Pop culture has become an oligopoly (2022)
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Maybe all of the apparent poverty in our culture's discourse, art, social cohesion, etc. isn't caused by broad tragedies of the commons that make for intriguing blog posts. Isn't the more parsimonious explanation that our culture is now composed of poor critical thinkers who are poorly educated, lack sophistication and nuance, and accordingly have terrible taste? We keep trying to invent these just-so stories for why we keep selecting for horrible, simplistic ideas when so many good ideas already exist. Rather than inventing a hundred different perverse incentive models and technology-changing-the-landscape theories, Occam's razor would favor the explanation that there has been a 'continental drift' in our cultural tastes and maturity. The observation that we keep voting for crappy stuff is best explained by... us preferring crappy stuff.
Something about the (modern?) movie making process just sucks out the good.
Hasn't this always been true though? Widespread public education systems did not exist for 99.9999% of human history. How could it be that education is more present in the world than it has ever been in history yet we somehow have worse critical thinking skills? Blaming the ills of society on education doesn't make much sense when we've had societies much longer than we've had public education.
Let alone that with your train of thought critical thinking must have not existed before literacy became a thing.
Basically if our education system sucks, it's because we've spent 20 years cutting corners, cheaping out, over-relying on metrics, and enforcing top-down control over teaching and curriculum. No wonder it sucks. Our public policy has been to stamp the outliers out of the system and crush it into mediocre mush.
Why? Education may easily have negative impact. Modern education was created to teach people to read instructions how to operate factory machinery. Critical thinking is not needed for that. In fact, society without much critical thinking is easier to work with.
Those people also had to compete, in the long run, for their positions. Broadening scope from a selected sample to the population necessarily degrades quality as the common denominator is pursued.
On the other hand, it creates tremendous wealth which allows niche art to flourish. (On the third hand, populism hates niche art.)
That’s really begging the question, isn’t it? Can you explain why your claim above should be true today (and especially not true/less true years ago)?
On first read this opinion just sounded like some misanthropic two-bit Nietzsche take
OTOH I've thought the same thing reading reddit comments, some people really are just fucking stupid and the only thing you can do about them is get away
The way I see it: the common culture can go fuck itself. Find your own people and ride off into the sunset
On a cultural level, the key is to promote local productions. Those will never get popular, but at least the local community will gain a better sense of connection through the artistic expressions of their community members. So for example: photo exhibitions, short film screenings, art galleries, all tailored to local productions.
Personally, I have no interest in the formulaic garbage coming from the pseudo-anonymous void.
You’re not wrong, but these are mostly untenable solutions at present.
The reason this situation has come to be is because of the newsfeed algorithms (pick your app) that sanitize or destroy local and niche influence/barriers and create a deep downhill rut towards amalgamated culture.
If our feeds only showed us what our followers post, the way it used to be, as opposed to showing us not-so-random content from all across the country/world, we wouldn’t have this problem so severely
On top of that there are still countless communities, free of any monetized algorithm, thanks to forums and things like discord.
So I think that it's more "tenable" than ever, and I don't thing that the cultural situation is worse than it was before, actually I think it's way better. It's just so easy to find a new think to dive into, connect to other hobbyists, discuss it, and for the most motivated, create content.
And legitimately so.
> It has never been that easy to create music, videogames, produce videos, comics, and distribute them. Nowadays basically anyone can do it, so the amount of content available is gigantic.
And they all compete in one giant global marketplace, which often undermines the viability of "local productions."
There's probably some counter-intuitive principle that infinite choice has a homogenizing effect. It's probably because people generally lazy, but historically have lived in environments with more barriers to that laziness that kept it in check (e.g. no one's becoming a solo game playing hikikomori in 1800, because they'd quickly become bored out of their minds). In the past local culture was unavoidable and required no special effort, because of travel and communication barriers. How the travel and communication barriers are gone, which means local culture requires special effort to maintain, and the lazy will hook into the homogenized culture that requires less effort.
> On top of that there are still countless communities, free or any monetized algorithms, thanks to forums and things like discord.
IIRC, forums have been dying off for a decade or more.
And they'll keep "dying off" for many more decades.
John Bentinck, fifth Duke of Portland? He had England's biggest ballroom built, and a billiard room with multiple billiard tables, but never threw a party, hated meeting people, and lived underground. He had all the above ground rooms in Welbeck Abbey painted bright pink, with a toilet in the corner of each one. Any workman who acknowledged he existed was dismissed.
