won't pay the actors much - they'll get a share of the profits instead. They're cheap enough to not bankrupt the production company if it flops, but will make immense profits if they succeed. The Company won't usually affect the production much, giving the director free reign to do what they want.
What's missing in today's world are the $10-$100M, movies. These have a big enough budget to not have to cut corners much, but still small enough to not draw the attention of The Executives who want their favourite things in the movie - letting the director enact their vision. The only mid-budget movie I can think of in the recent years is Michael Bay's Ambulance[1], shot with $40M.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blumhouse_Productions [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambulance_(film)
Also in 2019 there was Knives Out, which had a budget of $40 million and made $311 million in the box office.
I agree with your overall point, just giving a couple more examples.
* Prisoners: US$ 46M
* Sicario: US$ 30M
* Arrival: US$ 47M
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_Villeneuve#Reception
His first three movies were <$7M. He went up market (>$160M) with BR2049 and Dune.
You're 70 years too late. Life magazine in 1957 talked about how one of the consequences of the Hollywood studio system (from both TV, and the 1948 Paramount antitrust case) was the death of the "million-dollar mediocrity" (<https://books.google.com/books?id=Nz8EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA146>):
"It wasn't good entertainment and it wasn't art, and most of the movies produced had a uniform mediocrity, but they were also uniformly profitable ... The million-dollar mediocrity was the very backbone of Hollywood".
The "million-dollar mediocrity" died because the Paramount case forbade block booking, in which studios required that theaters purchase said mediocrities to also buy big films. Original TV movies appeared in the 1960s but their budgets and production values were too low to really fill the hole in Hollywood, but today's streaming companies' insatiable appetite for content has opened a new outlet for middle-tier films (and, more importantly, series).
I've got a ton of movies in my collection I would've never watched in a theatre setting, but have enjoyed on DVD multiple times.
I very much agree with one of the conclusions:
> Fortunately, there’s a cure for our cultural anemia. While the top of the charts has been oligopolized, the bottom remains a vibrant anarchy. There are weird books and funky movies and bangers from across the sea. Two of the most interesting video games of the past decade put you in the role of an immigration officer and an insurance claims adjuster. Every strange thing, wonderful and terrible, is available to you, but they’ll die out if you don’t nourish them with your attention.
Maybe Papers Please and Undertale would make better examples.
(This is the only time I can share this with you, but beware, spoiler alert. Papers Please - The Short Film: https://youtu.be/YFHHGETsxkE)
Here's an interesting, related link, that's very obviously coming from a certain perspective but still has things you can take [0].
Here are some strategies I use for books:
Go to the library and walk down a random shelf until a book calls to you. You can run your fingers down the spines and feel for the energy of the right book.
The opposite (however, somewhat sideways, rather than top-down) is pulling books from the "someone just returned this" section. And the books suggested by librarians.
I will also do full-text searches of my somewhat large library of ebooks, which gives equal weight to popular and unknown authors.
Randomness, with uncommon items weighted somewhat equal to common ones, and direct recommendations that bypass algorithmic feeds seem to work somewhat well for me as general strategies.
[0] https://www.epsilontheory.com/25-anti-mimetic-tactics-for-li...
RedLetterMedia helps me find weird movies without any mainstream appeal. r/NearProg, r/ListenToThis and r/progmetal are how I find weird experimental rock artists.
For books, some subreddits has a 'I have finished book X, what should I read next?' thread. That's a good way to do Markov-Chain-esque random walk. Another is to simply rely on my favorite podcasters and bloggers. Books are a long commitment and hard to 'figure out' in a minute or an hour. So, I rarely resort to low quality and high coverage searchers like I do with music or TV media.
ie. recommenders using something akin to page-rank could/should inject some random items so as to allow new content to bubble up and good new content to be voted up.
It seems nature does something similar - copying DNA pretty accurately, yet allowing for some mutations to advance things and adapt to a changing environment.
I've found that live music offers one of the best mechanisms for this. You start out with interest in <major band>, and go see their show. They're on tour with <midsize band> opening for them. You like <midsize band>'s set, so you go see them when they headline a show a few months later. Since they're a smaller band, it's a smaller show, so they have <small band> opening for them. You like <small band>'s set so you later go see them play with <local band>, and so forth.
As the shows get smaller it becomes more common for there to be 3-4 bands on the bill, so the rate of exposure increases. Combine that with the greater sense of community that's common at smaller shows as well as mechanisms like Spotify's related artists and it becomes easier and easier to find new music the deeper you get.
It would be cool if a similar thing was more common with other art forms. What if more movies were preceded by a short from an up and coming director (like Pixar tends to do)? Trailers fill a similar role, but not quite the same. Or what if books included a few recommendations from the author rather than just a list of other books from the publisher?
