16 ms·

Pop culture has become an oligopoly (2022)

119 points by passwordoops 2y ago

coding123 2y ago
I don't understand why TV sucks so bad. I mean when do we get the next alias that has 24 episodes a season and 8 or 9 seasons.
- BearOso 2y ago
  Shorter attention span these days. Viewers want a payoff immediately and don't want to wait a whole season. 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.
  - nottorp 2y ago
    > AI is going to produce too much crap to sort through 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.
- stn8188 2y ago
  We'll never have the same experience as Alias when we no longer have to revolve our schedules around the broadcast time!
- 0xcde4c3db 2y ago
  I think one component of it is the devaluing of writing in the industry. A big issue in the most recent WGA strike (mostly glossed over in favor of obsessing over the AI stuff) was studios pushing really hard to turn writing into one-off gig work instead of a stable position. A lot of successful shows have a first season that is lackluster or just plain "off" because they hadn't figured out what the show was actually about, and I suspect that excessive commoditization of the writing process is a recipe for producing that "weird first season" every season.
  - mmcdermott 2y ago
    Devaluating writers probably hurts, but you see the "weird first season" even in older shows. The 1960s series Get Smart and Dick Van Dyke Show had first seasons that were much weaker than what the show would become, to cite a couple of examples. There probably is no substitute for a period of getting your sea legs under you as a writer.
    - 0xcde4c3db 2y ago
      What I'm saying is that I suspect writers need to be attached to a specific show for a while for that seasoning/maturity/"sea legs" process to happen for the show. I don't think it works if there's just a procession of people who only write one or two episodes and then move on to other shows. 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.
- dogleash 2y ago
  >when do we get the next alias that has 24 episodes a season and 8 or 9 seasons 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.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
blowski 2y ago
I have no data to back me up, so take this with a big pinch of salt. 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.
- SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
  I think for music that certainly seems likely - 99% of my listening is artists who I will never hear on the radio. Books too, probably. But I don't know how relevant that is for something like movies. Outside of the occasional independent theatres, movies force us into a relatively limited selection. But if anything that media is becoming irrelevant as new media like YouTube and Twitch rises to prominence.
  - blowski 2y ago
    I would argue even with movies it holds true. 30 years ago, it was very difficult and expensive to buy, say, 1950s film noir. Now it takes 5 minutes to torrent. 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.
- AlexandrB 2y ago
  The problem is how compensation works in streaming. Those long tail artists are now paid less than they would make off of a few hundred CD sales. The Taylor Swifts and Muses of the world still get the bulk of the subscription you pay every month.
  - piva00 2y ago
    These long tail artists almost didn't sell their albums before streaming though. I've always been into obscure music since I was a teenager, to find it I'd have to dig through many record stores' bins, and get lucky enough to get my hands on second hand stuff. There was never a place they were stocked (perhaps except for some local store around where the artists' themselves were located). 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.
vouaobrasil 2y ago
On an individual level, the way to solve it is to stop watching the popular stuff and go with indie-made things. In general, it's a good idea to consume less media anyway. 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.
- hammock 2y ago
  > On an individual level, the way to solve it is to stop watching the popular stuff and go with indie-made things. On a cultural level, the key is to promote local productions. 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
  - TheRoque 2y ago
    Sounds a bit pessimistic. 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. Moreover, alternative ways of getting money have appeared: patreon, kickstarter, various donation websites, partnerships... 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.
    - tivert 2y ago
nathan_compton 2y ago
This kind of thing always just reads as "I don't like what is in pop culture," mostly because while these metrics tell one story, the tails of the culture are bigger than they have ever been. Pop culture looks so shitty because people don't depend on it the same way they used to.
HPsquared 2y ago
Megacorps don't do innovation. As in technology, so in culture.
- ChickeNES 2y ago
  I think AT&T/Bell Labs disproves that assertion
  - HPsquared 2y ago
    Fair. It would be interesting to compare the way Bell Labs was funded with modern economic / legal conditions.
the_real_cher 2y ago
There's tons of content to consume nowadays you don't have to be limited to pop culture. 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.
- nottorp 2y ago
  That's the problem exactly :) Entertainment is now a content factory for consumers. 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.
  - the_real_cher 2y ago
    > Entertainment is now a content factory for consumers. When was it not?
    - account42 2y ago