I have got old now and the medium of artistic expression that young people are into is not the same as when I was young.
In 40 years old people will complain no one makes crazy tiktok videos like they use to.
Of course in the moment, no one considers social media videos art. Just like at one point rap was noise, rock music was noise, the electric guitar was noise. William S Burroughs, jazz, blues, on and on back.
Same narrative over and over by old people. "My youth was filled with high art while kids these days like such trash."
In the past, it was a lot worse. There was a lot more "shared culture" that seemingly everyone tuned in to, that you kind of had to grin and bear. If you didn't know what happened on Seinfeld last night (90s), or on the Simpsons (2000s), or Game of Thrones (2010s), then you really had nothing to talk about at the water cooler. Nowadays, there really isn't much popular stuff that -everyone- watches, so it's easier than ever to drop that popular stuff.
A sticky notable exception is still national sports. There's still so much shared pop culture in knowing what the local city's Sportsball team sportsed about during last night's game that you have to kind of put up with if you want to socialize at the water cooler.
If an important selling point for a media product is that it’s locally produced, then it’s probably bad (as local productions usually are).
The real solution imo is just to consume less media. If consuming media takes up a significant portion of your time, then to me that sounds like a fundamentally boring life. I’d recommend one should fix their boring life problem before they start worrying about their boring media problem.
I chose those two because they were fairly famous local acts in Texas long before they became nationally famous.
ZZ Top in particular used to open for a lot of bands who would tour Texas. They were noted for bringing along a set of local fans who would help sell tickets for your tour.
2) One must suck before one gets good
If you can't make a living while you notionally "suck", you lose the pipeline to "good". I would, in fact, argue that this is really what is dragging down a lot of our "pop culture" right now. We are finally seeing the results of that pipeline collapsing around Y2K.
Many indie works suffer from the same formulaic failings as popular works, so that doesn't seem like a solution either. The same old hero story with a black or gay protagonist is not suddenly more interesting, yet that's a large portion of what's coming out of the indie scene.
In the US, there is no solution. We are all shackled to the cultural carcass that is late modernity. Retelling the same stories we have for decades, just with different colors.
This is absolutely not true everywhere in the US. In every place I've lived, there has been local community. More vibrant in some places than others, but always there.
I can't know if that's the case in all parts of the US, but I suspect it's true in the majority.
> I am nothing like my neighbors, never have been, and have never known very much about them in any of the places I've lived.
Perhaps you've been opting not to engage with the local communities you've been in?
When there's a loneliness epidemic that is especially pronounced with young people, it seems really silly to act like local community is a general institution that most people actively participate in. It might be true in your neck of the woods. It is certainly not in mine.
> When there's a loneliness epidemic that is especially pronounced with young people, it seems really silly to act like local community is a general institution
One of the reasons for the loneliness epidemic is that people have stopped seeking out and participating in things that get them face-to-face with neighbors. That's a thing only those people can fix for themselves. As a light example, you said
> I am nothing like my neighbors, never have been, and have never known very much about them in any of the places I've lived.
Where in the same breath you both claim that you have nothing in common with your neighbors, and that you have never known very much about them. However, you can't know if you have anything in common with them or not unless you get to know them. A first step toward finding what community exists around you is as simple as making it a point to get to know your neighbors.
I know enough about my neighbors based on small glimpses of their lifestyle to know I will never want to or need to know them. I don't make friends with child abusers. And the reality is that those sorts of value conflicts are commonplace in contemporary American life.
I think the indie scene for a lot of media is a lot less 'independent' than we might think. This became obvious to me when I noticed the absolutely insane fights that happened on Twitter surrounding young adult literature. (Eg https://reason.com/2019/05/05/teen-fiction-twitter-is-eating...)
Science fiction and fantasy seem to be doing something a bit similar.
I think if you want more independent writers you'll have to go to places like Royalroad or /r/hfy or scribblehub.
I assume you're just spitballing here. Still: what you've proposed often produces an artistic process that is possibly worse than the oligopoly you're attempting to oppose.
Prioritizing "a better sense of connection" through artistic expression is a recipe for manipulating artists into giving away their time (and, perhaps, art) for free or close to it. Moreover, de-emphasizing popularity means the local production has less money coming in. Too few dollars chasing "a better sense of connection" essentially means you'll optimized for the most manipulative ego-maniacs to hound local artists to mentor and make art for less than what they are worth.