I always thought it would be interesting to have a compendium of "artists' artists." Like, ask some of the most talented people in a given genre to give their recommendations.
Sometimes you get this with longer-form interviews of artists, but those often have a lot of details to sift through.
For books, literary magazines are good: the good ones publish good authors, who recommend good authors. But they're clique-y and only sort of fill the role.
⸻
1. It’s possible that I might have finished a few months sooner had Covid-related library closures not slowed me down a bit in 2020.
Rather, I think David Foster Wallace's prediction has been proven out:
> ...this idea that the internet’s gonna become incredibly democratic? I mean if you’ve spent any time on the web, you know that it’s not gonna be, because that’s completely overwhelming. There are four trillion bits coming at you, 99% of them are shit, and it’s too much work to do triage to decide...We’re going to beg for [curation]. We are literally gonna pay for it.
After all...here we are on HN, hoping someone has curated the seething froth of new content into something manageable.
Reviews and playlists are suspect to me. I also enjoy discovering and combing and deciding.
I’m extremely picky about music and cinema and books. Curated media rarely works out.
I never use Spotify and consider that sort of thing to be bad for music as an art for many reasons I won’t get into in this comment.
I’m a lifelong musician, multi instrumentalist etc… I have my tastes and preferences and desired directions of expansion of both (all, lol)
To me, as a former DJ, I drop the needle 3-4 times, skip around in the song, if I like some harmonic scenarios I am hearing I may stick around to hear how it develops and progresses. Given the harmonic constraints of an instrument etc, is there any variety of tone, harmonic structure, technique , texture, or is it just skulking away in a corner looking at its own navel… etc…
I realize that I’m atypical, but I’m also precisely a “music power user”. We don’t matter. The industry doesn’t care about progrock, jazz fusion, afrobeat, bebop, acid jazz, classical (except the Messiah on Christmas) samba, salsa, cumbia, or music in general, it cares about tracking armies of fan consumers across the internet, tabloid entertainment news, clothing, photos, videos, good looking people posing. Forget the music, these days it’s all image…
Only in art are experts thrown on the garbage heap while moneyed interests court the brains of those more easily duped simply due to less experience. I think this is where the competitive thing in music comes crashing hard into the reality that a good song and a really bad song can share the charts, but the bad song often remains longer…
Objectively bad, low effort, poorly structured, lacking a hook, etc, but marketing can keep it there as number one… unlike in UFC where your actual ability to fight matters.
This clearly illustrates that we went from a competency and competition of musical skill to one of marketing skill. Fair enough, but call a spade a spade
Does this mean I am old? Only if one disrespects the human race and human intellect so much that you would cheer the death of a sonic world from the warlike hand of visual glamour and stylized imagery.
A musician is just a kind of fashion photography model capable of making erudite hand gestures and choosing sponsors
>Only in art are experts thrown on the garbage heap while moneyed interests court the brains of those more easily duped simply due to less experience.
The entire multidisciplinary world of Academia in general, would like a word. In particular the sciences. Try telling a PhD candidate fishing for research funding for a potentially climate-saving data/technology that experts are respected :-)
The system is so laser focused on very specific bits of media (these movies, these songs, these books, and that's it there is no other form of entertainment), that when people find something they really like in the big long tail of content, it's a cause for celebration.
Alternatively, flip this around. Would Disney spend so much on Marvel movies if other studios could make movies about the same super heroes? No way! Why should Disney let the other studios ride on their coat tails? They would need to make all new stories and heroes.
I rather doubt, though, that the fact that The Great Gatsby just entered the public domain this year has anything to do with the concentration of the market in the hands of a declining number of producers.
But I think the Internet also plays a huge part in the consolidation of fandom. Before the internet, the majority of us could really only share our opinions with those physically nearby, so there were less connections per each node. Enter the internet, now each node has 1000000x more connections, naturally pooling together the ranges of an opinion's influence. The spheres of influence expand while the overall number of spheres shrinks. Just a thought, anyway.
[1] https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/pop-culture-has-b...
That's the real difference now. People can make near-professional movies on iPhones, musicians can make professional-quality music at home, but no amateur has access to the huge industrial PR, social, and trad ad networks that the major labels/studios can roll out to promote their projects.
https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_p...
I do agree some of the trends are more convincing than others, although they're generally consistent with the overall direction the author is suggesting.
Perceptions are subjective, but I don’t know how anyone wouldn’t consider the most interesting scene to be the one where Neo (and therefore the audience) is told point blank: “our beloved parent company Warner Bros. has decided to make a sequel to the trilogy.”
