My first Ted Gioia column, and I hope it's an outlier. Rather than deconstruct this wisp of an argument for a future where a thousand flowers bloom, let me focus on this quotation:
"And this doesn’t include the hundreds of startups that are trying to revitalize our culture. Every week I hear from some entrepreneur who wants to help musicians (or other creatives) make more money and have more opportunities. [...] Not all of these startups will succeed. In fact, most will fail. But a few will thrive. And, based on my dealings with them, they are going to be on the side of the individual artist, not the huge corporation or institution."
This was Daniel Ek's pitch for Spotify. The market for recordings was vanishing due to piracy, and Spotify was going to use streaming to put money back in the pockets of the working musician. How's that working out for the average musician? About as well as it's working out for most of the people helming those 3 million podcasts.
If TG can monetize his Substack, more power to him. Maybe it will be a better financial model than Spotify. Or Medium. Or HuffPost before that. But there are only so many $50 subscriptions a person can afford. Without subscriptions, the only source of income is advertising, and the advertising money is not going to go to the content creators, if history is any guide.
“But there are only so many $50 subscriptions a person can afford.”
The problem is that you can’t smell a thousand flowers. Or a hundred. Maybe 25...
I have 13 paid subscriptions. Some are more than $50, but taking that as a given, it’s about the same as my wife pays for a yearly newspaper subscription. She still lives in the print world. In that context, it’s not much. I can afford more, but finding time to read them has become a problem. Plus I have 17 more I don’t pay for mainly because I don’t get around to reading them. So for me, it’s not the money but the time.
And it’s exacerbated by about as many newsletters & RSS feeds. Good thing I avoid video. Fortunately I’m retired, but I have books I want to read.
Maybe AI will ultimately solve my kind of problem by curating for me, but the thing is, I don’t want to be trapped into a bubble by algorithms.
Subscriptions may be the only resort for short-form writers like journalists or podcasters, but not for musicians or long-form authors or videographers. Eck baited the record cos. and he knew it bc they could control the revenue share at very little cost. He has cajoled the artists with the unspoken promise to replace and eliminate the record cos. as distributors with a centralized platform, his platform that he controls.
Fuhgeddaboudit - artists need to control their networks and Eck is not their friend. Watch the movie.
Streaming as a subscription service is a loss-leader. The problem is the cost structure of storing all the world's music files, and if one demands lossless, that storage costs grows exponentially. $10 subscriptions will never pay for this - the true price is probably 5-7 times as much, but under cost effective pricing, streamers would have zero subscribers. So the streaming model is subsidized by investors and Big Tech.
Owning music sold by the artist is actually quite inexpensive and one could buy more than enough music for the money spent on streaming. Who needs to subsidize streaming of all the songs in the universe if one only listens to a tiny fraction of that? One just has to eliminate the middleman taking the lion's share of the value. This means record cos. AND streamers like Eck. Music search and discovery is easily solved through social network dynamics with peer networks and influencers. AI can't judge subjective art and never will do so effectively - humans do that.
Btw, piracy is a record company canard to protect their franchise revenue. Most musicians give away their music today. The problem of piracy is easily solved by creating the proper incentives. Piracy is not free as it takes time and energy, but music bought legally is really cheap when it is purchased peer-to-peer. The added incentive is that it directly supports the artist to make more art.
Lastly, advertising and promotion is not a curse if it's pull advertising rather than push. Influencers (and peer-controlled networks) control pull advertising and that's where the network gold is.
Until someone can explain why people care about Mr. Beast nothing can be changed. So far, I don’t see where the debate has evolved beyond Sheeple v. Victims.
The state of culture Ted describes is actually abysmal because we can't value culture by the amount of content created but by if and how it is consumed and shared. The problem, as Ted states, is obvious: there is an explosion of supply but not demand, which is limited by physical constraints such as time and attention. Technology has blessed us with the explosion of supply with new tools for creating and sharing, but it has also created an impossible task for valuing consumption. Consumption of art is free today, which means the production of art is also done for free. Of course, winner-take-all has created a bonanza of ancillary wealth for the few who command the attention of the global masses. But this only means we get creative content from the same small pool of artists, which starves the ecosystem of innovative creativity. (Who is Colleen Hoover and is she writing the same romance novel again and again?)
So, how to rebalance supply and demand to reinvigorate cultural innovation? Certainly not by looking at mass audience models that can only feed winner-take-all dynamics. My answer is that we need to look to the creative process that defines us as humans. Culture does not create humanity; humanity creates culture and our humanity is embodied in what we create and share, not in what we consume. Since we are all part of this global humanity, the answer is in the creative and sharing process, not just attention-consuming consumption. In other words, when we create and share our own humanity, we become more attentive and appreciative of others' creations. I am a photographer, thus I seek out other photographers' works.
The industrial and post-industrial economy created a bifurcation between creators and audiences where fewer and fewer creators command more and more attention from audiences. One is either a creator or a consumer, but we are all both. Rebalancing this means more niche market networks for varied content and better human connections within those networks. The dearth of demand is solved by the creative social network, not the network platforms or the distributors. All we need is a creative network that serves creators and those who wish to share their creations and leaves the technology and distribution platforms to the sole task of discovery, connection, and coordination. My friends recommend new art to me, not Amazon, Apple or Spotify.
