The State of the Culture (2023)

It’s boom times in culture, my friends...

Hey, don’t look at me that way—it really is boom times. At least the numbers are huge:

• A hundred thousand songs are uploaded daily to streaming platforms.

• In the last year 1.7 million books were self-published.

• 2,500 videos are uploaded to YouTube each minute.

• There are now 3 million podcasts—and 30 million podcast episodes were released last year.

• 86% of youngsters want to grow up to become influencers, and contribute to these impressive numbers

A hundred years ago, you folks didn’t even own a radio. Just last year, you thought TikTok was a breath mint. And now look at all those big numbers.

The metrics for our culture have never been. . . well, they’ve never been larger.

And that’s just what the humans do. We’ve got to add in all the robot stuff, too. We now have music, writing, and visual art from artificial intelligence—and it can create a theoretically infinite number of works.Everybody can have their own theme song. Or get a custom-made poem from ChatGPT. Or if you want a painting of Drake in the style of Rembrandt, AI can deliver that too.

Our culture is one of abundance and instantaneous gratification.

Never before has so much culture been available to so many at such little cost.

There’s just one tiny problem.

Where’s the audience? The supply of culture is HUGE and GROWING. But the demand side of the equation is ugly.

In many cases—newspaper subscribers, album purchases, movie tickets sold, etc.—the metrics have been shrinking or even collapsing.

For books to flourish, for example, you need a culture that promotes reading. But most people happily live without those reprocessed trees. As a result, only 28 books sold more than 500,000 copies last year—and eight of them were by the same romance writer.

The money in music is even more slippery. The list of highest earning musicians last year is filled with artists who either got rid of their song catalogs—they made the list by selling out to corporations and investment funds—or had side deals in other industries. You can be the greatest musician on the planet, but still need to peddle sneakers or cosmetics or tequila to be a top earner. (...)

But let’s turn around and look at those folks in the audience. It’s sobering to see what they’re actually doing. Consumers of culture have so many options to choose from—so what do they pick?

The brutal truth is that there’s an ocean of stuff out there, but consumers sip it with a narrow straw.

You can tell a lot about the future by looking at teenagers. What that data tells us is that they pick a web platform—often only one—and it becomes their prism for evaluating the entire world.

One of the big winners here is YouTube. It’s so pervasive that we may soon need 12-step programs for YouTube addicts.

TikTok is the other “narrow straw” in today’s culture—and this is especially troubling. TikTok turns everything into bite-sized candy. Surveys reveal that teens embrace it primarily for its comic and zany attributes, and the rule for success on the platform is to “make your TikToks as short as possible.”

What happens if an entire generation ignores newspapers, periodicals, and books—and other boring things like friends and relationships—in order to experience the world and its cultural offerings in this infantilizing context?

We have to deal with this audience, whether we like it or not. That’s the crucial demand side of the equation. There’s surely no shortage of songs or articles or podcasts, so let’s focus our efforts on creating a discerning audience for these offerings. A more culturally savvy citizen is not just good business for the arts world, but it’s also healthy for society.

But who will undertake this vital project?

by Ted Gioia, The Honest Broker |  Read more:

Images: Twitter