I’m surprised it wasn’t quoted in TFA because it’s an unusual fourth wall break that aligns with exactly the points the author is making about the inherent emptiness of endless franchises.
https://www.boxofficemojo.com/release/rl3861218049/ (Everything Everywhere All at Once)
On minimal budget and marketing
One thing I've noticed, it is now way easier to create content over this time period as well.
I now have a camera that can record beautiful 8K video, I can produce high-quality music records, and I don't have to rent or hire anyone. I've got a CNC that can crank out perfect templates for my woodworking. But there are now millions of others who can (and are) doing the same thing.
And thus, it's stupidly easy to find something new, but it's hard to find something new and consistently good. So we just gravitate to the proven because, ugh, our free time is valuable.
My only sense is that the oligopoly will persist, and probably become even more focused. But the "1000 true fans" approach for small-time producers is still the best way forward. Don't even bother trying to compete with big-time media, just try to build strong connections, thus being a "trusted" choice.
Something I noticed was that being “underground” and “alternative” was considered “cool” when I was a youngster. Now, it seems all transgressive elements have been stripped from the mix and it’s all about “please like me, like my product, I’m desperate for your approval”
I’d had my own notions of this being fueled by the suit-vs-rocker dichotomy turning into the self-promoting-artist lonesome internet point of light thing.
But this article describes a bigger pattern, and I think it’s largely about commercial conquest and has little to do with the ideas inside.
There’s also the theme of nostalgia and “good old” style marketing. How much junk food is marketed as “grandmas good olde traditional natural authentic junk food”?
What is extremely frustrating is watching mediocre output be considered best in class merely due to the rubber stamp effect of popularity, popularity due to marketing power and branding.
Clearly xyz charttopper is the best singer in the world if they are the most popular, right?
The entertainment oligopoly falsifying the appearance of democracy and choice while limiting the range of presentable choices is actually symbolic of how many authoritarian systems fake democratic parliamentary procedures and such.
Clearly the people have spoken, approving the pre approved choice. Lol.
Everyone must obviously love autotune if 9/10 top ten songs use it.
It doesn't though. What percentage of people do you think made up the viewership of the top 20 movies in 1977 vs today? People's attention is spread much thinner over vastly more "content" than ever before. You can be a fan of 20 different things that your neighbor has never heard of; this was much more difficult 50 years ago. I don't think the top 20 means much anymore.
Culture, especially pop culture and various other side ones, have constantly been changing. The 50s were not like the 60s were not like the 70s etc.
But the constant trap that many posters here are falling into is nostalgia making you perceive the "different" that you grew up in specifically as "better."
I grew up in the 80s and 90s. I wish I'd grown up today, I'd be far more likely to find friends with somewhat overlapping interests, and far less likely to get bullied for some of them.
I think the constant trap I see today is people perceiving different eras' output as "different but equal". A lot of this has to do with the populist notion that everything is about "taste" and nothing can be possibly better or worse.
But there are absolutely periods of better and worse art output, decades or whole periods of cultural stagnation, sometimes in all arts or other times just in some, periods of burst developments, etc. When we see art and music history at large, we easily discern them and have names for them - and history scholars have.
But when it comes to post '50s music, we can't fathom that some period is better than another, as if history is finished, and every decade is perpetually equally good.
The funny part is that we think that in the period with perhaps the most decline compared to the past.
I just don't think it's a moral failing if you disagree.
The collorary is your "counter culture" was bought and sold too. That one stung to find out, but alternative lifestyles have been manufactured for a long, long time
In a real counter culture the goals are aggressively anti-corporate.
The most impressive part is the way that individualism has become almost entirely a corporate creation. You "express yourself" by choosing and displaying products, all of which are either corporate or sold through a corporate monopoly (Amazon, Ebay, Etsy). The middle classes are allowed some artisanal choices, but only because they signal a more refined and informed kind of consumerism.
There really isn't much evidence of individualism which isn't assembled from some combination of corporate-friendly competitive ambition, Veblen signalling, standardised rebellion/outsider tropes, and political and religious tribalism.
I think you are confusing the deluge of internet ads that tell me to 'express myself' and 'unleash my potential' by <buying their crap>, with how people actually express themselves. Maybe I hang out with the wrong people, but I've never heard any of my friends 'expressing themselves' in those ways.
They obviously make statements about their take on fashion through their purchasing habits (as do I), but I don't confuse what I wear with what I am.
How people signal to others what they are is by what they're wearing. Asking people not to - good luck with that.
Well, if they're "expressing themselves" on mainstream social media, that's "corporate" and oligopolistic in a very real sense. It's puzzling to see so much knee-jerk anti-corporatism on sites like Twitter and even here at News.YC.
The closest thing to good govt art in the US is the tax-dodge stuff such as opera.