Yes, we get too wrapped up with commercial metrics rather than human metrics. Making money and creating wealth is great, but there's an important distinction between price and value. Price is a very imperfect measure of value. We probably learn this too late in life.
There's a wise old saying: "The best things in life ARE free."
I'm not sure how that's relevant. Value is value and I would always be seeking value, which might mean more timely and safe service, as well as competence.
Pacemakers are not free but getting one implanted so that you lived long enough to enjoy your first grandchild would put it on your Best list. Value is relative and changes with time and circumstances.
Well, my point is that on your deathbed what would you have valued more - your new pacemaker or the time it afforded with your grandchildren? The former merely served the more important latter. The point of the saying is that things don't matter as much as the experiences in life - many of which are free. I don't think we need to nitpick beyond that.
In the book business, it's long been said that the huge sales of mainstream writers like Colleen Hoover (who I haven't read) finance the publication of more literary stuff—the books that are critically acclaimed but don't sell many books. A book that sells 10,000 copies is a success. Is Hoover subsidizing the publication of great books? I don't know.
The disappearance of the midlist book is a bizarre corollary of this. New York publishers don't need to chase mega-bestsellers—they could make a reasonable profit on smart books that sell ten or twenty thousand copies. But with each passing year, they seem less interested in doing that. As a result, the publishing industry starts to resemble Hollywood—making big bets on surefire hits (or what they think will be surefire hits). It doesn't need to be like this.
I wouldn't put too much weight on "woke institutional capture" for the failure of older artists to reboot in current times.
To me, the artist job is to channel the zeitgeist into their work. Music, painting, drama - it doesn't have to be about "now", but it has to include "now" somehow. When Rachael Price and Vilray channel 40's love songs, the lyrics mention the narwhal as "the unicorn of the sea". They would never have said that in the 40's, nor did the use "unicorn" as a metaphor for something that's really rare.
That's why the Iron Man of the 60's was a quite different character than the Robert Downey Jr. version. And why Pat Metheney's recording of Giant Steps sounds so different from John Coltrane's. They are different individuals and they live in different times.
IIRC, a lot of the death of the midlist was tax-driven; in the late 80s or early 90s, the tax laws changed such that book inventories were considered taxable. As a result, booksellers and distributors terminated their inventories, and so if it doesn't sell a lot, it's never in stock.
Print-on-demand could remedy that, but it hasn't really taken off, as far as I can tell.
Sherman, fwiw, from a teachers perspective, "Absolutely True Diary" is the greatest text for teaching literary skills ever written (bc so many characters/angles/themes to grasp onto).
And kids are obsessed with Hoover's "It Ends with Us"
I saw a page on Reddit about "what movies could not be made today?" with the usual (this is not the first time I've seen a page on this topic) answers of things like "blazing saddles". But the most interesting answer was "star wars". Nobody in Hollywood would finance a film from a (relatively) new director, with no tie-in to some existing franchise. As the probably apocryphal remark goes, "it's a great script. it's a pity nobody's made it so we could do the sequel." The more I thought about it, the more I realized it was true. The lead-off movie to one of the biggest movie franchises of all time would not get greenlit today.
Music, like Hollywood, is more interested in making "content" than making something that's actually good. Making good music means you have to take risks and try new things. The corporate culture in the entertainment industry now is so risk adverse that they end up making poor quality, but supposedly safe, content. Hopefully people will quickly start to vote with their wallets and show the corporate morons running things that this is a bad policy. One of my problems is knowing where to find new and better music. I've started listening to local, alternative music radio stations and that has helped. I also use YouTube and find some good music there. I'll definitely look at bandcamp and see what they have to offer. For me personally, an article on how and where to find music worth listening to would be nice.
Personally, I was lucky enough in the 1990's to visit Guadeloupe a few times and Martinique. In combination with those wonderful times, I not only discovered zouk & other folkloric music from both these islands. Then I worked at SOB's in NYC for a summer filling in for a DJ. IT was there that I got to hear many Haitian bands live and also African from DRC. There was an African DJ whom I met there that introduced me to music from Bissau, Angola and Cape Verde. It doesn't matter to me that I cannot understand the lyrics. The music transcends words.
"Hopefully people will quickly start to vote with their wallets and show the corporate morons running things that this is a bad policy. One of my problems is knowing where to find new and better music."
Self-respecting people already have, but a majority made of morons won't challenge "corporate morons" or government morons to offer anything new or of value.
Every empire dies the same way. We are the Romans. Enjoy the ride!
BandCamp is a great place to start. YouTube and Spotify work well for me too.
Excellent commentary, as usual, but what about the educational institutions? Funding for arts and humanities in schools is at an all time low. How can you build an audience, when their only cultural reference points are consumerist entities packaging the culture like products to consume, instead of life experiences that enrich our human experience? What about the dehumanizing effect of the virtual, the artificial? How about face to face human interaction and community? When culture becomes a consumer commodity and the culture warriors become an exclusive diversion for the well healed and refuses to take risks, we all lose. The big problem isn't that we don't have enough solutions. It's that not enough people give a shit. Chomsky touched on this (albeit in a different context) when he said “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum....”. I wish I could share your enthusiasm for the entrepreneurial zeal and instant fame (for the 15 minutes Warhol presciently foretold) of bloggers, self-proclaimed influencers, and celebrities whose only talent is self-promotion. But to me this is all just marketing. It just replaces huge capitalists with more small ones.
