Solutions to Preserving Cultural Creativity
How we can protect and empower creators
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 our second piece, we unpacked seven drivers responsible for the paradox, speaking to various experts who explained how various mechanisms are suppressing creators today.
Now here in our final installment, we’ll explore five solutions to overcome and redesign the system to usher in a more creative class.
So, what can we do about this paradox?
___
01. Acknowledge New vs. New For Them
We need content from today and for today.
For Adrian Hillekamp of A&R Management with Concord, “Every generation needs its soundtrack and that can’t come from a back catalog. It has to come from the time, the moment, and have a particular feel.”
And yet in 1986, the R&B singer Ben E. King had his second #1 chart placement with “Stand By Me,” a full 21 years after it first topped the charts. Propelled by the success of the film of the same name, King’s sudden reappearance on the chart was as unexpected and remarkable as Kate Bush’s renaissance this summer.
Compounding the similarity to today’s phenomenon: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, famously capped by a parade-float performance of The Beatles version of soul hit “Twist & Shout,” and the same-summer soul-soundtrack of boomer nostalgia vehicle The Big Chill, which was eaten up by kids and their parents alike.
Perhaps content for today can be existing content that some just discover today. Contemporaneity isn’t a guarantee of innovation or inspiration. The current spike in interpolation isn’t novel. In fact, it might actually be cyclical. But that doesn’t mean it’s any less new to eyes and ears experiencing it for the first time.
But this is not from today. We need that too.
One simple way to break out of our cycle of reboots is to distinguish between what’s net-new vs. what’s new for a new audience. Multigenerational third-acts of media aren't all that bad... but for as long as there's also content produced from today.
02. (Re-)Build for Search & Exploration
An underlying problem in 2022 is not a lack of great talent—it’s just that we can’t easily find it.
The discovery, curation, distribution and amplification of quality content desperately needs a reassessment. In 1986 it wasn’t possible to discover everything. Today we have the technology to move far beyond traditional, monocultural points of discovery. But we seem to have stopped leveraging it—hypnotized by convenience, preferring to receive rather than search.
An easy dismissal here is that the market will do its work—award the deserving—the good will inevitably rise to the top. But that’s simply not the case.
The long tail is failing to identify, and connect the fringe to its eager audience. Ask yourself: when was the last time you found a new artist that you became an instant fan of? Was it an easy journey? Can you find your new favorite emerging author this afternoon—effortlessly?
We can push our systems further. A manual override is required, this time hand on the upstarts’ side of the scale, ensuring increased reach. This is not to make all artists “mainstream,” but to connect more potential fans to their next favorite creator.
In our research, 64% of people trust a streaming platform's recommendations to surface content which they’d enjoy. But, 3-in-4 people believe streaming platforms can still do a better job at surfacing unpopular entertainment which they may enjoy. The kicker: 62% want streaming platforms to recommend more unpopular content... even at the risk they may not like it.
We’ve solved the barrier to entry, but we still haven’t cracked the barrier to discovery.
Historically, one could effectively work their way up the long tail with ad spend, but today, so much congestion makes this tactic futile.
Thomas Klaffke, Head of Research at TrendWatching, connects our paradox to Kasey Klimes’ thoughts on the opportunity to design for emergence (or really just design for exploration.) “In design for emergence, the designer assumes that the end-user holds relevant knowledge and gives them extensive control over the design,” Klaffke says. “Rather than designing the end result, we design the user’s experience of designing their own end result.”
Rather than surfacing the same to all, platforms should trust their users to chart their own discovery paths—and not exclusively by disembodied, algorithmic means.
For today’s creators, we need to redesign the on-ramps for potential audiences. And for consumers, we need to ask: what does falling down the rabbit hole of exploration feel like when it's actually enjoyable and not against our own will?
03. Rewrite the Rules for Top-Down Risk
Anita Elberse, a professor at Harvard Business School and author of Blockbusters—an analysis on this very phenomenon—simplifies our predicament. “Of course I understand concerns about the diversity of content, and the fact that certain elements people like are disappearing,” Elberse writes. “But overall I'm not that pessimistic. It's not a hobby, it's a business.”