You see someone say something racist or sexist or homophobic and it's no longer the just a small voice that would blast the racist, sexist, homophobe but now it's everyone - including corporate America (and their twitter bot voices). And in the mean time since all those companies have "fallen in line" with the culture - it's OK to Buy Nike, Buy Starbucks, Buy Apple, Buy Microsoft because they all tow the line.
I mean it's good and bad. For one, it's good because now there's justice for the repressed. It's bad for it's cancellation culture. There are a lot of "cancelled" people that have done FAR less than say Harvey W. yet with a single tweet - mostly careless words - they're done. Even when they have that 15 second scramble after someone calls them out it just blows up. Apologies are meaningless after that. Being one person you can't defend against unlimited neural activity of millions of people digging into the background and lobbing as far as Twitter will let it go.
It has to do with the nature of the dissenters themselves. Nowadays they are politics / social media wannabees. When corporates coopot your movement, they make you rich and famous. Nothing makes a 'ladder climber' more happy.
The nature of dissent in the 50s was more about the problems than the status assigned to the people. You couldn't easily lure them away with sneaky gifts.
Worst of all, the 50s-esque true believers do exist. But they get cannibalized and spit out by the exact cabal of milque-toast corporate activism. The ones that don't are so radical that they only serve as red-flags on the danger of true belief, because all the reasonable ones got squash under corporate America's feet.
Did you read this?
https://www.amazon.com/Commodify-Your-Dissent-Salvos-Baffler...
Check out Hyman Rickover, a proponent of a nuclear Navy that pushed members of Congress to vote mothball 10 years of thorium reactor research for uranium reactors so they had weapons material.
I laugh at the notion we have a free market since the basis of our system is 50-70 year old back room deals that boosted families like Gates, Musk, Andreesen, Bezos.
There’s zero science that explains how they’re ahead of anyone else in skill and intelligence. Plenty to suggest typical old fashion political propaganda and corruption.
Can you please clarify what you mean?
50 years ago Gates was 16, Bezos was 8, Andreesen was 1 and Musk was newborn. 70 years ago none of them were even born. I highly doubt they were party to backroom deals!
Any suggestion reality owes eternal deference for some greater good is laughable on its face.
Gates’ father’s legacy is founding partner of an internationally known law firm, though I believe he stepped aside before it achieved global status.
Bezos conveniently had 25 relatives and family friends that could invest 50,000.
Musk family and African gem mine abuses are easy to source online.
IBM wanted nothing to do with transistor computers that might cannibalize their vacuum tube computer business until government funded the research; forcing progress through government action is pretty well established in history, just saying.
Austerity is for those with integrity.
The benefits of collective effort are pretty clear; why agency is locked up unless a billionaire can profit further is bizarre.
Relativity implies people without healthcare or universal healthcare are making an uninformed choice without experience.
The philosophy of our system is moral relativism and sunk cost fallacy, obfuscated by government funded propaganda. IMO.
The thorium reactors at that time were molten salt. Molten salts used react very poorly with water. Uranium reactors are generally pressurized water. You might imagine another reason Admiral Rickover might have preferred the uranium solution?
I think it's because anti-institutional cynicism has become the new norm with the rise of gen-x and the "ironic" hipsterdom of the early 2000s.
So much of modern culture is about operating in the negative space of the "normal" which takes significantly less effort than actively defining what you value and who you are.
It's all a matter of perspective, I don't see this trend as necessarily good or bad. There were some positives to the "underground" and "alternative" aesthetic, like being independent-minded and an emphasis on doing things that were new and original. There were some downsides too, like being jaded about everything, being too cool to show enthusiasm, and ultimately sometimes just blindly conforming to the "alternative" view for the sake of opposing the mainstream view.
Similarly I think there are positives to how I see young people behaving today, the flip-side to the negatives you mentioned. Being genuine and showing emotion is cool again, and, perhaps ironically, since there is less cultural pressure to be "alternative" people are arguably being more honest with themselves by openly seeking approval. We're all humans after all and we all seek approval from others, maybe it's good that there is no longer any stigma around that in the influencer age.
Because there is no more "sticking out". Everything has been commodified and accepted. There is no longer a way to differentiate yourself from the pack, because the pack is so diverse. I think that has really shaken things up: there's nothing to rebel against, and Gen-X cynicism/nihilism has left an identity crises for Mil/GenZ. Although it appears these groups are going back to tradition and don't give a f*k about nonconformity.
Steve Albini (legendary producer) wrote an essay in "Commodify Your Dissent" from the Baffler magazine around the time of the Dead Kennedys. He hits on the ability to buy anarchy patches in department stores as fashion items when in the past they were signs of a true counterculture. I highly recommend it, it captures what you are feeling up to a point, because it refers mostly to the 80's and 90's, and not the utter weirdness of today.
https://www.amazon.com/Commodify-Your-Dissent-Salvos-Baffler...