Granted, I am writing about the mid 19th century, but I find myself thinking of the benefits of no electricty, when people got together they had to either participate in singing or playing music, or become the audience for it. Yeah, I know, quality was not the same, but there was way more participation in music, and think how exciting a real concert coming to town must have been.
I also think about this a lot - I think with the ever increasing pervasiveness of technology we'll see societies start to make spaces where there is absolutely none.
Good point, and I think this may be the antidote to where we are now. I sense--hope--that a renaissance of people gathering together in the same place to make music, just for the fun of it, is on the horizon, as well as a resurgence of interest in the local and tangible.
This is a really odd commentary. It starts out promisingly, with a critique of Disney's culture-by-acquisition model, but ends up celebrating the success of...MrBeast? Ted, have you even watched MrBeast? Sorry, but to count the emerging hegemony of mindless Indie media as some kind of cultural triumph seems pretty dubious to me. Actually, I think your frank admission at the top--you don't like politics--is the beginning of the problem here. Old media, new media...the emergence of smaller platforms might be a plus, but only if we begin to see emancipatory potential in the content, and not just MrBeast-style capitalism repeated ad nauseam...
You said, "Sorry, but to count the emerging hegemony of mindless Indie media as some kind of cultural triumph seems pretty dubious to me."
I did not understand Ted to be saying that Mr. Beast was a cultural triumph so much as to say that Disney, somehow, doesn't matter. They are going to fade into irrelevance. (In my crystal ball, which is worth exactly what you've paid for it, they will at some point revitalize and do stuff that's interesting, but only after a long period of stagnation and shrinkage.
Ted's comment: "In other words, I don’t want to get rid of MrBeast. I just want many other people doing something comparable. And I’d really like the people with deep pockets to play a role in this." "Something comparable" sounds like a positive endorsement to me? Again, I think he's avoiding the important questions about our culture when he fixates on platforms, ignoring the fact that this Indie turn is largely just a more accessible way to consume the same old, mindless content...
Mark, you're misinterpreting my words. Jay is right in what he said. This article is about the need for arts and culture institutions to focus on building an audience. That's what I mean when I say that they should so "something comparable." I mention a number of institutions specifically (NY Times, Harvard, the MacArthur Foundation, etc.), and it should be obvious that the audience-building they might do is different from a MrBeast video. What they would do is 'comparable' (as outreach) but not 'identical' (in terms of content). That said, I don't have any hostility to MrBeast (although some people clearly do), who seems like a nice enough guy. I've only watched a few scattered minutes of his videos, so I'm no expert on his work—but nothing I've seen from him is offensive, unlike some other stuff circulating in the media. If one person can have such an impact, starting from a base of zero followers, imagine what these institutions with so much brainpower, reputation, and deep pockets might do.
My apologies for misunderstanding your words. On the other hand, I think you might be misunderstanding my words when you compare MrBeast favorably to "other stuff circulating in the media." You have to admit, that's a pretty low bar. To me, MrBeast is zany click bait, with a heavy dose of craven materialism--a quick dopamine hit for the bored and restless. Is that the kind of audience engagement we're looking for? I would suggest we look past the numbers when we are assessing the quality of new cultural phenomena...
My policy is to stay out of the comments section here. Readers should be able to disagree with me, or even attack me. That's what healthy dialogue is about.
I only intervene when people misrepresent my views, and attribute opinions to me that are markedly different from what I believe and what I say. That's why I made my comment above.
But I want to make an additional remark for the public record: It makes me weep to have written an impassioned plea for "hundreds and thousands" of institutions and organization to participate in building a discerning audience for our culture—in a moment of real crisis—and have some readers' takeaway be that MrBeast sucks.
I would have replied differently, but I see Ted has spoken for himself, and better than I might have.
I have one kicker: In order to build a cultural infrastructure (such a phrase!) that supports art that I like and that you like, we need to understand that it's going to support a lot of art that we don't like, and be ok with that as long as it also supports art that we do like.
Jay I think you do a better job of making Ted's point maybe than he does? There's certainly a case to be made for "more is better' when it comes to platforms. On the other hand, before we celebrate too much, it would be nice to have at least a few examples of Indie platforms building new audiences for culture that's worth getting excited about. Is that asking too much, Ted?
Well, all I can say is that there are multiple musicians who I found via YouTube and have bought albums from via Bandcamp. This is stuff I really like, and connect to. That's what you're asking about, right? Here's some names: Christian Scott, Nahre Sol, Zac Zinger, Adam Neely (Sungazer) come to mind off the top of my head. I like them, don't know that you will.
Y'all are circling around the solution without landing. The digital ecosystem that works is made of an infinite number of interconnected peer networks. It's like telephony: we're all connected by a global telephone network and I can conceivably call anyone in the world with a phone number, but my personal Rolodex (peer network) is limited to people I converse with, and it's only a couple hundred at most. Peer networks are the same - the mistake is that Web2.0 tried to put the entire planet on one switchboard (Facebook). This makes no sense - I don't want to be privy to every personal conversation going on in the world - what a meaningless distraction! But I also have no need to cut off those conversations that don't concern me. The same with sharing creative content - the more, the richer the ecosystem - but I'm only going to be exposed to that which I discover through my peers, and I choose my peers accordingly. We just need blockchain to power this ecosystem because it's completely decentralized and p2p.
