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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
I completely agree. There’s too much noise these days🥶