      When it was a luxury.
      - nottorp 2y ago
        Was it ever? Iirc when Shakspeare was writing his plays theater was the popular entertainment...
- nicce 2y ago
  Even if there is content, statistically there is no pressure to change the whole picture. 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.
root_axis 2y ago
Most of the growth in these spaces has been cultivated by the massive marketing power of these titans. I think viewing this as oligopolies taking over culture is misleading, rather, these massive corporations have invested huge marketing budgets into bringing consumers into the market, and the net result is that they now make up the glut of it. To use an analogy to the internet, it's not that all the intelligent discussion, homespun websites, and intimate message boards have disappeared, rather, they have been dwarfed by the influx of new people who were not participating in these spaces before they were lured in by the forces of the attention economy. This is "eternal September" writ large across the cultural landscape.
echelon 2y ago
In ten years time, most "prestige" content will be made outside of a big studio setting. The studios are going to die. You don't need their capital to build your vision.
sgbeal 2y ago
Isn't pop[ular] culture necessarily an oligopoly, in that in any sort of popularity-driven competition, popular things will always win out over less popular things? > 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.)
vonnik 2y ago
I think this analysis is missing something: how much money is being made per hit, and how many people are consuming it? In TV, at least, the numbers are way down. As a result, people play it safe by doing remakes.
diegof79 2y ago
The article briefly mentions “Hollywood greediness” as one of the possible explanations people give for the phenomenon and then switches to describe other factors. 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.
- maxwell 2y ago
  Risk profiles change though. Option 1 was a better bet in the late 1970s and early '80s, when the Old Hollywood franchises had been thoroughly wrung out and demand was there for new experiences.
alexpotato 2y ago
Anytime these discussions pop up, it's good to link to the documentary "Everything is a Remix" (here is the 2023 updated version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9RYuvPCQUA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9RYuvPCQUA" ) 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.
harimau777 2y ago
Part of me thinks that the law should be changed so that IP covers works but not "universes". E.g. only Disney would have the right to distribute A New Hope but anyone could create their own work set in the Star Wars universe. 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.
- mikestew 2y ago
  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.
  - harimau777 2y ago
    There's lots of ways that this could be done. 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.
- account42 2y ago
  Why not throw out the rest of the "IP" bs? Historically culture has relied as much on retelling the same stories (with slight modifications) as it has on creating related ones.
spideronwall 2y ago
Frontline (US) made this same argument in the Merchants of Cool. only thing missing are the modern actors like Youtube and Tiktok. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cool/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cool/ https://www.pbs.org/video/frontline-merchants-cool/ https://www.pbs.org/video/frontline-merchants-cool/
rhelz 2y ago
Is there anything which isn't an oligopoly today?
input_sh 2y ago
I have no strong opinion on the premise, but the cherry-picked data in this article is... on par with what I expect from a random Substack blog, which is to say god-awful. 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-of-billboard-hot-100-data-21e1a02cf304 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.
- kayo_20211030 2y ago
  I think that piece of data reinforces the point. If the "stayers" fall off the charts faster, there ought to be no reason, outside the oligopoly argument, to presume that the replacements would be from the same set of artists. Were it not the same stuff over and over again, wouldn't you expect something novel (i.e. some other artist) to replace them, at some level? But, it doesn't look like that's what happens, and also that it's happening less frequently than it once did.
  - input_sh 2y ago
    > Were it not the same stuff over and over again, wouldn't you expect something novel (i.e. some other artist) to replace them, at some level? 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?
JohnFen 2y ago
> Until the year 2000, about 25% of top-grossing movies were prequels, sequels, spinoffs, remakes, reboots, or cinematic universe expansions. Since 2010, it’s been over 50% ever year. In recent years, it’s been close to 100%. 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.
- bongodongobob 2y ago
  Yup. Superhero movies took over. Most boring, infantile genre there is.
  - DrNosferatu 2y ago
    Would we prefer Western cowboy movies instead? Maybe a new spaghetti (noodle?) superhero movie genre emerges…
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
drewcoo 2y ago
"Has become" is a bit of a stretch. The 20th century was the century of Bernays. https://theconversation.com/the-manipulation-of-the-american-mind-edward-bernays-and-the-birth-of-public-relations-44393 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 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.
binary132 2y ago