Brilliant analysis (I say that partly because I think about it every day--or at least every time I watch an NBA game and am exposed to another turntablist playing rap "music" (without melody, harmony, complexity, depth?). Even the word "culture" is in danger of radical devaluation and redefinition). Basketball and football coaches and players now speak routinely of finding a player or joining a team that "fits their culture" (usually meaning "plays to win"). Like the word "elite," "culture" has entered the world of professional and amateur (soon, high school) sports as a word of mystical, inestimable worth to the player said to possess it. Ted branches out yet is specific and objective in his evidence for the state of the culture 2022.
Ted Gioia is an incredible writer. He's helping me keep my head above water and calming me with his clear explanations and well-researched data. He makes you aware of how genuinely nuts things are getting, but he's the voice of reason, giving us hope. I recently purchased his Delta Blues book (Amazon), a scholarly work covering the history of blues from the late 1800s to the present. Ted's writing style is understandable and clear but with all the depth an educated reader needs.
I hate the term content creator but have to admit that most of it is strictly content just like when the recording industry started using the term product instead of music or art . Artists of all types deserve to make a good living. but aiming for content or product yields crap content or product. as a musician I hav spent LOTS of money on recordings of creative music and zero dollars on stuff that smells of product or content from a mile away
"Where’s the audience? The supply of culture is HUGE and GROWING. But the demand side of the equation is ugly."
I've said this for at least a decade now, and several times here on substack: I don't think people actually care about "music" that much — it's everything surrounding it — ironically, the means by which it was sold to the masses is what people *actually* care about. Status.
Everyone wants to be an artist/musician.... "influencer" because all the attention and power they will get as a result... on the flip side, at least since the 90s popular culture has ragged on "mindless consumers". No one wants to be one of those... despite still doing it, due to the marketing promises that make it seem like you won't be labeled that way.
Liking the "right" art/music.. and because politics has become pop culture... the "right politics"... comes with a number of social status advantages — just not as many as being in the spotlight representing any of those things. I think this helps explain the imbalance of supply and demand.
Yes, humans are extremely status conscious because it enhances their own success. Celebrity culture is the off-shoot of this. But the creative human becomes the measure of status under the right conditions for true value: Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo are far more revered and remembered in history than Lorenzo de Medici, even though the Medici had all the power.
"Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo are far more revered and remembered in history than Lorenzo de Medici, even though the Medici had all the power."
Correct. ...and if they were both alive today, who would be more influential?
(trick question: it would actually be Da Vinci's management firm. The theme of today is "power by proxy" ...use pretty/famous puppets to say the words that masses would never listen to coming out of your own mouth... use social media companies to silence opposition without running foul of that pesky constitution, etc, etc)
True, but my point is that we as humans determine those choices. We don't have to commericialize our life's worth, and that's the big pay-off that the material-obsessed never achieve. I don't feel the need to harp on those who short-change their lives as long as we are free to create our own.
"True, but my point is that we as humans determine those choices."
Choices? Not sure what that has to do with anything.
"We don't have to commericialize [sic] our life's worth, and that's the big pay-off that the material-obsessed never achieve."
OK.... you're right, we don't "have to"... but... what's the "big pay-off" you're referring to?
"I don't feel the need to harp on those who short-change their lives as long as we are free to create our own."
Again.. OK... not sure what your point is. I'm not trying to start a fight, but... it feels like you're just parroting some feel-good nonsense that doesn't actually reflect reality, in the hopes that no one is going to want to be critical of, what on the surface sees to be, positive messaging.
I also noticed the phrase "social science" in your bio,and I can't help but feel like those two things are intrinsically connected. You literally sound like the "con" man Ted was recently talking about.
Perhaps my succinctness is not clear, sorry. By choices, I mean I seek out art I value - I don't listen to Top40 or care who Rihanna is. We don't need to run with the herd - we are free to consume what we value. Nobody forcefeeds us commercial crap.
The big pay-off is a life lived according to and on your own terms. As an observer said at Lorenzo's funeral, "In the end we all end up dead; rich or poor." So live the life you value and advise others to do the same. My point is that I work to advance that vision of the present and the future. I'm not conning(?) anybody.
Please understand that I'm... kinda joking when I say this, but...
"...tech start-up founder in the creative media original content space... Social science academic and author.
I'm not conning(?) anybody."
My guy, that's *literally* your resumé. What are you talking about?
"The big pay-off is a life lived according to and on your own terms."
What does that even mean?
Because if taken literally, it's just not possible...
OK... so, you listen to the music you want? Is that really "living on your own terms"? Because... every step of procuring and enjoying that music means agreeing to the terms of dozens of entities that aren't you. So... whose terms are you *really* living by? Sure, you get to choose which company's terms to agree with, but what does that entail exactly — especially in a world of ever-encroaching EAAS (Existence As A Service/Subscription)?
So... logically, the only thing left would be "empty platitude to be interpreted as 'your truth' requires". Which is exactly the type of thing that someone who does what you do says to get people to give you money. Just sayin' ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
My first Ted Gioia column, and I hope it's an outlier. Rather than deconstruct this wisp of an argument for a future where a thousand flowers bloom, let me focus on this quotation:
"And this doesn’t include the hundreds of startups that are trying to revitalize our culture. Every week I hear from some entrepreneur who wants to help musicians (or other creatives) make more money and have more opportunities. [...] Not all of these startups will succeed. In fact, most will fail. But a few will thrive. And, based on my dealings with them, they are going to be on the side of the individual artist, not the huge corporation or institution."
