Causes of Our Creative Collapse
How reboots came to rule the roost
Originally written for ZINE.
In the first piece on the Creator Paradox, we identified and quantified the cultural oligopoly—the ballooning monoculture of reboots. We asked, “How is it that during a moment of radical creator liberation and audience frustration, we’re finding ourselves with the same tropes and hooks?”
In this piece, we’ll unpack the seven drivers which may be causing this paradox, speaking to various experts who’ll explain how various mechanisms are suppressing creators today.
So, what’s at the root of this phenomenon?
___
01. Conflicting Ecosystems
Most obviously, we’re discussing two very distinct and seemingly competing media environments.
For creators, there’s the bottom-up, democratized access to tools, enabling massive amounts of content to be made and syndicated frictionlessly. In the creator economy everyone can be a player and “make it.”
On the other hand, there’s the top-down, institutional power of filtering and recommendation, held by establishments incentivized by outsized financial returns. Large, risk-averse institutions—arguably just run by in-house lawyers and accountants at this point—play it safe to “protect shareholder value.”
These divergent models are currently inconducive. It’s this fundamental dynamic that sits center stage at our paradox.
When there are two drastically different sets of environments, incentives, and breeds of “creators” today—everyday maker vs. established institution—it’s hard to expect normies to be plucked out and be bet on by gatekeepers already in power.
02. It’s (Mostly) Trash
Then there’s the question of quality.
While the long tail is certainly diverse, it’s also made up of a lot of... noise. Amateurs are amateurs, no matter how many there are.
A reason we don’t see new creators’ work rise is simply because the majority of it isn’t even worthy (or because there’s just too much to sift through).
Another angle here is the lack of funding for emerging creators, fueling pursuits. For a young, talented artist today, where are grants or opportunities for backing outside of peer crowdsourcing?
In the absence of infinite time but facing infinite content, we actually need some gatekeepers. Further, we need financing for those who aren’t... trash.
03. Institutional Consolidation
By its very nature, the long tail of content is segmented into ever-smaller pieces for ever-more discerning audiences. But as the long tail lengthens where more create, the classic bell curve forms: the obscure gets more obscure, while the largest common denominator gets more... basic.
Look no further than Netflix’s most recent pivots, which make it clear they’re no longer interested in many, risky, artistic bets, but instead, “bigger, better, fewer.”
Ironically, this is no different than what preceded them. Also, Netflix was once seen as the promising example for the opportunity of the Long Tail. Instead, over the last decade, Netflix has been slashing its library of titles. As of 2010, Netflix housed 6.7K films. Today, a decade later that number is down 45%.
Much of today’s mass-produced work aims to satisfy the average. As a result, we’re left with average. The middle is saltine-cinema: the largest financial opportunity.
Take or leave Martin Scorsese’s critique of Marvel, his take on the state of film—this “consolidation”—shouldn’t be controversial: “The art of cinema is being systematically devalued, sidelined, demeaned, and reduced to its lowest common denominator, ‘content.’”
This dovetails with one of Mastroianni’s own hypotheses for today’s cultural oligopoly: a systemic reflex towards concentration. The big habitually eats the small. Movie studios, music labels, TV stations, and publishers of books and video games have all consolidated. And this concentration is simultaneously occurring across religion, political parties, language, top visited websites, newspapers, cities, and most discussed: wealth and businesses.
The winners we’re left with today are so large, they have to satisfy that largest possible common denominator in order to survive.
04. Medicinal Nostalgia
More choice isn’t always a good thing.
In The Paradox of Choice, Dr. Barry Swartz writes, “The fact that some choice is good doesn’t necessarily mean that more choice is better.”
Presented with an avalanche of opportunity, especially with entertainment—something meant to bring joy—we stick to what we know. After all, what we know feels good.
In Derek Thompson’s book, Hit Makers, he explains this tendency. “Most consumers are simultaneously neophilic—curious to discover new things—and deeply neophobic—afraid of anything that’s too new. The best hit makers are gifted at creating moments of meaning by marrying new and old, anxiety and understanding. They are architects of familiar surprises.”
As creatures of comfort, the unknown is scary. We opt for the familiar. And this selection solves two things for us: choice analysis paralysis, and emotional turmoil. We’re relieved.
A collective longing for the past might explain this paradox’s recent acceleration. The pandemic has triggered a mass re-appreciation of the old—safe and unthreatening. We also had plenty of time to explore catalogues while production was paused.