> “Conformist,” he sneered, averting his eyes in disgust and flipping his dyed black hair over his eyes. :D
Wait, doesn't that sound like the same thing? Presumably some kids are still non-conforming, and they are still the minority (because most kids of all generations have prioritized fitting in).
Be very wary of survivor bias when looking back in time, especially when there is a risk of nostalgia. There was plenty of popular garbage in the 70s and 80s, there is plenty of good music being made now. The only real difference is that we have yet to apply the "is this good enough to keep around" filter to modern culture.
There's also the issue of how well you know them. When I was a kid myself, as far as I could tell, all 40 year-olds had dull, shallow personal lives and were boring people. I don't have that impression now than I'm in my 40s and my experience of the lives of 40 year-olds goes beyond being told what not to do by them every now and again. How well do you seriously know and understand the inner motivations of your friend's kids?
Case in point: MTV of the 80s would play little to no black music. There's a famous 1983 interview bit of David Bowie where he asked the MTV VJ why they play no black music, and the VJ waffles a bit on the white suburban market. That does not sound very subversive to me.
Here's the excerpt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZGiVzIr8Qg&feature=emb_logo
you understand black americans have historically been repressed, right? this is pretty uncontroversial.
black american art, especially music, is absolutely saturated with themes of resistance, and even the mildest, most innocent examples have historically been perceived by racists and the establishment as dangerous and rebellious.
the 80s were at the tail end of white flight, when relocation of white people from diverse cities to majority-white suburbs was an explicit response to the desegregation and rebellions of the preceding years. mtv agents making a statement about suburban markets in that time has a clear meaning.
I think you're just commenting from your bubble, and using the flawed argument from the article to rationalize it (not to mention the fact that the people you're most likely to see are the minority vying for your attention).
In 1977 the top 20 grossing movies were probably watched by over 50% of movie watchers because there were just so few options. What do you think that proportion is now? I'm willing to bet that if you sampled random movie watchers, fewer than 10% of them will have watched any of the top 20 movies this year. There's just so much content out there, I don't think the top grossing movies mean as much anymore.
People's attention is spread very thin across hundreds of thousands of small creators these days. And consider that if you're a small YouTuber with a few thousand core fans, you're roughly as successful as the most underground punk rock bands/indie film directors of the 70s. As I see it, the "alternative" culture is bigger than it's ever been. I could be a die-hard fan of a dozen different works that I consider very mainstream, and yet my next door neighbor will not be familiar with any of them.
Not everybody considered those things cool - obviously they were specifically NOT the mainstream pop crowd, or else there was nothing to be "underground" or "alternative" against.
There's certainly still underground/alternative pop culture. More than ever before! In some ways its harder to find (e.g. your search bubble isn't going to pop it up to you if it doesn't think you want it), ironically!
But with that new bubble of being in your sub-community largely comes less need to "act out" against the rest of the crowd. This is largely good, except in cases of e.g. violent incel egging-on spiral-downward communities or your more "old fashioned" sorts of violent radicalism that continue to exist.
(Here's a trivially simple example: the author claims that a smaller and smaller group is claiming a larger and larger share of the market in TV. But then look at something like this from wikipedia's I Love Lucy page: 'The episode "Lucy Goes to the Hospital", which first aired on Monday, January 19, 1953, garnered a record 15.105 million homes reached, equivalent to 44 million viewers resulting from 71.7% share of all households with television sets at the time having been tuned in to view the program.[69] That record is surpassed only by Elvis Presley's first of three appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show, which aired on September 9, 1956 (82.6% share, 60.710 million viewers and a 57.1 rating ).[69] The overall rating of 67.3 for the entire 1952 season of I Love Lucy continues to be the highest average rating for any single season of a TV show.[70]' No show or musician commands anything close to that now. )
I know folks in literary circles like hating on Dan Brown, but I do love that all his books have very short chapters. It’s refreshing to have frequent stopping places, rather than tucking in for a 70 page chapter-that-should-have-been-a-novella. I feel like I get through books with shorter chapters faster.
The former features marvel’s Thor, who’s commercial af. But it goes to a new world, has a markedly different tone, humor, themes, and plot. The plot hits themes of humility and identity and the specifics of the ending were, imo, not very predictable.
Jojo rabbit is set in WWII with all original characters with some great bits, but an overall plot that’s fairly predictable.
You could easily argue it’s still Jojo rabbit, but is there anything obviously bad about how original Thor 3 is? I think no.