This was Daniel Ek's pitch for Spotify. The market for recordings was vanishing due to piracy, and Spotify was going to use streaming to put money back in the pockets of the working musician. How's that working out for the average musician? About as well as it's working out for most of the people helming those 3 million podcasts.
If TG can monetize his Substack, more power to him. Maybe it will be a better financial model than Spotify. Or Medium. Or HuffPost before that. But there are only so many $50 subscriptions a person can afford. Without subscriptions, the only source of income is advertising, and the advertising money is not going to go to the content creators, if history is any guide.
“But there are only so many $50 subscriptions a person can afford.”
The problem is that you can’t smell a thousand flowers. Or a hundred. Maybe 25...
I have 13 paid subscriptions. Some are more than $50, but taking that as a given, it’s about the same as my wife pays for a yearly newspaper subscription. She still lives in the print world. In that context, it’s not much. I can afford more, but finding time to read them has become a problem. Plus I have 17 more I don’t pay for mainly because I don’t get around to reading them. So for me, it’s not the money but the time.
And it’s exacerbated by about as many newsletters & RSS feeds. Good thing I avoid video. Fortunately I’m retired, but I have books I want to read.
Maybe AI will ultimately solve my kind of problem by curating for me, but the thing is, I don’t want to be trapped into a bubble by algorithms.
Subscriptions may be the only resort for short-form writers like journalists or podcasters, but not for musicians or long-form authors or videographers. Eck baited the record cos. and he knew it bc they could control the revenue share at very little cost. He has cajoled the artists with the unspoken promise to replace and eliminate the record cos. as distributors with a centralized platform, his platform that he controls.
Fuhgeddaboudit - artists need to control their networks and Eck is not their friend. Watch the movie.
Streaming as a subscription service is a loss-leader. The problem is the cost structure of storing all the world's music files, and if one demands lossless, that storage costs grows exponentially. $10 subscriptions will never pay for this - the true price is probably 5-7 times as much, but under cost effective pricing, streamers would have zero subscribers. So the streaming model is subsidized by investors and Big Tech.
Owning music sold by the artist is actually quite inexpensive and one could buy more than enough music for the money spent on streaming. Who needs to subsidize streaming of all the songs in the universe if one only listens to a tiny fraction of that? One just has to eliminate the middleman taking the lion's share of the value. This means record cos. AND streamers like Eck. Music search and discovery is easily solved through social network dynamics with peer networks and influencers. AI can't judge subjective art and never will do so effectively - humans do that.
Btw, piracy is a record company canard to protect their franchise revenue. Most musicians give away their music today. The problem of piracy is easily solved by creating the proper incentives. Piracy is not free as it takes time and energy, but music bought legally is really cheap when it is purchased peer-to-peer. The added incentive is that it directly supports the artist to make more art.
Lastly, advertising and promotion is not a curse if it's pull advertising rather than push. Influencers (and peer-controlled networks) control pull advertising and that's where the network gold is.
Right on target. FFE.
Until someone can explain why people care about Mr. Beast nothing can be changed. So far, I don’t see where the debate has evolved beyond Sheeple v. Victims.
The state of culture Ted describes is actually abysmal because we can't value culture by the amount of content created but by if and how it is consumed and shared. The problem, as Ted states, is obvious: there is an explosion of supply but not demand, which is limited by physical constraints such as time and attention. Technology has blessed us with the explosion of supply with new tools for creating and sharing, but it has also created an impossible task for valuing consumption. Consumption of art is free today, which means the production of art is also done for free. Of course, winner-take-all has created a bonanza of ancillary wealth for the few who command the attention of the global masses. But this only means we get creative content from the same small pool of artists, which starves the ecosystem of innovative creativity. (Who is Colleen Hoover and is she writing the same romance novel again and again?)
So, how to rebalance supply and demand to reinvigorate cultural innovation? Certainly not by looking at mass audience models that can only feed winner-take-all dynamics. My answer is that we need to look to the creative process that defines us as humans. Culture does not create humanity; humanity creates culture and our humanity is embodied in what we create and share, not in what we consume. Since we are all part of this global humanity, the answer is in the creative and sharing process, not just attention-consuming consumption. In other words, when we create and share our own humanity, we become more attentive and appreciative of others' creations. I am a photographer, thus I seek out other photographers' works.
The industrial and post-industrial economy created a bifurcation between creators and audiences where fewer and fewer creators command more and more attention from audiences. One is either a creator or a consumer, but we are all both. Rebalancing this means more niche market networks for varied content and better human connections within those networks. The dearth of demand is solved by the creative social network, not the network platforms or the distributors. All we need is a creative network that serves creators and those who wish to share their creations and leaves the technology and distribution platforms to the sole task of discovery, connection, and coordination. My friends recommend new art to me, not Amazon, Apple or Spotify.
Michael this hit home for me:
"Culture does not create humanity; humanity creates culture and our humanity is embodied in what we create and share, not in what we consume."
Yes, we get too wrapped up with commercial metrics rather than human metrics. Making money and creating wealth is great, but there's an important distinction between price and value. Price is a very imperfect measure of value. We probably learn this too late in life.
There's a wise old saying: "The best things in life ARE free."
Would you still say that if your daughter was pregnant with your first grandchild and you were in urgent need of a pacemaker?