As Dylan Viner, Managing Partner at TRIPTK, a cultural research and brand consultancy, points out, “Hateful of the present, and fearful of the future, we long for the past.”
And this is true even when the past isn’t our own. According to Spotify’s own research, 68% of Gen Z enjoy media from prior decades because it reminds them of when times were simpler.
History is a reassuring comparison to the unpredictability of what tomorrow may bring. So what if it’s played out? At least we know the words.
05. Influence of the Aged
As users of today’s media platforms grow older, so too will the age of the content being consumed.
According to market research by Ampere Analysis, Netflix's core subscription base is already saturated with 18-34 and 35-44 viewers—80% and 70% respectively. Growth within these age brackets has been stagnant. Now, Americans 50+ are driving the growth of the entertainment juggernaut, which now inevitably must keep luring and satisfying these older consumers.
The growth of mature users on today’s content platforms recalibrates what’s surfaced and produced, diminishing the attention placed on the youthful, emerging or rebellious.
06. Platform Persuasion
We, the audience, have less control over this paradox than we think. Chris Dancy, an author and speaker on living with technology, remarks, “Technology has moved from Big Brother to Big Mother.... Our quest to create the most frictionless experience is leaving people devoid of autonomy and longing for the feeling of 1st person living.”
Faced with AI-customized playlists, “We think you may like” recommendations, and “Just for you” nudges, it’s up to once agnostic platforms to determine what’s now streamed... and popular.
Algorithms were believed to untether us from the masses and offer paths for personalization, but instead what’s pushed today still emanates from the original institutional power we thought we were escaping.
The consultancy Music Tomorrow researched how playlists are impacting emerging artists. What they found was that “over the last four years, major labels accounted for nearly 70% of the music featured in the ‘New Music Friday’ playlist on Spotify, 86% for ‘Rap Caviar’ and 87% for ‘Pop Rising’ playlists. Even though making and releasing music has become easier than ever, the support of a major label—and its marketing powerhouse is one of the top determinants (if not prerequisites) for getting access to some of the most valuable streaming real estate.”
Further explaining our disillusionment with algorithmic personalization and escape from the mainstream, Rob Horning of Real Life magazine writes, “Streaming services work strenuously to shape customers' disposition toward consuming if not specific tastes, making them more passive in their consumption, more willing to go along with what is trending and what is being surfaced on landing pages and home screens. It's no accident that searching these sites for something to watch is often an arduous and fruitless chore, inducing a learned helplessness and a preemptive predilection to surrender to the feed.”
“For You” is not about pushing the limits of our artistic palates, as much a device to serve us what the platform projects—and wants us to be satisfied with, herding us into more predictable siloes that can then be targeted with more “precise” recommendations. Anything other than this is a liability to the business model.
Ted Gioia also comments on this practice in the Atlantic. “Algorithms are designed to be feedback loops, ensuring that the promoted new songs are virtually identical to your favorite old songs. Anything that genuinely breaks the mold is excluded from consideration almost as a rule. That's actually how the current system has been designed to work.”
Algorithms’ are not designed to radically free us through superior discovery. They’re made to categorize us into more predictable buckets with predetermined labels. “New” is just a wrench in this machine.
07. Creators ≠ Consumers
Finally, a less validated hypothesis as to why we have an unrecognized Long Tail is perhaps that we find more value in making than consuming.
With the tools of creation democratized, it’s never been easier to produce... but that doesn’t insinuate there’s a proportionate eager audience.
Many may find more value in the creation of work, than the discovery and consumption of it. And further, much of today’s “creation” is in fact informed by existing IP.
As Kevin Alloca, YouTube’s Global Director of Culture & Trends, explained to me, “So much of user generated content today is still about a franchise—reactions, reviews, or remixes. While there’s never been so much creativity and content, it’s not to say it’s all entirely removed from existing IP. It's fairly common now to see more media about, or related to the original work and consumption of it, than there is of the original work itself.”
We’re duped by a mirage of new media today. In fact, we’re in a feedback loop of meta reactions. It’s a reaction video to a movie trailer which is a sequel, or a walk-through stream for the latest in a video game franchise. We have videos about a video about a video. Today, so much of bottom-up creations are nodding to legacy material. There’s less originality out there than we perceive there to be.
In a culture where creating can be more satisfying than consumption, we’re left with a glut of both unwanted content, and new content that’s actually just about existing content.