And there have been lots of great movies in the past year even. Everything everywhere, Last Night in Soho, massive talent, etc.
Edit: the formulaic rom coms and action movies and comedies were the bigger issue to me. A mildly novel setting, or perhaps, novel buddy cop duo, added far less interesting material than things complained about here.
You know exactly how it goes, but that's the reason you enjoy it =)
The real conclusion IMO is that the methods of distributing "pop culture" have been turned on their head, and traditional media is now playing catch up. Nielsen numbers and Billboard charts and all similar metrics are now irrelevant to the conversation.
It's a general feature of complex ecologies rather than a specialty of cultural or economic ecologies.
Consider if the whole of media were an iceberg: It seems to me that in 1977, almost the entire iceburg was poking up out of the water. Today on the other hand, while there is a much larger visible chunk sticking out of the water, it's just a tiny insignificant prick compared to what's going on underneath. The number you actually want is the size of the rest of the berg in 1977 vs today.
Because it seems to me that as popular as the things I watch are, if I went and asked random people on the street about them, 99% of them would have no idea what I'm talking about. But if I were to do the same thing 50 years ago, more people would be familiar with the same smaller set of shows and movies and books.
To me this is most evident based on the viewership of tv show finales. To this day, the most watched tv finale of all time is MASH at over 100 million viewers. Modern shows, even GoT don't even come close. I believe this is because there is so much content out there being produced that our attention is much more spread out. The "top 20" means less and less as the proportion of people who actually consume that stuff goes lower and lower.
https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q...
I don't think the author's argument is that convincing except for the rise of movie franchises, but that's not a observation. Ppl have been complaining about formulaic movies for years.
You'd be surprised. Most people only listen to what's popular, same as always. It's just that what is popular is much more constrained.
I feel so burnt out from Netflix series, they are all the same, crime, murder, replicas of game of thrones (vikings) etc. And the majority of films they list are mediocre, all the good ones I have seen multiple times.
I can't remember the last new good film I watched, maybe Tenet. I lost track of new things coming out.
You can’t change this because pop culture and the star system are for the masses. Art is for early adopters. It’s that same concept of the technical chasm we have.
0: https://www.billboard.com/music/chart-beat/no-2022-hits-harr...
and then you have things like the book series of The Expanse and the follow on TV/streaming series, which are an entirely new thing.
or a movie like "ex machina".
nothing mandates watching endless remakes...
My reasoning : a post-war relatively wealthy middle class and free University education meant more time for things like attending political protests, tinkering with emerging electronics/computers, engineering projects and garage bands.
We have wonderful flat screens now, much better comms .. and yet nothing seems fixable, were killing the planet with our carbon emissions and not many people seem concerned, and our best most energetic young minds are slaves to servicing their student debt.
https://web.archive.org/web/20060208093032/http://www.shirky...
discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31038660
TL;DR: power laws predictably mean the top <whatever> looks really big, but that doesn't mean the long tail doesn't matter either.
Charles Perrow wrote of this in the mid-1980s:
After the critical period from about 1956 to 1960, when tastes were unfrozen, competition was intense, and demand soared, consolidation appeared. The number of firms stabilized at about forty. New corporate entries appeared, such as MGM and Warner Brothers, sensing, one supposes, the opportunity that vastly expanding sales indicated. Some independents grew large. The eight-firm concentration ratio also stabilized (though not yet the four-firm ratio). The market became sluggish, however, as the early stars died, were forced into retirement because of legal problems, or in the notable case of Elvis Presley, were drafted by an impinging environment. Near the end of this period the majors decided that the new sounds were not a fad and began to buy up the contracts of established artists and successfully picked and promoted new ones, notably The Beach Boys and Bob Dylan. A new generation (e.g., The Beatles) appeared from 1964 to 1969, and sales again soared.(
But now the concentration ratios soared also. From 1962 to 1973, the four-firm ratio went from 25 to 51 percent; the eight-firm ratio from 46 to 81 percent, almost back to the pre-1955 levels. The number of different firms having hits declined from forty-six to only sixteen. Six of the eight giants were diversified conglomerates, some of which led in the earlier period; one was a new independent, the other a product of of mergers.*
How did they do it? The major companies asserted “increasing central control over the creative process”[352] through deliberate creation and extensive promotion of new groups, long-range contracts for groups, and reduced autonomy for producers. In addition, legal and illegal promotion costs (drug payola to disc jockeys, for example) rose in the competitive race and now exceeded the resources of small independents. Finally, the majors “have also moved to regain a controlling position in record distribution by buying chains of retail stores.”[353] The diversity is still greater than it had been in the past, and may remain high, but it is ominous that the majors have all the segments covered. As an executive said, “Columbia Records will have a major entry into whatever new area is broached by the vagaries of public tastes.” But for a concentrated industry, the “vagaries of public tastes” are not economical; it is preferable to stabilize and consolidate them. This would be possible through further control over the creative process and marketing.