I'm not sure how that's relevant. Value is value and I would always be seeking value, which might mean more timely and safe service, as well as competence.
Pacemakers are not free but getting one implanted so that you lived long enough to enjoy your first grandchild would put it on your Best list. Value is relative and changes with time and circumstances.
Well, my point is that on your deathbed what would you have valued more - your new pacemaker or the time it afforded with your grandchildren? The former merely served the more important latter. The point of the saying is that things don't matter as much as the experiences in life - many of which are free. I don't think we need to nitpick beyond that.
In the book business, it's long been said that the huge sales of mainstream writers like Colleen Hoover (who I haven't read) finance the publication of more literary stuff—the books that are critically acclaimed but don't sell many books. A book that sells 10,000 copies is a success. Is Hoover subsidizing the publication of great books? I don't know.
The disappearance of the midlist book is a bizarre corollary of this. New York publishers don't need to chase mega-bestsellers—they could make a reasonable profit on smart books that sell ten or twenty thousand copies. But with each passing year, they seem less interested in doing that. As a result, the publishing industry starts to resemble Hollywood—making big bets on surefire hits (or what they think will be surefire hits). It doesn't need to be like this.
so true. And thanks to Twitter, rather than taking on the culture with literature, publishers seriously risk adverse.
And like in Hollywood this attitude negatively affects the entire industry.
I wouldn't put too much weight on "woke institutional capture" for the failure of older artists to reboot in current times.
To me, the artist job is to channel the zeitgeist into their work. Music, painting, drama - it doesn't have to be about "now", but it has to include "now" somehow. When Rachael Price and Vilray channel 40's love songs, the lyrics mention the narwhal as "the unicorn of the sea". They would never have said that in the 40's, nor did the use "unicorn" as a metaphor for something that's really rare.
That's why the Iron Man of the 60's was a quite different character than the Robert Downey Jr. version. And why Pat Metheney's recording of Giant Steps sounds so different from John Coltrane's. They are different individuals and they live in different times.
IIRC, a lot of the death of the midlist was tax-driven; in the late 80s or early 90s, the tax laws changed such that book inventories were considered taxable. As a result, booksellers and distributors terminated their inventories, and so if it doesn't sell a lot, it's never in stock.
Print-on-demand could remedy that, but it hasn't really taken off, as far as I can tell.
Sherman, fwiw, from a teachers perspective, "Absolutely True Diary" is the greatest text for teaching literary skills ever written (bc so many characters/angles/themes to grasp onto).
And kids are obsessed with Hoover's "It Ends with Us"
so perhaps some symbiosis is possible!
I saw a page on Reddit about "what movies could not be made today?" with the usual (this is not the first time I've seen a page on this topic) answers of things like "blazing saddles". But the most interesting answer was "star wars". Nobody in Hollywood would finance a film from a (relatively) new director, with no tie-in to some existing franchise. As the probably apocryphal remark goes, "it's a great script. it's a pity nobody's made it so we could do the sequel." The more I thought about it, the more I realized it was true. The lead-off movie to one of the biggest movie franchises of all time would not get greenlit today.
Off topic, but I noted (and appreciated) the quote from your book on love songs in the WaPo Burt Bacharach obit.
Music, like Hollywood, is more interested in making "content" than making something that's actually good. Making good music means you have to take risks and try new things. The corporate culture in the entertainment industry now is so risk adverse that they end up making poor quality, but supposedly safe, content. Hopefully people will quickly start to vote with their wallets and show the corporate morons running things that this is a bad policy. One of my problems is knowing where to find new and better music. I've started listening to local, alternative music radio stations and that has helped. I also use YouTube and find some good music there. I'll definitely look at bandcamp and see what they have to offer. For me personally, an article on how and where to find music worth listening to would be nice.
Personally, I was lucky enough in the 1990's to visit Guadeloupe a few times and Martinique. In combination with those wonderful times, I not only discovered zouk & other folkloric music from both these islands. Then I worked at SOB's in NYC for a summer filling in for a DJ. IT was there that I got to hear many Haitian bands live and also African from DRC. There was an African DJ whom I met there that introduced me to music from Bissau, Angola and Cape Verde. It doesn't matter to me that I cannot understand the lyrics. The music transcends words.
"Hopefully people will quickly start to vote with their wallets and show the corporate morons running things that this is a bad policy. One of my problems is knowing where to find new and better music."
Self-respecting people already have, but a majority made of morons won't challenge "corporate morons" or government morons to offer anything new or of value.
Every empire dies the same way. We are the Romans. Enjoy the ride!
BandCamp is a great place to start. YouTube and Spotify work well for me too.
Excellent commentary, as usual, but what about the educational institutions? Funding for arts and humanities in schools is at an all time low. How can you build an audience, when their only cultural reference points are consumerist entities packaging the culture like products to consume, instead of life experiences that enrich our human experience? What about the dehumanizing effect of the virtual, the artificial? How about face to face human interaction and community? When culture becomes a consumer commodity and the culture warriors become an exclusive diversion for the well healed and refuses to take risks, we all lose. The big problem isn't that we don't have enough solutions. It's that not enough people give a shit. Chomsky touched on this (albeit in a different context) when he said “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum....”. I wish I could share your enthusiasm for the entrepreneurial zeal and instant fame (for the 15 minutes Warhol presciently foretold) of bloggers, self-proclaimed influencers, and celebrities whose only talent is self-promotion. But to me this is all just marketing. It just replaces huge capitalists with more small ones.