We’ve Got A Problem
So we’ve established the existence of this creativity paradox, along with its spread, intensity and many causes. Hands turned up, we can accept this is just how it all turned out. So be it.
But we can’t. Absolutely. Can. Not.
We’re in a corrosive media ecosystem where the top 1% of bands and solo artists earn roughly 80% of all recorded music revenue—and by some estimates, the share for established artists is only getting larger. If this trend continues, we risk sabotaging both the opportunity and incentive for new artists to even participate.
As Mastroianni writes, “Movies, TV, music, books, and video games should expand our consciousness, jumpstart our imaginations, and introduce us to new worlds and stories and feelings [...] Learning to like unfamiliar things is one of the noblest human pursuits; it builds our empathy for unfamiliar people.”
If we stop watering “the new,” the new will die. Substitute “new” with whichever genre or medium you prefer. It’s the (originally) foreign, weird, edgy, counter-cultural, and antagonistic that drives a healthy society forward. Or for another metaphor: suffocate today’s sparks of “the new,” and we’re left in the dark.
We lose.
For Gioia, we must breathe life into the long tail as it “creates a more pluralistic, diverse and multifaceted society.”
The Long Tail vision hinted at making the blockbuster less pronounced... but the exact opposite occurred: the fringe is now endangered.
So what can we do?
___
In our final installment, we’ll explore five solutions to overcome and redesign the system to usher in a more creative class.
Dec 5, 2022
·
10 min read
Causes of Our Creative Collapse
How reboots came to rule the roost
Originally written for ZINE.
In the first piece on the Creator Paradox, we identified and quantified the cultural oligopoly—the ballooning monoculture of reboots. We asked, “How is it that during a moment of radical creator liberation and audience frustration, we’re finding ourselves with the same tropes and hooks?”
In this piece, we’ll unpack the seven drivers which may be causing this paradox, speaking to various experts who’ll explain how various mechanisms are suppressing creators today.
So, what’s at the root of this phenomenon?
___
01. Conflicting Ecosystems
Most obviously, we’re discussing two very distinct and seemingly competing media environments.
For creators, there’s the bottom-up, democratized access to tools, enabling massive amounts of content to be made and syndicated frictionlessly. In the creator economy everyone can be a player and “make it.”
On the other hand, there’s the top-down, institutional power of filtering and recommendation, held by establishments incentivized by outsized financial returns. Large, risk-averse institutions—arguably just run by in-house lawyers and accountants at this point—play it safe to “protect shareholder value.”
These divergent models are currently inconducive. It’s this fundamental dynamic that sits center stage at our paradox.
When there are two drastically different sets of environments, incentives, and breeds of “creators” today—everyday maker vs. established institution—it’s hard to expect normies to be plucked out and be bet on by gatekeepers already in power.
02. It’s (Mostly) Trash
Then there’s the question of quality.
While the long tail is certainly diverse, it’s also made up of a lot of... noise. Amateurs are amateurs, no matter how many there are.
A reason we don’t see new creators’ work rise is simply because the majority of it isn’t even worthy (or because there’s just too much to sift through).
Another angle here is the lack of funding for emerging creators, fueling pursuits. For a young, talented artist today, where are grants or opportunities for backing outside of peer crowdsourcing?
In the absence of infinite time but facing infinite content, we actually need some gatekeepers. Further, we need financing for those who aren’t... trash.
03. Institutional Consolidation
By its very nature, the long tail of content is segmented into ever-smaller pieces for ever-more discerning audiences. But as the long tail lengthens where more create, the classic bell curve forms: the obscure gets more obscure, while the largest common denominator gets more... basic.
Look no further than Netflix’s most recent pivots, which make it clear they’re no longer interested in many, risky, artistic bets, but instead, “bigger, better, fewer.”
Ironically, this is no different than what preceded them. Also, Netflix was once seen as the promising example for the opportunity of the Long Tail. Instead, over the last decade, Netflix has been slashing its library of titles. As of 2010, Netflix housed 6.7K films. Today, a decade later that number is down 45%.
Much of today’s mass-produced work aims to satisfy the average. As a result, we’re left with average. The middle is saltine-cinema: the largest financial opportunity.
Take or leave Martin Scorsese’s critique of Marvel, his take on the state of film—this “consolidation”—shouldn’t be controversial: “The art of cinema is being systematically devalued, sidelined, demeaned, and reduced to its lowest common denominator, ‘content.’”