Again the truism: “the market will do its work.” But what Elberse and others at the top fail to remember is that risk and diversity can drive business. And further, we’re in control of these business decisions. We set our own rules here. “It’s a business” is the opportunity, not the excuse.
We found that across all age demographics, 81% of people say they want entertainment to better reflect unique experiences and tastes similar to their own, while 76% want TV, film and music producers to take more creative risks in what’s produced today.
Risky is safe.
We can reward creative risk-taking at an executive level. We can incentivize creative moonshots, and financially or emotionally support the underdogs. We can satiate unknown or unstated appetites by creating crowdsourced competitions or allocate funding for student works. We can iterate upon models to make the Long Tail even more financially appetizing.
Some of the most beautiful works this year — Turning Red, Everything Everywhere All At Once, and Marcel the Shell — are template and trope-defying pitches. They’re pure outliers. But their creative (and financial) success is in part due to the fact there are no comparisons to them. Creative differentiation, in itself, is a winning strategy. A24 for one has zagged, refreshingly embracing the financial upsides of originality and friction.
Back to Scorsese. As he explains in the New York Times, “[Today’s films] lack something essential to cinema: the unifying vision of an individual artist. Because, of course, the individual artist is the riskiest factor of all. [Historically], the tension between the artists and the people who ran the business was constant and intense, but it was a productive tension that gave us some of the greatest films ever made. Today, that tension is gone, and there are some in the business with absolute indifference to the very question of art and an attitude toward the history of cinema that is both dismissive and proprietary — a lethal combination.”
What plagues the music industry is no different. Today, some artists and insiders fear even listening to unsolicited demos, which could make them vulnerable to future lawsuits. Example: If and when a hit of theirs coincidently sounds similar to something they’ve heard previously — like the landmark Robin Thicke, Pharrell, Marvin Gaye “Blurred Lines” case.
We find ourselves in a moment where some are beginning to shy away from creativity.
Nick Littlemore of Australian trio Pnau agrees. In Pop Music: The Great Recycling Business, he says, “[Today, culturally] we’re afraid of new ideas. They’re not road tested. So we’d rather do something that maybe has a little bit more of a guarantee of being successful.”
What does tip-toeing around “the new” do to a generation? Nothing good, at a macro level.
Creativity must be seen as a freedom, not feared.
04. Reframe Success & Reevaluate the Charts
We need to shout from the rooftops that it’s okay to be a creator without a billion views. Mr. Beast and Dobrik-fame is singular—not remotely available to all.
Deciding to write a newsletter for 100 people is not just okay, but an incredible feat. Conversely, optimizing for attention to mimic and (un-)intentionally contrast ourselves to institutional celebrities at “the top” helps no one.
We must reevaluate reach, views and ad-revenue as our go-to metrics of success, and instead aim towards the worth of depth. Call it the invaluable intensity of love. After all, we only care about what we can measure. And passion is a murky metric.
Why again do we still have award shows? Research reveals, barely half of people believe top music charts and box office numbers accurately reflect the quality of today's entertainment. Surprisingly, it’s younger generations who are more likely than anyone else to trust these charts. Why? These audiences are dangerously more impressionable...
In an essay by Sari Azout and Jad Esber, the two suggest: “For the creator middle class to rise, we need to see higher resolutions of taste preference and a breakup with singular, discriminatory platform algorithms and the opinion of the ‘few’ that arbitrate taste and force today’s dominant aesthetic. With that, individuals can decide on ‘what’s best’ for themselves, allowing for the talent power law to play out across more taste vectors and spreading the opportunity to be perceived as ‘the best’—and, with that, spreading the opportunity to profit from that.”
We face a massive opportunity to rewrite not just the rules to incentivize risk, but to also redefine what a “successful creator” looks like.
Culturally, we’re stuck on traditional metrics (more money or more eyeballs), and stuck on a traditional lineage through traditional milestones of success. Even for new creators today, legacy occasions like Late Night interviews, brand endorsements, commercials, SNL performances, award show trophies, and even YouTube Play Buttons are still seen as the aspirational markers of success. Why?
We’re mistakenly still using dusty indicators of success in a contemporary media environment.
Where are the awards celebrating the small and mighty? Who are the megaphones to draw more attention and financing toward marginalized creators? Where is the campaign reminding us that creativity dies in the shadows of reboots, and that merely making something is a celebration in itself?