Granted, I am writing about the mid 19th century, but I find myself thinking of the benefits of no electricty, when people got together they had to either participate in singing or playing music, or become the audience for it. Yeah, I know, quality was not the same, but there was way more participation in music, and think how exciting a real concert coming to town must have been.
I also think about this a lot - I think with the ever increasing pervasiveness of technology we'll see societies start to make spaces where there is absolutely none.
New Amish
Good point, and I think this may be the antidote to where we are now. I sense--hope--that a renaissance of people gathering together in the same place to make music, just for the fun of it, is on the horizon, as well as a resurgence of interest in the local and tangible.
This is a really odd commentary. It starts out promisingly, with a critique of Disney's culture-by-acquisition model, but ends up celebrating the success of...MrBeast? Ted, have you even watched MrBeast? Sorry, but to count the emerging hegemony of mindless Indie media as some kind of cultural triumph seems pretty dubious to me. Actually, I think your frank admission at the top--you don't like politics--is the beginning of the problem here. Old media, new media...the emergence of smaller platforms might be a plus, but only if we begin to see emancipatory potential in the content, and not just MrBeast-style capitalism repeated ad nauseam...
You said, "Sorry, but to count the emerging hegemony of mindless Indie media as some kind of cultural triumph seems pretty dubious to me."
I did not understand Ted to be saying that Mr. Beast was a cultural triumph so much as to say that Disney, somehow, doesn't matter. They are going to fade into irrelevance. (In my crystal ball, which is worth exactly what you've paid for it, they will at some point revitalize and do stuff that's interesting, but only after a long period of stagnation and shrinkage.
Ted's comment: "In other words, I don’t want to get rid of MrBeast. I just want many other people doing something comparable. And I’d really like the people with deep pockets to play a role in this." "Something comparable" sounds like a positive endorsement to me? Again, I think he's avoiding the important questions about our culture when he fixates on platforms, ignoring the fact that this Indie turn is largely just a more accessible way to consume the same old, mindless content...
Mark, you're misinterpreting my words. Jay is right in what he said. This article is about the need for arts and culture institutions to focus on building an audience. That's what I mean when I say that they should so "something comparable." I mention a number of institutions specifically (NY Times, Harvard, the MacArthur Foundation, etc.), and it should be obvious that the audience-building they might do is different from a MrBeast video. What they would do is 'comparable' (as outreach) but not 'identical' (in terms of content). That said, I don't have any hostility to MrBeast (although some people clearly do), who seems like a nice enough guy. I've only watched a few scattered minutes of his videos, so I'm no expert on his work—but nothing I've seen from him is offensive, unlike some other stuff circulating in the media. If one person can have such an impact, starting from a base of zero followers, imagine what these institutions with so much brainpower, reputation, and deep pockets might do.
My apologies for misunderstanding your words. On the other hand, I think you might be misunderstanding my words when you compare MrBeast favorably to "other stuff circulating in the media." You have to admit, that's a pretty low bar. To me, MrBeast is zany click bait, with a heavy dose of craven materialism--a quick dopamine hit for the bored and restless. Is that the kind of audience engagement we're looking for? I would suggest we look past the numbers when we are assessing the quality of new cultural phenomena...
My policy is to stay out of the comments section here. Readers should be able to disagree with me, or even attack me. That's what healthy dialogue is about.
I only intervene when people misrepresent my views, and attribute opinions to me that are markedly different from what I believe and what I say. That's why I made my comment above.
But I want to make an additional remark for the public record: It makes me weep to have written an impassioned plea for "hundreds and thousands" of institutions and organization to participate in building a discerning audience for our culture—in a moment of real crisis—and have some readers' takeaway be that MrBeast sucks.
This is why we don't have nice things.
I would have replied differently, but I see Ted has spoken for himself, and better than I might have.
I have one kicker: In order to build a cultural infrastructure (such a phrase!) that supports art that I like and that you like, we need to understand that it's going to support a lot of art that we don't like, and be ok with that as long as it also supports art that we do like.
Jay I think you do a better job of making Ted's point maybe than he does? There's certainly a case to be made for "more is better' when it comes to platforms. On the other hand, before we celebrate too much, it would be nice to have at least a few examples of Indie platforms building new audiences for culture that's worth getting excited about. Is that asking too much, Ted?
Well, all I can say is that there are multiple musicians who I found via YouTube and have bought albums from via Bandcamp. This is stuff I really like, and connect to. That's what you're asking about, right? Here's some names: Christian Scott, Nahre Sol, Zac Zinger, Adam Neely (Sungazer) come to mind off the top of my head. I like them, don't know that you will.
Y'all are circling around the solution without landing. The digital ecosystem that works is made of an infinite number of interconnected peer networks. It's like telephony: we're all connected by a global telephone network and I can conceivably call anyone in the world with a phone number, but my personal Rolodex (peer network) is limited to people I converse with, and it's only a couple hundred at most. Peer networks are the same - the mistake is that Web2.0 tried to put the entire planet on one switchboard (Facebook). This makes no sense - I don't want to be privy to every personal conversation going on in the world - what a meaningless distraction! But I also have no need to cut off those conversations that don't concern me. The same with sharing creative content - the more, the richer the ecosystem - but I'm only going to be exposed to that which I discover through my peers, and I choose my peers accordingly. We just need blockchain to power this ecosystem because it's completely decentralized and p2p.