This dovetails with one of Mastroianni’s own hypotheses for today’s cultural oligopoly: a systemic reflex towards concentration. The big habitually eats the small. Movie studios, music labels, TV stations, and publishers of books and video games have all consolidated. And this concentration is simultaneously occurring across religion, political parties, language, top visited websites, newspapers, cities, and most discussed: wealth and businesses.
The winners we’re left with today are so large, they have to satisfy that largest possible common denominator in order to survive.
04. Medicinal Nostalgia
More choice isn’t always a good thing.
In The Paradox of Choice, Dr. Barry Swartz writes, “The fact that some choice is good doesn’t necessarily mean that more choice is better.”
Presented with an avalanche of opportunity, especially with entertainment—something meant to bring joy—we stick to what we know. After all, what we know feels good.
In Derek Thompson’s book, Hit Makers, he explains this tendency. “Most consumers are simultaneously neophilic—curious to discover new things—and deeply neophobic—afraid of anything that’s too new. The best hit makers are gifted at creating moments of meaning by marrying new and old, anxiety and understanding. They are architects of familiar surprises.”
As creatures of comfort, the unknown is scary. We opt for the familiar. And this selection solves two things for us: choice analysis paralysis, and emotional turmoil. We’re relieved.
A collective longing for the past might explain this paradox’s recent acceleration. The pandemic has triggered a mass re-appreciation of the old—safe and unthreatening. We also had plenty of time to explore catalogues while production was paused.
As Dylan Viner, Managing Partner at TRIPTK, a cultural research and brand consultancy, points out, “Hateful of the present, and fearful of the future, we long for the past.”
And this is true even when the past isn’t our own. According to Spotify’s own research, 68% of Gen Z enjoy media from prior decades because it reminds them of when times were simpler.
History is a reassuring comparison to the unpredictability of what tomorrow may bring. So what if it’s played out? At least we know the words.
05. Influence of the Aged
As users of today’s media platforms grow older, so too will the age of the content being consumed.
According to market research by Ampere Analysis, Netflix's core subscription base is already saturated with 18-34 and 35-44 viewers—80% and 70% respectively. Growth within these age brackets has been stagnant. Now, Americans 50+ are driving the growth of the entertainment juggernaut, which now inevitably must keep luring and satisfying these older consumers.
The growth of mature users on today’s content platforms recalibrates what’s surfaced and produced, diminishing the attention placed on the youthful, emerging or rebellious.
06. Platform Persuasion
We, the audience, have less control over this paradox than we think. Chris Dancy, an author and speaker on living with technology, remarks, “Technology has moved from Big Brother to Big Mother.... Our quest to create the most frictionless experience is leaving people devoid of autonomy and longing for the feeling of 1st person living.”
Faced with AI-customized playlists, “We think you may like” recommendations, and “Just for you” nudges, it’s up to once agnostic platforms to determine what’s now streamed... and popular.
Algorithms were believed to untether us from the masses and offer paths for personalization, but instead what’s pushed today still emanates from the original institutional power we thought we were escaping.
The consultancy Music Tomorrow researched how playlists are impacting emerging artists. What they found was that “over the last four years, major labels accounted for nearly 70% of the music featured in the ‘New Music Friday’ playlist on Spotify, 86% for ‘Rap Caviar’ and 87% for ‘Pop Rising’ playlists. Even though making and releasing music has become easier than ever, the support of a major label—and its marketing powerhouse is one of the top determinants (if not prerequisites) for getting access to some of the most valuable streaming real estate.”
Further explaining our disillusionment with algorithmic personalization and escape from the mainstream, Rob Horning of Real Life magazine writes, “Streaming services work strenuously to shape customers' disposition toward consuming if not specific tastes, making them more passive in their consumption, more willing to go along with what is trending and what is being surfaced on landing pages and home screens. It's no accident that searching these sites for something to watch is often an arduous and fruitless chore, inducing a learned helplessness and a preemptive predilection to surrender to the feed.”
“For You” is not about pushing the limits of our artistic palates, as much a device to serve us what the platform projects—and wants us to be satisfied with, herding us into more predictable siloes that can then be targeted with more “precise” recommendations. Anything other than this is a liability to the business model.
Ted Gioia also comments on this practice in the Atlantic. “Algorithms are designed to be feedback loops, ensuring that the promoted new songs are virtually identical to your favorite old songs. Anything that genuinely breaks the mold is excluded from consideration almost as a rule. That's actually how the current system has been designed to work.”
