Originally written for ZINE.

‍There’s a new dilemma.

‍Only it’s not that “new” of a dilemma.

At the beginning of this summer, decades of glacier-paced cultural change was captured perfectly in a single weekend. The top of the charts revealed our endangered media ecosystem.

‍You’ve heard this song plenty before. Thanks to inclusion in Netflix’s fifth season of Stranger Things, Kate Bush’s 1985 song “Running Up That Hill (Make a Deal with God)” found itself back in the zeitgeist. It went from 22,000 streams per day to 5.1M. Momentarily, a 37-year-old track was the most streamed song on Spotify.

‍Meanwhile, Top Gun: Maverick, a sequel to the 1986 original, broke box office records, banking $156 million the same weekend. This was right before Jurassic World stomped in—the seventh installment since 1993. Then came Minions 2—a sequel and a spin off to the Despicable Me franchise, which in itself already had three installments.

‍Further, in video games that weekend, 9 out of 10 best selling titles were from franchises. And the New York Times Best Sellers list saw James Paterson, the Guinness World Records holder for the most #1 New York Times bestsellers, taking up two of the top five spots in fiction.

‍It was the summer weekend for big premieres. But in fact, nothing about these releases were particularly that new.

‍Most noteworthy though, this pattern of mega-successful reboots stood against a backdrop of another story…

‍These titles were released at a moment when more people are creating more content than ever before in history.

‍Spotify boasts 70,000 tracks uploaded every day. YouTube is uploading 30,000 hours of new content every hour. Nearly 3M unique podcasts exist. Twitch is broadcasting +7.5M streamers, indie game releases and play are both growing year over year, and roughly 4M books are published annually in the U.S.—nearly half of those self-published, a +250% increase over just five years.

‍On one hand, we have a booming creator economy, with an ever-expanding democratization of tools for production to anyone with an idea. So much so, that according to 1,000 Americans surveyed by Zine, 86% of people believe there is an overwhelming amount of entertainment available today.

‍Yet meanwhile on the other hand, we seem to have also found ourselves culturally stunted. Our box office and streaming platforms are soggy with the same regurgitated franchises. Reboots rule the roost, and familiar faces hog our charts, while notable newcomers redefining genres feel few and far between. With this, 64% of people declare they are getting fed up with today’s reboots, sequels, and remakes.

‍What gives?

‍How is it that during a moment of radical creator liberation and audience frustration, we’re finding ourselves with the same tropes and hooks?

‍Chris Anderson’s 2006 optimistic Long Tail vision promised us that “specificity”—the shallow and obscure—would be economically feasible as the internet would connect the niche to its audience. Aggregators will win, the odd would thrive, and those on the edges would celebrate. Creators could finally connect to their 1,000 true fans.

‍But as seen from the macro view, a diverse, bottom-up media ecosystem is in fact not thriving.

‍Instead, the inverse is happening.

‍Homogeneity is winning.

‍In an analysis by Adam Mastroianni, a postdoc scholar at Columbia Business School, “the same” keeps rising to the top—across all media.

‍Simply, there are fewer winners.

‍Mastroianni calls this our cultural oligopoly. “A cartel of superstars has conquered culture,” he writes.‍ “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% every year. In recent years, it’s been close to 100%.

‍“Since 2000, about a third of the top 30 most-viewed shows are either spin offs of other shows in the top 30 (e.g., CSI and CSI: Miami) or multiple broadcasts of the same show (e.g., American Idol on Monday and American Idol on Wednesday).

‍“In the 1950s, a little over half of the authors in the Top 10 had been there before. These days, it’s closer to 75%.

‍“In the late 1990s, 75% or less of best selling video games were franchise installments. Since 2005, it’s been above 75% every year, and sometimes it’s 100%.”

‍Software engineer Azhad Syed identifies the same cultural oligopoly in his analysis of the music industry. ‍“The number of different artists that crack the Top 100 is decreasing over time,” he writes. “In conjunction with fewer and fewer artists on the charts, each of those artists is charting 1.5x to 2x as many songs per year.”

‍Meanwhile, “old” music—defined as having been released more than 18 months—now accounts for 72% of the market in the U.S. And though 18 months is admittedly a flawed definition of “old,” more widely, the consumption of old music is growing, while demand for new music is also declining.

‍In assessing this record for the Atlantic, music critic and historian Ted Gioia writes, “Never before in history have new tracks attained hit status while generating so little cultural impact.”

‍The old is winning financially, but it’s also winning creatively. Rolling Stone magazine forecasts the continued rise of “interpolations”—the cousin of sampling in which song structure is borrowed and made “new.” Staff writer Ethan Millman writes: ‍“Don’t expect interpolations to slow down anytime soon—rather, the total opposite is likely. Publishing companies are sitting on mountains of instantly recognizable songs [...] Now that the business is focused around streaming singles, they have a chance to juice them once again.”

‍As a result, the hottest private equity investments as of late have been the publishing catalogs of accomplished artists. In fact, according to VP of Business and Legal Affairs at Sony Music Publishing, Dag Sandsmark,‍ “The world’s largest music publisher has received twice as many requests for samples and interpolations from its catalog two years in a row.”

‍Which translates to this: today, from film and TV, to books, video games, and music, there’s statistically less diversification rising to the top. And while it’s given that everything in culture is a remix, the intensity of today’s reliance on what’s come before seems worthy of our attention.

‍What’s causing this systemic malfunction?

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‍In the next 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.

‍And in our third and final, we’ll explore five solutions to overcome and redesign the system to usher in a more creative class.