Btw, who is MrBeast, and should I care?
Brilliant analysis (I say that partly because I think about it every day--or at least every time I watch an NBA game and am exposed to another turntablist playing rap "music" (without melody, harmony, complexity, depth?). Even the word "culture" is in danger of radical devaluation and redefinition). Basketball and football coaches and players now speak routinely of finding a player or joining a team that "fits their culture" (usually meaning "plays to win"). Like the word "elite," "culture" has entered the world of professional and amateur (soon, high school) sports as a word of mystical, inestimable worth to the player said to possess it. Ted branches out yet is specific and objective in his evidence for the state of the culture 2022.
Ted Gioia is an incredible writer. He's helping me keep my head above water and calming me with his clear explanations and well-researched data. He makes you aware of how genuinely nuts things are getting, but he's the voice of reason, giving us hope. I recently purchased his Delta Blues book (Amazon), a scholarly work covering the history of blues from the late 1800s to the present. Ted's writing style is understandable and clear but with all the depth an educated reader needs.
I hate the term content creator but have to admit that most of it is strictly content just like when the recording industry started using the term product instead of music or art . Artists of all types deserve to make a good living. but aiming for content or product yields crap content or product. as a musician I hav spent LOTS of money on recordings of creative music and zero dollars on stuff that smells of product or content from a mile away
"I’m not much of a fan of politics" - one of a number of reasons I read you, Ted
Do you have any recommendations for Substacks dedicated to short stories?
"Where’s the audience? The supply of culture is HUGE and GROWING. But the demand side of the equation is ugly."
I've said this for at least a decade now, and several times here on substack: I don't think people actually care about "music" that much — it's everything surrounding it — ironically, the means by which it was sold to the masses is what people *actually* care about. Status.
Everyone wants to be an artist/musician.... "influencer" because all the attention and power they will get as a result... on the flip side, at least since the 90s popular culture has ragged on "mindless consumers". No one wants to be one of those... despite still doing it, due to the marketing promises that make it seem like you won't be labeled that way.
Liking the "right" art/music.. and because politics has become pop culture... the "right politics"... comes with a number of social status advantages — just not as many as being in the spotlight representing any of those things. I think this helps explain the imbalance of supply and demand.
Yes, humans are extremely status conscious because it enhances their own success. Celebrity culture is the off-shoot of this. But the creative human becomes the measure of status under the right conditions for true value: Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo are far more revered and remembered in history than Lorenzo de Medici, even though the Medici had all the power.
"Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo are far more revered and remembered in history than Lorenzo de Medici, even though the Medici had all the power."
Correct. ...and if they were both alive today, who would be more influential?
(trick question: it would actually be Da Vinci's management firm. The theme of today is "power by proxy" ...use pretty/famous puppets to say the words that masses would never listen to coming out of your own mouth... use social media companies to silence opposition without running foul of that pesky constitution, etc, etc)
True, but my point is that we as humans determine those choices. We don't have to commericialize our life's worth, and that's the big pay-off that the material-obsessed never achieve. I don't feel the need to harp on those who short-change their lives as long as we are free to create our own.
"True, but my point is that we as humans determine those choices."
Choices? Not sure what that has to do with anything.
"We don't have to commericialize [sic] our life's worth, and that's the big pay-off that the material-obsessed never achieve."
OK.... you're right, we don't "have to"... but... what's the "big pay-off" you're referring to?
"I don't feel the need to harp on those who short-change their lives as long as we are free to create our own."
Again.. OK... not sure what your point is. I'm not trying to start a fight, but... it feels like you're just parroting some feel-good nonsense that doesn't actually reflect reality, in the hopes that no one is going to want to be critical of, what on the surface sees to be, positive messaging.
I also noticed the phrase "social science" in your bio,and I can't help but feel like those two things are intrinsically connected. You literally sound like the "con" man Ted was recently talking about.
Perhaps my succinctness is not clear, sorry. By choices, I mean I seek out art I value - I don't listen to Top40 or care who Rihanna is. We don't need to run with the herd - we are free to consume what we value. Nobody forcefeeds us commercial crap.
The big pay-off is a life lived according to and on your own terms. As an observer said at Lorenzo's funeral, "In the end we all end up dead; rich or poor." So live the life you value and advise others to do the same. My point is that I work to advance that vision of the present and the future. I'm not conning(?) anybody.
Please understand that I'm... kinda joking when I say this, but...
"...tech start-up founder in the creative media original content space... Social science academic and author.
I'm not conning(?) anybody."
My guy, that's *literally* your resumé. What are you talking about?
"The big pay-off is a life lived according to and on your own terms."
What does that even mean?
Because if taken literally, it's just not possible...
OK... so, you listen to the music you want? Is that really "living on your own terms"? Because... every step of procuring and enjoying that music means agreeing to the terms of dozens of entities that aren't you. So... whose terms are you *really* living by? Sure, you get to choose which company's terms to agree with, but what does that entail exactly — especially in a world of ever-encroaching EAAS (Existence As A Service/Subscription)?
So... logically, the only thing left would be "empty platitude to be interpreted as 'your truth' requires". Which is exactly the type of thing that someone who does what you do says to get people to give you money. Just sayin' ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I completely agree. There’s too much noise these days🥶