Algorithms’ are not designed to radically free us through superior discovery. They’re made to categorize us into more predictable buckets with predetermined labels. “New” is just a wrench in this machine.
07. Creators ≠ Consumers
Finally, a less validated hypothesis as to why we have an unrecognized Long Tail is perhaps that we find more value in making than consuming.
With the tools of creation democratized, it’s never been easier to produce... but that doesn’t insinuate there’s a proportionate eager audience.
Many may find more value in the creation of work, than the discovery and consumption of it. And further, much of today’s “creation” is in fact informed by existing IP.
As Kevin Alloca, YouTube’s Global Director of Culture & Trends, explained to me, “So much of user generated content today is still about a franchise—reactions, reviews, or remixes. While there’s never been so much creativity and content, it’s not to say it’s all entirely removed from existing IP. It's fairly common now to see more media about, or related to the original work and consumption of it, than there is of the original work itself.”
We’re duped by a mirage of new media today. In fact, we’re in a feedback loop of meta reactions. It’s a reaction video to a movie trailer which is a sequel, or a walk-through stream for the latest in a video game franchise. We have videos about a video about a video. Today, so much of bottom-up creations are nodding to legacy material. There’s less originality out there than we perceive there to be.
In a culture where creating can be more satisfying than consumption, we’re left with a glut of both unwanted content, and new content that’s actually just about existing content.
We’ve Got A Problem
So we’ve established the existence of this creativity paradox, along with its spread, intensity and many causes. Hands turned up, we can accept this is just how it all turned out. So be it.
But we can’t. Absolutely. Can. Not.
We’re in a corrosive media ecosystem where the top 1% of bands and solo artists earn roughly 80% of all recorded music revenue—and by some estimates, the share for established artists is only getting larger. If this trend continues, we risk sabotaging both the opportunity and incentive for new artists to even participate.
As Mastroianni writes, “Movies, TV, music, books, and video games should expand our consciousness, jumpstart our imaginations, and introduce us to new worlds and stories and feelings [...] Learning to like unfamiliar things is one of the noblest human pursuits; it builds our empathy for unfamiliar people.”
If we stop watering “the new,” the new will die. Substitute “new” with whichever genre or medium you prefer. It’s the (originally) foreign, weird, edgy, counter-cultural, and antagonistic that drives a healthy society forward. Or for another metaphor: suffocate today’s sparks of “the new,” and we’re left in the dark.
We lose.
For Gioia, we must breathe life into the long tail as it “creates a more pluralistic, diverse and multifaceted society.”
The Long Tail vision hinted at making the blockbuster less pronounced... but the exact opposite occurred: the fringe is now endangered.
So what can we do?
___
In our final installment, we’ll explore five solutions to overcome and redesign the system to usher in a more creative class.
Dec 5, 2022
·
10 min read
Causes of Our Creative Collapse
How reboots came to rule the roost
Originally written for ZINE.
In the first piece on the Creator Paradox, we identified and quantified the cultural oligopoly—the ballooning monoculture of reboots. We asked, “How is it that during a moment of radical creator liberation and audience frustration, we’re finding ourselves with the same tropes and hooks?”
In this piece, we’ll unpack the seven drivers which may be causing this paradox, speaking to various experts who’ll explain how various mechanisms are suppressing creators today.
So, what’s at the root of this phenomenon?
___
01. Conflicting Ecosystems
Most obviously, we’re discussing two very distinct and seemingly competing media environments.
For creators, there’s the bottom-up, democratized access to tools, enabling massive amounts of content to be made and syndicated frictionlessly. In the creator economy everyone can be a player and “make it.”
On the other hand, there’s the top-down, institutional power of filtering and recommendation, held by establishments incentivized by outsized financial returns. Large, risk-averse institutions—arguably just run by in-house lawyers and accountants at this point—play it safe to “protect shareholder value.”
These divergent models are currently inconducive. It’s this fundamental dynamic that sits center stage at our paradox.
When there are two drastically different sets of environments, incentives, and breeds of “creators” today—everyday maker vs. established institution—it’s hard to expect normies to be plucked out and be bet on by gatekeepers already in power.
02. It’s (Mostly) Trash
Then there’s the question of quality.
While the long tail is certainly diverse, it’s also made up of a lot of... noise. Amateurs are amateurs, no matter how many there are.