Charles Perrow, Complex organizations : a critical essay, 1972, 1985. pp. 186--187.
https://www.worldcat.org/title/complex-organizations-a-criti...
https://archive.org/search.php?query=Complex+organizations+:...
The dynamics, actors, and economics remind me strongly of the software / high-tech industry, though with much weaker coupling and different lock-in mechanics.
I've just been having a conversation with a friend who points out a quote from Herbert Simon (polymath economist, psychologist, mathemetician, artificial intelligence pioneer, and more):
“in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”
My friend's observation:
[I'm thinking about how the] boom/bust cycles of the 1800s were caused by land value boom/bust cycles and how inflation is too many quatloos chasing a finite supply of dinguses…now wondering if there is a corollary of this in attention, as a finite amount of attention is chased by an expanding supply of "content." Gresham's Law comes into play on the quality but what to do about the quantity of media available in the same fixed 86,400 seconds per day?
My response in part:
1. This is what the limbic / emotional system seems to have evolved around. That itself is in major part common at least amongst all mammals, and other life forms --- birds and reptiles show at least fear/anger responses, and for birds affection.
2. I've argued that in a world where there's an overload of information, _cheap and no-regret information discarding_ is an essential property. Some time after concluding that, a podcast guest mentioned the idea that random sampling in statistical methodology is less about choosing what to _include_ as what to _exclude_, which ... seems to follow a parallel path. Random selection isn't a bad option, and is at least unbiased. Stratified sampling may give more appropriate focus to more probabalistically relevant information. I'm thinking here of the eye and both its various regions of sensitivity, as well as its ability to shift focus rapidly. The sense of touch and its varying sensitivity across the body --- highest on hands (especially fingers), feet, lips, tongue, and genitals is another. Audio perception is far less focused, by contrast.
3. One of the useful elements of economics is that it gives a framework for considering behaviours under shifting costs. So with information -> abundant & attention -> scarce, we're shifting the relative costs of information (or perhaps better, "distraction", or "stimuli"), and attention. There's the additional factor that _value of stimuli is difficult (costly) to assess._
- Traditionally, trust, and specifically _institutional reputational trust_ was a key factor. That gives a long-term, slow-moving value which can be assessed. It does of course have and introduce its own problems, but at least reduces the transactional costs of information assessment.
- Shifts to biases and tribalistic behaviour are probable.
- Similarly, "shoot the messenger", which seems to become more prevalent in high-stimulus environments. (Messengers may themselve often be direc threats, as with disease vectors, say.)
- Structural and process reforms. Highly-structured information _at the very least_ reduces the processing costs and/or increases the complexity of information which can be conveyed for any given cost.
- Attention may shift to better-regulated platforms or sources. There are information streams we don't follow biologically for their lack of signal / excess of noise, and/or energetic costs of filtering. That may be entire channels, or selecting bandwidth within channels.
As Adam Mastroianni notes, there are other patterns to how the industry responds:
- Serials (television) and sequels / cinematic universes become preferred over original works. Audiences can re-attach to familiar characters and landscapes, in which a new (though predictable) narrative develops.
- "Brand familiarity" follows similar trends, particularly with publishing. For a time this played out through serial publication --- books were produced, and financed, by publishing chapters individually through magazines. Many of those magazines themselves grew with the birth of mechanised transportation, mass production, and the need for advertising-driven marketing which the magazines supplied, while also serving as advertisements for their own product: books. Many of the magazines were organs of book publishers. See Hamilton Holt's excellent Commercialism and Journalism (1909) for background on the origins of the magazine publishing industry: https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft
- Marshall Poe, founder and editor of the New Books Network podcast has spoken of how books, especially academic monographs, are a difficult product to crack and market. In particular, "people don't like to read very much". His podcast's long-form interviews with authors provide both a shorter entry point: an hour or so, perhaps experienced during a commute or household chores; and a different format, audio rather than written content, far easier for most people to process. Poe's comments should be in this interview, on his own network. https://newbooksnetwork.com/marshall-poe
On the "not liking to read" bit, my suspicion is that highly literate people strongly overestimate population average literacy, and the rate of low or no literacy, even in advanced countries: https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179/index.asp https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29734146
The "content problem" has several legs: creation, production, curation, marketing, and distribution. Where costs of creation, production, and distribution fall (as they have), costs of curation (whether centralised or distributed) and marketing increase. We're seeing a shift in just that direction.
What do you expect from technocrats who grew up on dystopian capitalist cyberpunk? One touch purchases was a capitalist brand itself; Uncle Pauly G has NFT bucks for cyber punks that ship!