The only thing to be done is to drop out and participate in at least sponsoring, if not creating culture.
gnfedhjmm2 2y ago
[flagged]
tracker1 2y ago
And eventually, the model sinks. Just look at Disney. It may take another decade or more, but either they will shift their approach, or they will die and get split up and sold off.
iambateman 2y ago
The most interesting cultural artifacts have always been media…in large part because that was all which has survived since antiquity, excepting a few lucky buildings. 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.
btbuildem 2y ago
The article doesn't cover the most relevant part (and a huge contributing factor, imo): that most media products at that scale are simply investment vehicles. The first and often the only thing you hear about some blockbuster movie is how much money it made at the box office. Studio execs evaluate potential projects primarily by their potential to generate a return. 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. 1: https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/budgets https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/budgets
- fiso64 2y ago
  This doesn't explain why this has started happening in the last 40 years for media types that have existed for far longer than that. Even movies have been around for long enough to build up a large catalogue and for investors to catch on, so why didn't we start seeing a rise in remakes and sequels until recently?
  - btbuildem 2y ago
    When did the US get off the gold standard, early 70's? Maybe the infinite supply of money has something to do with these changes.
dang 2y ago
Discussed at the time (of the article): Pop culture has become an oligopoly - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31239268 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31239268 - May 2022 (146 comments)
sebastos 2y ago
The idea that there are emergent, systematic issues that are damaging our culture is always very compelling. The first 100 articles of that style had me so utterly convinced. It's taken 10-THOUSAND of those articles for me to start questioning whether there is an alternative hypothesis. 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.
- Invictus0 2y ago
  From an investor's perspective, would you prefer to invest $100M in a movie franchise where the last 4 titles have done really well and become borderline cultural landmarks, or a novel title with absolutely no backstory? The reality is that the former wins out most of the time and this is the explanation Occam's razor really favors. No one wants to make a bad movie--it just so happens that some stories are less risky than others.
  - Maken 2y ago
    Nowadays, every new series or movie is set in a pre-existing universe that dates from the late 80s or 90s. Everything must be part of become a franchise to be funded, even if the team behind have little or nothing to do with the original creators. I do understand that producers want predictability and anything with a established fanbase is much less risky than betting on the next Jurassic Park, but they are simply killing the golden goose at this point.
  - Aerroon 2y ago
    But the problem is less with the source material and more with the execution of the movie. Look at Game of Thrones and what happened when they ran out of source material. Something about the (modern?) movie making process just sucks out the good.
yk 2y ago
I read a long time ago related articles: 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.
- lemonberry 2y ago
  I believe you're thinking of Kevin Kelly's "1,000 True Fans". That should help you refine your search.
doe_eyes 2y ago
The only graph in that article that shows a strong trend supporting the thesis is the first one - essentially, "movies that are remakes or sequels to previous movies". It goes from 25% in the 1980s to ~80% today. 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?
- rightbyte 2y ago
  My theory is that culture back then was way more common and shared among people, so old stuff got a great mindshare that is really hard to recreate with new movies. 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.
yobbo 2y ago
Things were different in 1960s/1970s since at that time there weren't huge catalogues of works owned by a just few media companies, although there were far fewer channels (with less and more expensive bandwidth.) 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payola [1] https://www.billboard.com/pro/playola-promotion-streaming-services/ https://www.billboard.com/pro/playola-promotion-streaming-se... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
w10-1 2y ago
This is not oligopoly, but the result of technology as an enhancer delivering more value to the leader. 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.
katamarimambo 2y ago
The conclusion from the music analysis is off because of changes in media consumption and chart calculations. When a top (or even a mid) act drops an album (so, every week), the entire album is listened on the apps by many people and it is not unusual to have all songs in the top 100 that week.
b3ing 2y ago
One way around it is to stop looking at only media from your own country (specifically if you're in the US) and look at what other countries are doing. With the internet there is no reason to only listen to American bands, watch American movies, etc. K-pop for example has grown outside of Korea.
DrNosferatu 2y ago
It’s more superhero movies, no? They aren’t really cinema, like WWF-style wrestling isn’t really sport. (in the Olympic sense)
snowpid 2y ago
This is an article where we need "in the US" in the title.