A reason we don’t see new creators’ work rise is simply because the majority of it isn’t even worthy (or because there’s just too much to sift through).
Another angle here is the lack of funding for emerging creators, fueling pursuits. For a young, talented artist today, where are grants or opportunities for backing outside of peer crowdsourcing?
In the absence of infinite time but facing infinite content, we actually need some gatekeepers. Further, we need financing for those who aren’t... trash.
03. Institutional Consolidation
By its very nature, the long tail of content is segmented into ever-smaller pieces for ever-more discerning audiences. But as the long tail lengthens where more create, the classic bell curve forms: the obscure gets more obscure, while the largest common denominator gets more... basic.
Look no further than Netflix’s most recent pivots, which make it clear they’re no longer interested in many, risky, artistic bets, but instead, “bigger, better, fewer.”
Ironically, this is no different than what preceded them. Also, Netflix was once seen as the promising example for the opportunity of the Long Tail. Instead, over the last decade, Netflix has been slashing its library of titles. As of 2010, Netflix housed 6.7K films. Today, a decade later that number is down 45%.
Much of today’s mass-produced work aims to satisfy the average. As a result, we’re left with average. The middle is saltine-cinema: the largest financial opportunity.
Take or leave Martin Scorsese’s critique of Marvel, his take on the state of film—this “consolidation”—shouldn’t be controversial: “The art of cinema is being systematically devalued, sidelined, demeaned, and reduced to its lowest common denominator, ‘content.’”
This dovetails with one of Mastroianni’s own hypotheses for today’s cultural oligopoly: a systemic reflex towards concentration. The big habitually eats the small. Movie studios, music labels, TV stations, and publishers of books and video games have all consolidated. And this concentration is simultaneously occurring across religion, political parties, language, top visited websites, newspapers, cities, and most discussed: wealth and businesses.
The winners we’re left with today are so large, they have to satisfy that largest possible common denominator in order to survive.
04. Medicinal Nostalgia
More choice isn’t always a good thing.
In The Paradox of Choice, Dr. Barry Swartz writes, “The fact that some choice is good doesn’t necessarily mean that more choice is better.”
Presented with an avalanche of opportunity, especially with entertainment—something meant to bring joy—we stick to what we know. After all, what we know feels good.
In Derek Thompson’s book, Hit Makers, he explains this tendency. “Most consumers are simultaneously neophilic—curious to discover new things—and deeply neophobic—afraid of anything that’s too new. The best hit makers are gifted at creating moments of meaning by marrying new and old, anxiety and understanding. They are architects of familiar surprises.”
As creatures of comfort, the unknown is scary. We opt for the familiar. And this selection solves two things for us: choice analysis paralysis, and emotional turmoil. We’re relieved.
A collective longing for the past might explain this paradox’s recent acceleration. The pandemic has triggered a mass re-appreciation of the old—safe and unthreatening. We also had plenty of time to explore catalogues while production was paused.
As Dylan Viner, Managing Partner at TRIPTK, a cultural research and brand consultancy, points out, “Hateful of the present, and fearful of the future, we long for the past.”
And this is true even when the past isn’t our own. According to Spotify’s own research, 68% of Gen Z enjoy media from prior decades because it reminds them of when times were simpler.
History is a reassuring comparison to the unpredictability of what tomorrow may bring. So what if it’s played out? At least we know the words.
05. Influence of the Aged
As users of today’s media platforms grow older, so too will the age of the content being consumed.
According to market research by Ampere Analysis, Netflix's core subscription base is already saturated with 18-34 and 35-44 viewers—80% and 70% respectively. Growth within these age brackets has been stagnant. Now, Americans 50+ are driving the growth of the entertainment juggernaut, which now inevitably must keep luring and satisfying these older consumers.
The growth of mature users on today’s content platforms recalibrates what’s surfaced and produced, diminishing the attention placed on the youthful, emerging or rebellious.
06. Platform Persuasion
We, the audience, have less control over this paradox than we think. Chris Dancy, an author and speaker on living with technology, remarks, “Technology has moved from Big Brother to Big Mother.... Our quest to create the most frictionless experience is leaving people devoid of autonomy and longing for the feeling of 1st person living.”
Faced with AI-customized playlists, “We think you may like” recommendations, and “Just for you” nudges, it’s up to once agnostic platforms to determine what’s now streamed... and popular.