Music is the most age dependant business. It's literally impossible to discover your favorite song at age 35+ and it's most likely already buried in your brain forever between 14 and 20.
Same things for movies, franchises sell because there is a familiarity to it. Stuff that isn't franchise just doesn't sell. A possible exception would be biopics.
I predict a huuuge amount of high budget biopic to integrate revenues from franchises.
JFK, MLK, Reagan, Hendrix, the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, The Eagles, Michael Jackson, Michael Jordan...they will all get a biopic with a budget of no less than 175M a pop.
With all due respect, this sounds like a comment from someone who's not really into music.
I did a quick check with a musical friend to see if he shared my initial reaction... "what's your favourite song?" resulted in "I have no idea how to answer that question. Maybe ask me my top 100 favourites?"
I'm well over that age now, and I have a new "favourite song" every week or two. Easing into more free time as the kids get older and am using some of that to go see more live music from local bands.
In the last decade alone (I'm 30), I went from primarily classic rock and folk music mixed with some movie soundtracks to metal to Eurobeat to J-Pop. My favorite song when I was 14 was probably something by Feist or the Beatles, maybe something by Queen. Now it's definitely something from a J-Pop or Vocaloid artist. Somewhere between that I'd have said something by Franz Ferdinand or White Stripes (and to be fair, I do listen to them quite a bit).
There aren't a ton of albums that I liked between the ages of 14 and 20 that I'd still defend as "good", though a handful are still nostalgia-listens for me. I had pretty shit taste in music then, really.
What's amazing is that you can hear their influences as being the music I was listening to when I was a teen through to my early 20s.
Example: Nothing but Thieves are my #1 favourite in terms of recent rockers; you can hear the Queen, Jeff Buckley, Muse, Pink Floyd influences in there. I might be hallucinating some of it, but I swear half my teen favourites are in there somewhere.
Another point; some of my favourite bands that were making great music many years ago are still putting out new albums, but they're just missing the edge now, sounding a bit formulaic.
The article seems unhappy about sampling, but basically sampling has been important more or less since it became practical. There was a rash of songs a while back that I thought were all sampling an old favourite I bought as a CD single last century. But they aren't! They're just using the same sample it does which is from a 1932 trumpet line.
And sampling empowers the outsiders they're enthusiastic about. Lil Nas X wouldn't be anywhere without (almost certainly illegally until he was signed and somebody papered over the cracks with $$$ and co-writing credits) sampling Nine Inch Nails "34 Ghosts IV". Yes that's a great old timey banjo sound, but it ain't sampled from some obscure old banjo tune, Trent and Atticus put a bunch of work into making it sound that way.
I don't have a single favorite song, but the band Ghost is high in my personal rotation -and they didn't even make a record until I was 44.
And I didn't discover most of my favorite bands until I was in my 20's.
I probably took after my dad when it comes to music listening. He's in his 60s and still actively searching for and finding new favorites.
That is, the song catalogue has stopped being something that has turnover, it just keeps accumulating into a library of dusty shelves, and that makes it hard for young people to assert norms as in days past and tell everyone "this band that was marketed to my demographic is totally the best and nothing will ever beat them" - which is where a concept of "best song" is going to come from, because hardly anyone is trying to assign letter grades to their listening.
Instead you'll see a more apocalyptic Fall-of-Rome tone in the comments of old hits: "I'm only 13 but I wish I were in the 80's, best decade for music nothing like today's crap". It's so common a sentiment as to be memetic and widely riffed upon.
Something has definitely changed in the music business.
Handled properly, modern digital audio is easily capable of containing the magic sounds of particular classic time periods: not just the 80s, if you really work at it you can get late 70s represented properly, even without using period recording equipment. But you cannot mess around, you have to do it a particular way.
People aren't significantly different from the 70s or the 60s or the 80s, as far as music creation goes. But the common practices are wildly different, and technology had a forcing effect causing the sounds of a decade (or time period) to take on a consistent quality based on the available tools and distribution media. That's all. You know it's not just 70s and 80s: there's electronic genres where the 90s fill a similar nostalgia role, and coincidentally have an obvious, distinct sound that is not heard today, and can to large effect be recalled through determinedly sticking to the period tools…
Between 14 and 20 years of age I was listening to some cool music, too (it was that interesting period just after grunge and as brit-pop was taking off), but, to be honest, the lyrics from those songs and even the music itself don't speak to me that much anymore.
Nah. When I was a teenager, I was listening to classic rock and folk music. When I was in my mid 20s, I got into metal. Now I'm 30 and would absolutely give you a list of J-Pop songs competing for the title of "favorite song."