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Looking at etsy or the long list of artists on Spotify putting out music without hitting the mainstream radio, I'm not convinced the world has converged everywh

Looking at etsy or the long list of artists on Spotify putting out music without hitting the mainstream radio, I'm not convinced the world has converged everywhere. I have far more variety that appeals to me available to me than ever before - and so does a person with opposite tastes. Expensive to build or change things have - houses or cars - but art or more commodity products have fractured. The people/media one is the author's biggest blind spot here: there is still a dominant mainstream that people are chasing, but it's audience is smaller than before. I think this is why they chase the same thing more aggressively. So your "bestsellers" look alike, but more people are reading random shit that would never crack that list in the past either. Selling to a niche is precisely the opposite of what gets you in the bestseller list, but the niches I like have SO MUCH STUFF available now. The non-mainstream has fractured, making the remaining mainstream look more similar to chase a narrower segment. The most watched TV shows now have a far lower percentage of the country watching, and also have more variety in what the cast as a whole looks like, whether that's hairstyle or tattoos or piercings or whatnot. EDIT: here's an experiment to try to demonstrate. Tell me how many of those lookalike movie and book poster/cover images you've watched. And how many you'd watch more of. Movies: I've seen 0 of those (I'm not a horror fan anyway, but I've seen a couple in the last five years, Hereditary and The Invisible Man, and they didn't look like those posters). Self-help books: I've read 0. I haven't been reading any Danielle Steele, John Grisham, Kathryn Stockett, or Stieg Larsson in the last 15 years either... but Grisham was much more common in my circle, and I read some, in the 90s. I had less fewer options! I read over 30 books last year, and none of them popped up in this article...

eestrada 4y ago
To bolster this point, the bestselling album of all time is still Michael Jackson's Thriller, released in 1982. So it has been literally over 40 years and nothing else has topped that for mainstream popularity, musically speaking. It has sold over 70 million copies. The next nearest album is AC/DC's Back in Black, released in 1980, at 50 million copies, a 20 million copy difference. A present day musician would be over the moon to sell 20 million copies. If I'm reading the charts right, the only musician to break 30 million sales for an album since 2010 has been Adele. So, while mainstream creations may be homogenizing, independent creators are finding a larger audience than ever before. I see that as a good thing. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_albums https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_albums
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  Even better, not only has nothing "topped" Thriller for mainstream popularity, it was also never really "copied" in any meaningful sense. The same is true of many of the most popular works of ... popular ... art. Yes, Thriller had quite an influence on pop-dance music when it came out, but who can name a single song about which the first thing anyone says is "oh, that's just like <X> from Thriller"
- stiglitz 4y ago
  Album sales have become an increasingly obsolete metric for popularity during the last 20 or so of those 40 years.
  - eestrada 4y ago
    That is a good point. It would be interesting to see these same numbers as a ratio against worldwide album sales over time. That would give a better sense of popularity relative to their time.

eestrada 4y ago

To bolster this point, the bestselling album of all time is still Michael Jackson's Thriller, released in 1982. So it has been literally over 40 years and nothing else has topped that for mainstream popularity, musically speaking. It has sold over 70 million copies. The next nearest album is AC/DC's Back in Black, released in 1980, at 50 million copies, a 20 million copy difference. A present day musician would be over the moon to sell 20 million copies. If I'm reading the charts right, the only musician to break 30 million sales for an album since 2010 has been Adele. So, while mainstream creations may be homogenizing, independent creators are finding a larger audience than ever before. I see that as a good thing. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_albums https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_albums

PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
Even better, not only has nothing "topped" Thriller for mainstream popularity, it was also never really "copied" in any meaningful sense. The same is true of many of the most popular works of ... popular ... art. Yes, Thriller had quite an influence on pop-dance music when it came out, but who can name a single song about which the first thing anyone says is "oh, that's just like <X> from Thriller"
stiglitz 4y ago
Album sales have become an increasingly obsolete metric for popularity during the last 20 or so of those 40 years.
- eestrada 4y ago
  That is a good point. It would be interesting to see these same numbers as a ratio against worldwide album sales over time. That would give a better sense of popularity relative to their time.