Worst of all, the artists who get manipulated and burned out by this process aren't the ones who would have produced "garbage coming from the pseudo-anonymous void." They're the ones who would have done local community productions that have enough money to pay a minimally decent amount of money to artists. Ironically, you end up with less enthusiasm for the kind of art you're wanting to produce.
You make it sound like some weird manipulation scheme. Sounds like you've never actually done anything like this in real life.
No surprise this leads to reruns and repeats, as everything slowly turns into multicoloured sludge. Investors look back at Super Movie VIII, and fund Super Movie IX because they can be reasonably confident in making a 100% profit. [1]
To be so immensely popular, these products have cater to the lowest common denominator. They're optimized for sellability, not quality. The "stars" come and go as their arcs play out, but the studios behind them remain a constant. The most successful ones make stock market insider-trading politicians look like children in a sandbox. They just pump out the sausage, sell it at a 100% mark up, and we gobble it up because it's pre-chewed and an easy distraction from the daily struggles.
Maybe the infinite supply of money has something to do with these changes.
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.
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 don't see how that negates their argument. Can you elaborate?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 suspected it was contagious when I first saw a Hot Topic and mall goths oh so many years ago.
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.
Coincidentally, it was about then (2010) that I stopped going to mainstream movies. Or perhaps not so coincidentally. I stopped because I stopped liking the movies that I did see, and perhaps that list explains why.
Instead of going out to the movies, I started going out to see live theater.
Maybe a new spaghetti (noodle?) superhero movie genre emerges…
In our time, most of the rights to 100 years of pop culture is owned by three big media companies, and they own stakes in distribution channels. The catalogues give them power to bargain for promotion in various channels. That's how it used to work in radio [0], and is suspected to work in music streaming [1].
I suspect revoking extensions to copyright/IP laws [2, for example] would change the picture.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payola
[1] https://www.billboard.com/pro/playola-promotion-streaming-se...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
However, this greediness to get more money from production is also reflected in risk aversion. Look it from the point of an investor: option 1 invests 10 million in a new sci-fi production with an exciting plot, and Option 2 invest 10 million in a franchise with a crappy plot. The chances of getting a more significant return from 2 are higher.
The same happens with music and other art forms.
That’s why it’s important to have incentives for local and indie productions. Many times, the critics of those incentives point out that they are biased and contrary to the “free market”. But I don’t see any other way to bring balance to the force.
But doesn't that follow sort of naturally? Filmmaking took off as an industry not that long ago - roughly in the 1960s. Of course you didn't have too many remakes of old movies back when you just didn't have that many movies to begin with. And cinematic universes - often centered around superhero action - started popping up only in the 1980s. Before that, it wasn't easy to make a sequel to "Gone with the Wind" or "To Kill a Mockingbird". It was a literary problem, not a matter of corporate consolidation.
And it's dictated to a large extent by audience preferences. We like sequels, prequels, and remakes of the films we remember from our childhood. The same goes for video games; it's a lot harder to sell a brand new idea than it is to market Fallout 5 or Dragon Age IV. It's not the studios doing it to us, it's what we want to play.
I don't know. I don't find the thesis particularly compelling. On the flip side: it used to be that everyone was watching the same TV shows at once, because you only had so much choice. Now, you have far more variety than you used to (albeit the average quality has probably gone down). The same goes for music - sure, "top 100" lists are still dominated by studio-produced albums, but what percentage of people is listening to "top 100" when we all get personalized streams?
And it seems like people are nostalgic for things they never was there to experience. Like, some fake nostalgia, that is transferred between generations and cultures that had nothing to do with it.
The problem is pop culture gives everyone a shared interest to talk about and contributes to social cohesion.
Imagine talking with your friends about Jaws, or Nirvana when they first came out.
I can still find quality content but the people I can talk with it about are limited.
Pop culture provided sort of a commonality between people where we could unite over various pieces of art.
Now we have sports though.
Note how you don't apply any term that would imply you'd be discerning or have agency, like viewer or god forbid customer.
And you don't call the 'content' art, entertainment or anything like that.
When was it not?
Spotify pays less and less for niches. Algorithms recommend more and more superstars.
People are not prepared to pay for the niche individuals more than they need to. These individuals have harder time to make a living from that. They cannot focus on that. Over time, there is less and less individuals.