119 points by passwordoops 2y ago

I don't understand why TV sucks so bad. I mean when do we get the next alias that has 24 episodes a season and 8 or 9 seasons.

BearOso 2y ago
Shorter attention span these days. Viewers want a payoff immediately and don't want to wait a whole season. 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.
- nottorp 2y ago
  > AI is going to produce too much crap to sort through 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.
stn8188 2y ago
We'll never have the same experience as Alias when we no longer have to revolve our schedules around the broadcast time!
0xcde4c3db 2y ago
I think one component of it is the devaluing of writing in the industry. A big issue in the most recent WGA strike (mostly glossed over in favor of obsessing over the AI stuff) was studios pushing really hard to turn writing into one-off gig work instead of a stable position. A lot of successful shows have a first season that is lackluster or just plain "off" because they hadn't figured out what the show was actually about, and I suspect that excessive commoditization of the writing process is a recipe for producing that "weird first season" every season.
- mmcdermott 2y ago
  Devaluating writers probably hurts, but you see the "weird first season" even in older shows. The 1960s series Get Smart and Dick Van Dyke Show had first seasons that were much weaker than what the show would become, to cite a couple of examples. There probably is no substitute for a period of getting your sea legs under you as a writer.
  - 0xcde4c3db 2y ago
    What I'm saying is that I suspect writers need to be attached to a specific show for a while for that seasoning/maturity/"sea legs" process to happen for the show. I don't think it works if there's just a procession of people who only write one or two episodes and then move on to other shows. 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.
dogleash 2y ago
>when do we get the next alias that has 24 episodes a season and 8 or 9 seasons 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.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

blowski 2y ago

I have no data to back me up, so take this with a big pinch of salt. 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.

SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
I think for music that certainly seems likely - 99% of my listening is artists who I will never hear on the radio. Books too, probably. But I don't know how relevant that is for something like movies. Outside of the occasional independent theatres, movies force us into a relatively limited selection. But if anything that media is becoming irrelevant as new media like YouTube and Twitch rises to prominence.
- blowski 2y ago
  I would argue even with movies it holds true. 30 years ago, it was very difficult and expensive to buy, say, 1950s film noir. Now it takes 5 minutes to torrent. 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.
AlexandrB 2y ago
The problem is how compensation works in streaming. Those long tail artists are now paid less than they would make off of a few hundred CD sales. The Taylor Swifts and Muses of the world still get the bulk of the subscription you pay every month.
- piva00 2y ago
  These long tail artists almost didn't sell their albums before streaming though. I've always been into obscure music since I was a teenager, to find it I'd have to dig through many record stores' bins, and get lucky enough to get my hands on second hand stuff. There was never a place they were stocked (perhaps except for some local store around where the artists' themselves were located). 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.

vouaobrasil 2y ago

On an individual level, the way to solve it is to stop watching the popular stuff and go with indie-made things. In general, it's a good idea to consume less media anyway. 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.

hammock 2y ago
> On an individual level, the way to solve it is to stop watching the popular stuff and go with indie-made things. On a cultural level, the key is to promote local productions. 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
- TheRoque 2y ago
  Sounds a bit pessimistic. 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. Moreover, alternative ways of getting money have appeared: patreon, kickstarter, various donation websites, partnerships... 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.
  - tivert 2y ago

nathan_compton 2y ago

This kind of thing always just reads as "I don't like what is in pop culture," mostly because while these metrics tell one story, the tails of the culture are bigger than they have ever been. Pop culture looks so shitty because people don't depend on it the same way they used to.

HPsquared 2y ago

Megacorps don't do innovation. As in technology, so in culture.