As Mastroianni shared with me, “It’s a naive and optimistic thought to think that the Long Tail is meant to fairly compete with Tom Cruise and that he should be dethroned on the same chart by a TikTok. In reality, he loses quite often, however it’s just not clearly documented [...] Perhaps this is a story about a continued and questionable value of ‘the charts.’ They don’t reveal the whole picture of what’s happening in culture.”
We need new charts, new records, and new metrics to compare ourselves to, and more importantly, more healthily reach towards.
05. Seek the Odd with Bottom-Up Risk
We’re not off the hook here. We entertainment consumers must also be held responsible.
For “consumer risk,” this means being open to a little bit more experimentation. Mix things up. Diversify your media diet. Foreign subtitled B&W documentaries are not required, but repeating familiar patterns or acquiescing to the algorithm should be exercised out of our habits.
We can’t expect diversification if we first don’t at least taste it, signaling a desire for it. Scorsese's qualms with Hollywood today are rooted in this dilemma: “If people are given only one kind of thing and endlessly sold only one kind of thing, of course they’re going to want more of that one kind of thing,” he says.
To break out of this system, it’s up to us to express interest in anything other than Fast & The Furious 30. We can have that... but also more.
It falls on the audience as well to zag, making demand for the unique unquestionably clear.
The Cliffhanger
When reproduction is rewarded, monotony becomes omnipresent.
When creativity—or lack thereof—is primarily driven by financial returns, risks are minimized. Audiences are left malnourished.
And when the fringe doesn’t reach its audience, it dies without attention. Newcomers question the system, and bow out before even trying.
Relevancy and reach are at tension. We must find ways to strike equilibrium. And if we don’t, our future literally becomes our past.
We face a daunting opportunity to better support the niche, and introduce the new to its awaiting fans.
Mind you, this is not a declaration to kill off the Minions, but a recognition that we have equally enjoyable—and richer—content waiting for us, just without direct lines of access. Thankfully, this is not an all or nothing scenario.
We can have Tom Cruise mega-hits and freaky, indie artists both thriving concurrently. And moreover, superhero installments with provocateurs exploring underrepresented communities or toppling taboos in more nuanced ways.
We have choice. Choice in what we consume. And choice in whether we author new rules to get there.
For as long as we remain mindful that there’s more out there to enjoy...
So let's choose for ourselves. And celebrate others who do so for themselves.
___
Thanks to Ben Dietz, Josh Chapdelaine, Jad Esber, Adam Mastroianni, Ted Gioia, Kevin Alloca, Sarah Unger, Dr. Marcus Collins, Dylan Viner and Chris Dancy for their ideas in both expanding and distilling this analysis.
Dec 12, 2022
·
11 min read
Solutions to Preserving Cultural Creativity
How we can protect and empower creators
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 our second piece, we unpacked seven drivers responsible for the paradox, speaking to various experts who explained how various mechanisms are suppressing creators today.
Now here in our final installment, we’ll explore five solutions to overcome and redesign the system to usher in a more creative class.
So, what can we do about this paradox?
___
01. Acknowledge New vs. New For Them
We need content from today and for today.
For Adrian Hillekamp of A&R Management with Concord, “Every generation needs its soundtrack and that can’t come from a back catalog. It has to come from the time, the moment, and have a particular feel.”
And yet in 1986, the R&B singer Ben E. King had his second #1 chart placement with “Stand By Me,” a full 21 years after it first topped the charts. Propelled by the success of the film of the same name, King’s sudden reappearance on the chart was as unexpected and remarkable as Kate Bush’s renaissance this summer.
Compounding the similarity to today’s phenomenon: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, famously capped by a parade-float performance of The Beatles version of soul hit “Twist & Shout,” and the same-summer soul-soundtrack of boomer nostalgia vehicle The Big Chill, which was eaten up by kids and their parents alike.
Perhaps content for today can be existing content that some just discover today. Contemporaneity isn’t a guarantee of innovation or inspiration. The current spike in interpolation isn’t novel. In fact, it might actually be cyclical. But that doesn’t mean it’s any less new to eyes and ears experiencing it for the first time.