Algorithms were believed to untether us from the masses and offer paths for personalization, but instead what’s pushed today still emanates from the original institutional power we thought we were escaping.
The consultancy Music Tomorrow researched how playlists are impacting emerging artists. What they found was that “over the last four years, major labels accounted for nearly 70% of the music featured in the ‘New Music Friday’ playlist on Spotify, 86% for ‘Rap Caviar’ and 87% for ‘Pop Rising’ playlists. Even though making and releasing music has become easier than ever, the support of a major label—and its marketing powerhouse is one of the top determinants (if not prerequisites) for getting access to some of the most valuable streaming real estate.”
Further explaining our disillusionment with algorithmic personalization and escape from the mainstream, Rob Horning of Real Life magazine writes, “Streaming services work strenuously to shape customers' disposition toward consuming if not specific tastes, making them more passive in their consumption, more willing to go along with what is trending and what is being surfaced on landing pages and home screens. It's no accident that searching these sites for something to watch is often an arduous and fruitless chore, inducing a learned helplessness and a preemptive predilection to surrender to the feed.”
“For You” is not about pushing the limits of our artistic palates, as much a device to serve us what the platform projects—and wants us to be satisfied with, herding us into more predictable siloes that can then be targeted with more “precise” recommendations. Anything other than this is a liability to the business model.
Ted Gioia also comments on this practice in the Atlantic. “Algorithms are designed to be feedback loops, ensuring that the promoted new songs are virtually identical to your favorite old songs. Anything that genuinely breaks the mold is excluded from consideration almost as a rule. That's actually how the current system has been designed to work.”
Algorithms’ are not designed to radically free us through superior discovery. They’re made to categorize us into more predictable buckets with predetermined labels. “New” is just a wrench in this machine.
07. Creators ≠ Consumers
Finally, a less validated hypothesis as to why we have an unrecognized Long Tail is perhaps that we find more value in making than consuming.
With the tools of creation democratized, it’s never been easier to produce... but that doesn’t insinuate there’s a proportionate eager audience.
Many may find more value in the creation of work, than the discovery and consumption of it. And further, much of today’s “creation” is in fact informed by existing IP.
As Kevin Alloca, YouTube’s Global Director of Culture & Trends, explained to me, “So much of user generated content today is still about a franchise—reactions, reviews, or remixes. While there’s never been so much creativity and content, it’s not to say it’s all entirely removed from existing IP. It's fairly common now to see more media about, or related to the original work and consumption of it, than there is of the original work itself.”
We’re duped by a mirage of new media today. In fact, we’re in a feedback loop of meta reactions. It’s a reaction video to a movie trailer which is a sequel, or a walk-through stream for the latest in a video game franchise. We have videos about a video about a video. Today, so much of bottom-up creations are nodding to legacy material. There’s less originality out there than we perceive there to be.
In a culture where creating can be more satisfying than consumption, we’re left with a glut of both unwanted content, and new content that’s actually just about existing content.
We’ve Got A Problem
So we’ve established the existence of this creativity paradox, along with its spread, intensity and many causes. Hands turned up, we can accept this is just how it all turned out. So be it.
But we can’t. Absolutely. Can. Not.
We’re in a corrosive media ecosystem where the top 1% of bands and solo artists earn roughly 80% of all recorded music revenue—and by some estimates, the share for established artists is only getting larger. If this trend continues, we risk sabotaging both the opportunity and incentive for new artists to even participate.
As Mastroianni writes, “Movies, TV, music, books, and video games should expand our consciousness, jumpstart our imaginations, and introduce us to new worlds and stories and feelings [...] Learning to like unfamiliar things is one of the noblest human pursuits; it builds our empathy for unfamiliar people.”
If we stop watering “the new,” the new will die. Substitute “new” with whichever genre or medium you prefer. It’s the (originally) foreign, weird, edgy, counter-cultural, and antagonistic that drives a healthy society forward. Or for another metaphor: suffocate today’s sparks of “the new,” and we’re left in the dark.
We lose.
For Gioia, we must breathe life into the long tail as it “creates a more pluralistic, diverse and multifaceted society.”
The Long Tail vision hinted at making the blockbuster less pronounced... but the exact opposite occurred: the fringe is now endangered.
So what can we do?
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In our final installment, we’ll explore five solutions to overcome and redesign the system to usher in a more creative class.
Dec 5, 2022
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10 min read
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