ChickeNES 2y ago
I think AT&T/Bell Labs disproves that assertion
- HPsquared 2y ago
  Fair. It would be interesting to compare the way Bell Labs was funded with modern economic / legal conditions.

the_real_cher 2y ago

There's tons of content to consume nowadays you don't have to be limited to pop culture. 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.

nottorp 2y ago
That's the problem exactly :) Entertainment is now a content factory for consumers. 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.
- the_real_cher 2y ago
  > Entertainment is now a content factory for consumers. When was it not?
  - account42 2y ago
    When it was a luxury.
    - nottorp 2y ago
      Was it ever? Iirc when Shakspeare was writing his plays theater was the popular entertainment...
nicce 2y ago
Even if there is content, statistically there is no pressure to change the whole picture. 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.

root_axis 2y ago

Most of the growth in these spaces has been cultivated by the massive marketing power of these titans. I think viewing this as oligopolies taking over culture is misleading, rather, these massive corporations have invested huge marketing budgets into bringing consumers into the market, and the net result is that they now make up the glut of it. To use an analogy to the internet, it's not that all the intelligent discussion, homespun websites, and intimate message boards have disappeared, rather, they have been dwarfed by the influx of new people who were not participating in these spaces before they were lured in by the forces of the attention economy. This is "eternal September" writ large across the cultural landscape.

echelon 2y ago

In ten years time, most "prestige" content will be made outside of a big studio setting. The studios are going to die. You don't need their capital to build your vision.

sgbeal 2y ago

Isn't pop[ular] culture necessarily an oligopoly, in that in any sort of popularity-driven competition, popular things will always win out over less popular things? > 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.)

vonnik 2y ago

I think this analysis is missing something: how much money is being made per hit, and how many people are consuming it? In TV, at least, the numbers are way down. As a result, people play it safe by doing remakes.

diegof79 2y ago

The article briefly mentions “Hollywood greediness” as one of the possible explanations people give for the phenomenon and then switches to describe other factors. 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.

maxwell 2y ago
Risk profiles change though. Option 1 was a better bet in the late 1970s and early '80s, when the Old Hollywood franchises had been thoroughly wrung out and demand was there for new experiences.

alexpotato 2y ago

Anytime these discussions pop up, it's good to link to the documentary "Everything is a Remix" (here is the 2023 updated version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9RYuvPCQUA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9RYuvPCQUA" ) 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.

harimau777 2y ago

Part of me thinks that the law should be changed so that IP covers works but not "universes". E.g. only Disney would have the right to distribute A New Hope but anyone could create their own work set in the Star Wars universe. 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.

mikestew 2y ago
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.
- harimau777 2y ago
  There's lots of ways that this could be done. 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.
account42 2y ago
Why not throw out the rest of the "IP" bs? Historically culture has relied as much on retelling the same stories (with slight modifications) as it has on creating related ones.

spideronwall 2y ago

Frontline (US) made this same argument in the Merchants of Cool. only thing missing are the modern actors like Youtube and Tiktok. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cool/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cool/ https://www.pbs.org/video/frontline-merchants-cool/ https://www.pbs.org/video/frontline-merchants-cool/

rhelz 2y ago

Is there anything which isn't an oligopoly today?

input_sh 2y ago

I have no strong opinion on the premise, but the cherry-picked data in this article is... on par with what I expect from a random Substack blog, which is to say god-awful. 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-of-billboard-hot-100-data-21e1a02cf304 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.

kayo_20211030 2y ago
I think that piece of data reinforces the point. If the "stayers" fall off the charts faster, there ought to be no reason, outside the oligopoly argument, to presume that the replacements would be from the same set of artists. Were it not the same stuff over and over again, wouldn't you expect something novel (i.e. some other artist) to replace them, at some level? But, it doesn't look like that's what happens, and also that it's happening less frequently than it once did.
- input_sh 2y ago
  > Were it not the same stuff over and over again, wouldn't you expect something novel (i.e. some other artist) to replace them, at some level? 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?

JohnFen 2y ago

> Until the year 2000, about 25% of top-grossing movies were prequels, sequels, spinoffs, remakes, reboots, or cinematic universe expansions. Since 2010, it’s been over 50% ever year. In recent years, it’s been close to 100%. 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.

bongodongobob 2y ago
Yup. Superhero movies took over. Most boring, infantile genre there is.
- DrNosferatu 2y ago
  Would we prefer Western cowboy movies instead? Maybe a new spaghetti (noodle?) superhero movie genre emerges…

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

drewcoo 2y ago

"Has become" is a bit of a stretch. The 20th century was the century of Bernays. https://theconversation.com/the-manipulation-of-the-american-mind-edward-bernays-and-the-birth-of-public-relations-44393 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 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.