But this is not from today. We need that too.
One simple way to break out of our cycle of reboots is to distinguish between what’s net-new vs. what’s new for a new audience. Multigenerational third-acts of media aren't all that bad... but for as long as there's also content produced from today.
02. (Re-)Build for Search & Exploration
An underlying problem in 2022 is not a lack of great talent—it’s just that we can’t easily find it.
The discovery, curation, distribution and amplification of quality content desperately needs a reassessment. In 1986 it wasn’t possible to discover everything. Today we have the technology to move far beyond traditional, monocultural points of discovery. But we seem to have stopped leveraging it—hypnotized by convenience, preferring to receive rather than search.
An easy dismissal here is that the market will do its work—award the deserving—the good will inevitably rise to the top. But that’s simply not the case.
The long tail is failing to identify, and connect the fringe to its eager audience. Ask yourself: when was the last time you found a new artist that you became an instant fan of? Was it an easy journey? Can you find your new favorite emerging author this afternoon—effortlessly?
We can push our systems further. A manual override is required, this time hand on the upstarts’ side of the scale, ensuring increased reach. This is not to make all artists “mainstream,” but to connect more potential fans to their next favorite creator.
In our research, 64% of people trust a streaming platform's recommendations to surface content which they’d enjoy. But, 3-in-4 people believe streaming platforms can still do a better job at surfacing unpopular entertainment which they may enjoy. The kicker: 62% want streaming platforms to recommend more unpopular content... even at the risk they may not like it.
We’ve solved the barrier to entry, but we still haven’t cracked the barrier to discovery.
Historically, one could effectively work their way up the long tail with ad spend, but today, so much congestion makes this tactic futile.
Thomas Klaffke, Head of Research at TrendWatching, connects our paradox to Kasey Klimes’ thoughts on the opportunity to design for emergence (or really just design for exploration.) “In design for emergence, the designer assumes that the end-user holds relevant knowledge and gives them extensive control over the design,” Klaffke says. “Rather than designing the end result, we design the user’s experience of designing their own end result.”
Rather than surfacing the same to all, platforms should trust their users to chart their own discovery paths—and not exclusively by disembodied, algorithmic means.
For today’s creators, we need to redesign the on-ramps for potential audiences. And for consumers, we need to ask: what does falling down the rabbit hole of exploration feel like when it's actually enjoyable and not against our own will?
03. Rewrite the Rules for Top-Down Risk
Anita Elberse, a professor at Harvard Business School and author of Blockbusters—an analysis on this very phenomenon—simplifies our predicament. “Of course I understand concerns about the diversity of content, and the fact that certain elements people like are disappearing,” Elberse writes. “But overall I'm not that pessimistic. It's not a hobby, it's a business.”
Again the truism: “the market will do its work.” But what Elberse and others at the top fail to remember is that risk and diversity can drive business. And further, we’re in control of these business decisions. We set our own rules here. “It’s a business” is the opportunity, not the excuse.
We found that across all age demographics, 81% of people say they want entertainment to better reflect unique experiences and tastes similar to their own, while 76% want TV, film and music producers to take more creative risks in what’s produced today.
Risky is safe.
We can reward creative risk-taking at an executive level. We can incentivize creative moonshots, and financially or emotionally support the underdogs. We can satiate unknown or unstated appetites by creating crowdsourced competitions or allocate funding for student works. We can iterate upon models to make the Long Tail even more financially appetizing.
Some of the most beautiful works this year — Turning Red, Everything Everywhere All At Once, and Marcel the Shell — are template and trope-defying pitches. They’re pure outliers. But their creative (and financial) success is in part due to the fact there are no comparisons to them. Creative differentiation, in itself, is a winning strategy. A24 for one has zagged, refreshingly embracing the financial upsides of originality and friction.
Back to Scorsese. As he explains in the New York Times, “[Today’s films] lack something essential to cinema: the unifying vision of an individual artist. Because, of course, the individual artist is the riskiest factor of all. [Historically], the tension between the artists and the people who ran the business was constant and intense, but it was a productive tension that gave us some of the greatest films ever made. Today, that tension is gone, and there are some in the business with absolute indifference to the very question of art and an attitude toward the history of cinema that is both dismissive and proprietary — a lethal combination.”