E.g., in the 1990's vehicles for commercializing movies took off. Toys, fast-food tie-in's with well-timed ad campaigns and printed bags, etc.: all this technology took time to develop, but resulted in the major movies making more money from tie-in's than the box office. That results in more "producers", i.e., people dedicated to making commercial success out of stories, and the most successful of those can translate those skills to new artists (whether movie directors or pop stars) -- much like the Bush and Clinton political teams picked new horses to run for a decade or more. Their secondary offerings may be successful mainly because their producers are good, but that effect peters out with fashion fatigue.
The underlying intuition is that "popular" culture, by virtue of being many, many people, is somehow a test of reality, a stochastic scale. But any measurable effect is largely a function of followers - some fast, some slow - that reflect different types of network and investment effects.
It highlights how essentially everything in culture is a remix of some previous version of the culture (or some aspect of it). E.g. even language is largely a remix of earlier languages with some occasional creation of new words.
Also, while true that there is definitely an oligopoly, it's also clear that the Long Tail is both huge AND easy to access. In the past, you could only see movies by going to the movie theater and there were only a limited number of theaters. Now, you can both create and consume media in niches as small (or combined) as you want.
But this is not necessarily inherent to media.
Perhaps the most interesting, long-standing cultural artifacts we are currently creating are not in the realm of media at all.
Space travel The internet Generative AI
Even though movies are undoubtedly dominated by a few stars, I don’t think the legacy of our time will be the movie Legally Blonde 2. When people think about the period 1950-2050, they will write more about the rise of companies which were capable of mass producing intelligent and what people did with them.
The 20th century was the century of Bernays.
https://theconversation.com/the-manipulation-of-the-american...
In the 20th century, teenagers were invented. Their purpose? An advertising target.
https://www.ushistory.org/us/46c.asp
The pop culture in the article seems to mostly be the culture of teenagers. This was always an entirely constructed racket.
Around 2000 (+- 5) someone claimed that with the internet you only need 1000 (or I believe 3000) dedicated fans to make something like a blog.
And around 2010 (+- 5) there was a Wired, I believe, article that did show that also the most popular things are more concentrated, while the Long Tail eats the former successful mid-range.
If anybody has references, the first could be Chris Anderson's The long tail, but I think that thesis was around earlier. The second I didn't find anything.
The studios are going to die. You don't need their capital to build your vision.
> oligopoly: a state of limited competition, in which a market is shared by a small number of producers or sellers.
(That's an honest question, not a concrete stance.)
Pop culture has become an oligopoly - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31239268 - May 2022 (146 comments)
This would better match the way that popular culture has worked throughout most of history where anyone could create a story about King Arthur, Robin Hood, or Sun Wukong.
There would probably need to be some sort of protections to prevent corporations from simply scooping up independent artist's work. However, that seems like something that could be worked out.
That’s a pretty heavy lift for that poor sentence. The way it “works out” in my mind is that the instant an indie work pokes its head above water, Disney sweeps in and makes a franchise out of it without payment to the artist. Because your proposal works both directions.
A franchise could only become open for unauthorized developers once it has made a certain inflation adjusted revenue, or once a franchise has works created by more than a certain number of artists.
Or these changes could simply only apply to corporations. So individuals could own franchise IP but corporations could not. Or corporations would be required to compensate the original creator but independent artists would not.
It's not necessary to make a perfect system. Just one that is better than our current dysfunctional system where corporations own most of our culture.
Historically culture has relied as much on retelling the same stories (with slight modifications) as it has on creating related ones.
Aside from streaming, commercial breaks are getting longer and episode content shorter. Content is only half the runtime now. If they put a rerun between each new episode, viewers stay engaged, but they get a whole bunch more commercial spaces for free.
We can't even have books any more to get content at our own pace. AI is going to produce too much crap to sort through, unless you stick to the known authors, but that just confirms this article's point.
There will be money to be made in manual curation again soon.
As in magazine style, not influencer style. Where it's not the producer paying for an ad, but the readers paying for the editor doing their job.
If it has been done for writing for a couple hundred years, it can be done for video entertainment as well. It's already done for video games to a point, although some review sites look like payola now.
To be fair, there is the odd exception where one writer just single-handedly cranks out the scripts (e.g. Joe Straczynski writing all of season 3 of Babylon 5), but that's the exception for a reason.
When? It'll be 3 years late when you discover a cult classic that was canceled for abysmal ratings after 6 episodes. Which is why they'll never make it.
They aren’t really cinema, like WWF-style wrestling isn’t really sport.
(in the Olympic sense)