binary132 2y ago

The only thing to be done is to drop out and participate in at least sponsoring, if not creating culture.

gnfedhjmm2 2y ago

[flagged]

tracker1 2y ago

And eventually, the model sinks. Just look at Disney. It may take another decade or more, but either they will shift their approach, or they will die and get split up and sold off.

iambateman 2y ago

The most interesting cultural artifacts have always been media…in large part because that was all which has survived since antiquity, excepting a few lucky buildings. 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.

btbuildem 2y ago

The article doesn't cover the most relevant part (and a huge contributing factor, imo): that most media products at that scale are simply investment vehicles. The first and often the only thing you hear about some blockbuster movie is how much money it made at the box office. Studio execs evaluate potential projects primarily by their potential to generate a return. 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. 1: https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/budgets https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/budgets

fiso64 2y ago
This doesn't explain why this has started happening in the last 40 years for media types that have existed for far longer than that. Even movies have been around for long enough to build up a large catalogue and for investors to catch on, so why didn't we start seeing a rise in remakes and sequels until recently?
- btbuildem 2y ago
  When did the US get off the gold standard, early 70's? Maybe the infinite supply of money has something to do with these changes.

dang 2y ago

Discussed at the time (of the article): Pop culture has become an oligopoly - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31239268 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31239268 - May 2022 (146 comments)

sebastos 2y ago

The idea that there are emergent, systematic issues that are damaging our culture is always very compelling. The first 100 articles of that style had me so utterly convinced. It's taken 10-THOUSAND of those articles for me to start questioning whether there is an alternative hypothesis. 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.

Invictus0 2y ago
From an investor's perspective, would you prefer to invest $100M in a movie franchise where the last 4 titles have done really well and become borderline cultural landmarks, or a novel title with absolutely no backstory? The reality is that the former wins out most of the time and this is the explanation Occam's razor really favors. No one wants to make a bad movie--it just so happens that some stories are less risky than others.
- Maken 2y ago
  Nowadays, every new series or movie is set in a pre-existing universe that dates from the late 80s or 90s. Everything must be part of become a franchise to be funded, even if the team behind have little or nothing to do with the original creators. I do understand that producers want predictability and anything with a established fanbase is much less risky than betting on the next Jurassic Park, but they are simply killing the golden goose at this point.
- Aerroon 2y ago
  But the problem is less with the source material and more with the execution of the movie. Look at Game of Thrones and what happened when they ran out of source material. Something about the (modern?) movie making process just sucks out the good.

yk 2y ago

I read a long time ago related articles: 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.

lemonberry 2y ago
I believe you're thinking of Kevin Kelly's "1,000 True Fans". That should help you refine your search.

doe_eyes 2y ago

The only graph in that article that shows a strong trend supporting the thesis is the first one - essentially, "movies that are remakes or sequels to previous movies". It goes from 25% in the 1980s to ~80% today. 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?

rightbyte 2y ago
My theory is that culture back then was way more common and shared among people, so old stuff got a great mindshare that is really hard to recreate with new movies. 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.

yobbo 2y ago

Things were different in 1960s/1970s since at that time there weren't huge catalogues of works owned by a just few media companies, although there were far fewer channels (with less and more expensive bandwidth.) 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payola [1] https://www.billboard.com/pro/playola-promotion-streaming-services/ https://www.billboard.com/pro/playola-promotion-streaming-se... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act

w10-1 2y ago

This is not oligopoly, but the result of technology as an enhancer delivering more value to the leader. 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.

katamarimambo 2y ago

The conclusion from the music analysis is off because of changes in media consumption and chart calculations. When a top (or even a mid) act drops an album (so, every week), the entire album is listened on the apps by many people and it is not unusual to have all songs in the top 100 that week.

b3ing 2y ago

One way around it is to stop looking at only media from your own country (specifically if you're in the US) and look at what other countries are doing. With the internet there is no reason to only listen to American bands, watch American movies, etc. K-pop for example has grown outside of Korea.

DrNosferatu 2y ago

It’s more superhero movies, no? They aren’t really cinema, like WWF-style wrestling isn’t really sport. (in the Olympic sense)

snowpid 2y ago

This is an article where we need "in the US" in the title.