What plagues the music industry is no different. Today, some artists and insiders fear even listening to unsolicited demos, which could make them vulnerable to future lawsuits. Example: If and when a hit of theirs coincidently sounds similar to something they’ve heard previously — like the landmark Robin Thicke, Pharrell, Marvin Gaye “Blurred Lines” case.
We find ourselves in a moment where some are beginning to shy away from creativity.
Nick Littlemore of Australian trio Pnau agrees. In Pop Music: The Great Recycling Business, he says, “[Today, culturally] we’re afraid of new ideas. They’re not road tested. So we’d rather do something that maybe has a little bit more of a guarantee of being successful.”
What does tip-toeing around “the new” do to a generation? Nothing good, at a macro level.
Creativity must be seen as a freedom, not feared.
04. Reframe Success & Reevaluate the Charts
We need to shout from the rooftops that it’s okay to be a creator without a billion views. Mr. Beast and Dobrik-fame is singular—not remotely available to all.
Deciding to write a newsletter for 100 people is not just okay, but an incredible feat. Conversely, optimizing for attention to mimic and (un-)intentionally contrast ourselves to institutional celebrities at “the top” helps no one.
We must reevaluate reach, views and ad-revenue as our go-to metrics of success, and instead aim towards the worth of depth. Call it the invaluable intensity of love. After all, we only care about what we can measure. And passion is a murky metric.
Why again do we still have award shows? Research reveals, barely half of people believe top music charts and box office numbers accurately reflect the quality of today's entertainment. Surprisingly, it’s younger generations who are more likely than anyone else to trust these charts. Why? These audiences are dangerously more impressionable...
In an essay by Sari Azout and Jad Esber, the two suggest: “For the creator middle class to rise, we need to see higher resolutions of taste preference and a breakup with singular, discriminatory platform algorithms and the opinion of the ‘few’ that arbitrate taste and force today’s dominant aesthetic. With that, individuals can decide on ‘what’s best’ for themselves, allowing for the talent power law to play out across more taste vectors and spreading the opportunity to be perceived as ‘the best’—and, with that, spreading the opportunity to profit from that.”
We face a massive opportunity to rewrite not just the rules to incentivize risk, but to also redefine what a “successful creator” looks like.
Culturally, we’re stuck on traditional metrics (more money or more eyeballs), and stuck on a traditional lineage through traditional milestones of success. Even for new creators today, legacy occasions like Late Night interviews, brand endorsements, commercials, SNL performances, award show trophies, and even YouTube Play Buttons are still seen as the aspirational markers of success. Why?
We’re mistakenly still using dusty indicators of success in a contemporary media environment.
Where are the awards celebrating the small and mighty? Who are the megaphones to draw more attention and financing toward marginalized creators? Where is the campaign reminding us that creativity dies in the shadows of reboots, and that merely making something is a celebration in itself?
As Mastroianni shared with me, “It’s a naive and optimistic thought to think that the Long Tail is meant to fairly compete with Tom Cruise and that he should be dethroned on the same chart by a TikTok. In reality, he loses quite often, however it’s just not clearly documented [...] Perhaps this is a story about a continued and questionable value of ‘the charts.’ They don’t reveal the whole picture of what’s happening in culture.”
We need new charts, new records, and new metrics to compare ourselves to, and more importantly, more healthily reach towards.
05. Seek the Odd with Bottom-Up Risk
We’re not off the hook here. We entertainment consumers must also be held responsible.
For “consumer risk,” this means being open to a little bit more experimentation. Mix things up. Diversify your media diet. Foreign subtitled B&W documentaries are not required, but repeating familiar patterns or acquiescing to the algorithm should be exercised out of our habits.
We can’t expect diversification if we first don’t at least taste it, signaling a desire for it. Scorsese's qualms with Hollywood today are rooted in this dilemma: “If people are given only one kind of thing and endlessly sold only one kind of thing, of course they’re going to want more of that one kind of thing,” he says.
To break out of this system, it’s up to us to express interest in anything other than Fast & The Furious 30. We can have that... but also more.
It falls on the audience as well to zag, making demand for the unique unquestionably clear.
The Cliffhanger
When reproduction is rewarded, monotony becomes omnipresent.
When creativity—or lack thereof—is primarily driven by financial returns, risks are minimized. Audiences are left malnourished.
And when the fringe doesn’t reach its audience, it dies without attention. Newcomers question the system, and bow out before even trying.
Relevancy and reach are at tension. We must find ways to strike equilibrium. And if we don’t, our future literally becomes our past.
We face a daunting opportunity to better support the niche, and introduce the new to its awaiting fans.
Mind you, this is not a declaration to kill off the Minions, but a recognition that we have equally enjoyable—and richer—content waiting for us, just without direct lines of access. Thankfully, this is not an all or nothing scenario.
We can have Tom Cruise mega-hits and freaky, indie artists both thriving concurrently. And moreover, superhero installments with provocateurs exploring underrepresented communities or toppling taboos in more nuanced ways.
We have choice. Choice in what we consume. And choice in whether we author new rules to get there.
For as long as we remain mindful that there’s more out there to enjoy...
So let's choose for ourselves. And celebrate others who do so for themselves.
___
Thanks to Ben Dietz, Josh Chapdelaine, Jad Esber, Adam Mastroianni, Ted Gioia, Kevin Alloca, Sarah Unger, Dr. Marcus Collins, Dylan Viner and Chris Dancy for their ideas in both expanding and distilling this analysis.
Dec 12, 2022
·
11 min read
Solutions to Preserving Cultural Creativity
How we can protect and empower creators
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 our second piece, we unpacked seven drivers responsible for the paradox, speaking to various experts who explained how various mechanisms are suppressing creators today.
Now here in our final installment, we’ll explore five solutions to overcome and redesign the system to usher in a more creative class.
So, what can we do about this paradox?
___
01. Acknowledge New vs. New For Them
We need content from today and for today.
For Adrian Hillekamp of A&R Management with Concord, “Every generation needs its soundtrack and that can’t come from a back catalog. It has to come from the time, the moment, and have a particular feel.”
And yet in 1986, the R&B singer Ben E. King had his second #1 chart placement with “Stand By Me,” a full 21 years after it first topped the charts. Propelled by the success of the film of the same name, King’s sudden reappearance on the chart was as unexpected and remarkable as Kate Bush’s renaissance this summer.
Compounding the similarity to today’s phenomenon: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, famously capped by a parade-float performance of The Beatles version of soul hit “Twist & Shout,” and the same-summer soul-soundtrack of boomer nostalgia vehicle The Big Chill, which was eaten up by kids and their parents alike.
Perhaps content for today can be existing content that some just discover today. Contemporaneity isn’t a guarantee of innovation or inspiration. The current spike in interpolation isn’t novel. In fact, it might actually be cyclical. But that doesn’t mean it’s any less new to eyes and ears experiencing it for the first time.
But this is not from today. We need that too.
One simple way to break out of our cycle of reboots is to distinguish between what’s net-new vs. what’s new for a new audience. Multigenerational third-acts of media aren't all that bad... but for as long as there's also content produced from today.
02. (Re-)Build for Search & Exploration
An underlying problem in 2022 is not a lack of great talent—it’s just that we can’t easily find it.
The discovery, curation, distribution and amplification of quality content desperately needs a reassessment. In 1986 it wasn’t possible to discover everything. Today we have the technology to move far beyond traditional, monocultural points of discovery. But we seem to have stopped leveraging it—hypnotized by convenience, preferring to receive rather than search.
An easy dismissal here is that the market will do its work—award the deserving—the good will inevitably rise to the top. But that’s simply not the case.
The long tail is failing to identify, and connect the fringe to its eager audience. Ask yourself: when was the last time you found a new artist that you became an instant fan of? Was it an easy journey? Can you find your new favorite emerging author this afternoon—effortlessly?
We can push our systems further. A manual override is required, this time hand on the upstarts’ side of the scale, ensuring increased reach. This is not to make all artists “mainstream,” but to connect more potential fans to their next favorite creator.
In our research, 64% of people trust a streaming platform's recommendations to surface content which they’d enjoy. But, 3-in-4 people believe streaming platforms can still do a better job at surfacing unpopular entertainment which they may enjoy. The kicker: 62% want streaming platforms to recommend more unpopular content... even at the risk they may not like it.
We’ve solved the barrier to entry, but we still haven’t cracked the barrier to discovery.
Historically, one could effectively work their way up the long tail with ad spend, but today, so much congestion makes this tactic futile.
Thomas Klaffke, Head of Research at TrendWatching, connects our paradox to Kasey Klimes’ thoughts on the opportunity to design for emergence (or really just design for exploration.) “In design for emergence, the designer assumes that the end-user holds relevant knowledge and gives them extensive control over the design,” Klaffke says. “Rather than designing the end result, we design the user’s experience of designing their own end result.”
Rather than surfacing the same to all, platforms should trust their users to chart their own discovery paths—and not exclusively by disembodied, algorithmic means.
For today’s creators, we need to redesign the on-ramps for potential audiences. And for consumers, we need to ask: what does falling down the rabbit hole of exploration feel like when it's actually enjoyable and not against our own will?
03. Rewrite the Rules for Top-Down Risk
Anita Elberse, a professor at Harvard Business School and author of Blockbusters—an analysis on this very phenomenon—simplifies our predicament. “Of course I understand concerns about the diversity of content, and the fact that certain elements people like are disappearing,” Elberse writes. “But overall I'm not that pessimistic. It's not a hobby, it's a business.”
Again the truism: “the market will do its work.” But what Elberse and others at the top fail to remember is that risk and diversity can drive business. And further, we’re in control of these business decisions. We set our own rules here. “It’s a business” is the opportunity, not the excuse.
We found that across all age demographics, 81% of people say they want entertainment to better reflect unique experiences and tastes similar to their own, while 76% want TV, film and music producers to take more creative risks in what’s produced today.
Risky is safe.
We can reward creative risk-taking at an executive level. We can incentivize creative moonshots, and financially or emotionally support the underdogs. We can satiate unknown or unstated appetites by creating crowdsourced competitions or allocate funding for student works. We can iterate upon models to make the Long Tail even more financially appetizing.
Some of the most beautiful works this year — Turning Red, Everything Everywhere All At Once, and Marcel the Shell — are template and trope-defying pitches. They’re pure outliers. But their creative (and financial) success is in part due to the fact there are no comparisons to them. Creative differentiation, in itself, is a winning strategy. A24 for one has zagged, refreshingly embracing the financial upsides of originality and friction.
Back to Scorsese. As he explains in the New York Times, “[Today’s films] lack something essential to cinema: the unifying vision of an individual artist. Because, of course, the individual artist is the riskiest factor of all. [Historically], the tension between the artists and the people who ran the business was constant and intense, but it was a productive tension that gave us some of the greatest films ever made. Today, that tension is gone, and there are some in the business with absolute indifference to the very question of art and an attitude toward the history of cinema that is both dismissive and proprietary — a lethal combination.”
What plagues the music industry is no different. Today, some artists and insiders fear even listening to unsolicited demos, which could make them vulnerable to future lawsuits. Example: If and when a hit of theirs coincidently sounds similar to something they’ve heard previously — like the landmark Robin Thicke, Pharrell, Marvin Gaye “Blurred Lines” case.
We find ourselves in a moment where some are beginning to shy away from creativity.
Nick Littlemore of Australian trio Pnau agrees. In Pop Music: The Great Recycling Business, he says, “[Today, culturally] we’re afraid of new ideas. They’re not road tested. So we’d rather do something that maybe has a little bit more of a guarantee of being successful.”
What does tip-toeing around “the new” do to a generation? Nothing good, at a macro level.
Creativity must be seen as a freedom, not feared.
04. Reframe Success & Reevaluate the Charts
We need to shout from the rooftops that it’s okay to be a creator without a billion views. Mr. Beast and Dobrik-fame is singular—not remotely available to all.
Deciding to write a newsletter for 100 people is not just okay, but an incredible feat. Conversely, optimizing for attention to mimic and (un-)intentionally contrast ourselves to institutional celebrities at “the top” helps no one.
We must reevaluate reach, views and ad-revenue as our go-to metrics of success, and instead aim towards the worth of depth. Call it the invaluable intensity of love. After all, we only care about what we can measure. And passion is a murky metric.
Why again do we still have award shows? Research reveals, barely half of people believe top music charts and box office numbers accurately reflect the quality of today's entertainment. Surprisingly, it’s younger generations who are more likely than anyone else to trust these charts. Why? These audiences are dangerously more impressionable...
In an essay by Sari Azout and Jad Esber, the two suggest: “For the creator middle class to rise, we need to see higher resolutions of taste preference and a breakup with singular, discriminatory platform algorithms and the opinion of the ‘few’ that arbitrate taste and force today’s dominant aesthetic. With that, individuals can decide on ‘what’s best’ for themselves, allowing for the talent power law to play out across more taste vectors and spreading the opportunity to be perceived as ‘the best’—and, with that, spreading the opportunity to profit from that.”
We face a massive opportunity to rewrite not just the rules to incentivize risk, but to also redefine what a “successful creator” looks like.
Culturally, we’re stuck on traditional metrics (more money or more eyeballs), and stuck on a traditional lineage through traditional milestones of success. Even for new creators today, legacy occasions like Late Night interviews, brand endorsements, commercials, SNL performances, award show trophies, and even YouTube Play Buttons are still seen as the aspirational markers of success. Why?
We’re mistakenly still using dusty indicators of success in a contemporary media environment.
Where are the awards celebrating the small and mighty? Who are the megaphones to draw more attention and financing toward marginalized creators? Where is the campaign reminding us that creativity dies in the shadows of reboots, and that merely making something is a celebration in itself?
As Mastroianni shared with me, “It’s a naive and optimistic thought to think that the Long Tail is meant to fairly compete with Tom Cruise and that he should be dethroned on the same chart by a TikTok. In reality, he loses quite often, however it’s just not clearly documented [...] Perhaps this is a story about a continued and questionable value of ‘the charts.’ They don’t reveal the whole picture of what’s happening in culture.”
We need new charts, new records, and new metrics to compare ourselves to, and more importantly, more healthily reach towards.
05. Seek the Odd with Bottom-Up Risk
We’re not off the hook here. We entertainment consumers must also be held responsible.
For “consumer risk,” this means being open to a little bit more experimentation. Mix things up. Diversify your media diet. Foreign subtitled B&W documentaries are not required, but repeating familiar patterns or acquiescing to the algorithm should be exercised out of our habits.
We can’t expect diversification if we first don’t at least taste it, signaling a desire for it. Scorsese's qualms with Hollywood today are rooted in this dilemma: “If people are given only one kind of thing and endlessly sold only one kind of thing, of course they’re going to want more of that one kind of thing,” he says.
To break out of this system, it’s up to us to express interest in anything other than Fast & The Furious 30. We can have that... but also more.
It falls on the audience as well to zag, making demand for the unique unquestionably clear.
The Cliffhanger
When reproduction is rewarded, monotony becomes omnipresent.
When creativity—or lack thereof—is primarily driven by financial returns, risks are minimized. Audiences are left malnourished.
And when the fringe doesn’t reach its audience, it dies without attention. Newcomers question the system, and bow out before even trying.
Relevancy and reach are at tension. We must find ways to strike equilibrium. And if we don’t, our future literally becomes our past.
We face a daunting opportunity to better support the niche, and introduce the new to its awaiting fans.
Mind you, this is not a declaration to kill off the Minions, but a recognition that we have equally enjoyable—and richer—content waiting for us, just without direct lines of access. Thankfully, this is not an all or nothing scenario.
We can have Tom Cruise mega-hits and freaky, indie artists both thriving concurrently. And moreover, superhero installments with provocateurs exploring underrepresented communities or toppling taboos in more nuanced ways.
We have choice. Choice in what we consume. And choice in whether we author new rules to get there.
For as long as we remain mindful that there’s more out there to enjoy...
So let's choose for ourselves. And celebrate others who do so for themselves.
___
Thanks to Ben Dietz, Josh Chapdelaine, Jad Esber, Adam Mastroianni, Ted Gioia, Kevin Alloca, Sarah Unger, Dr. Marcus Collins, Dylan Viner and Chris Dancy for their ideas in both expanding and distilling this analysis.
Dec 12, 2022
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11 min read
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