"If one impact of the end of old-school gatekeeping is the endless, stagnant reigns of megacelebrities..." But aren't the reigns of Taylor Swift and Drake quite stagnant by this point even sans old-school gatekeepers?
Yes, that’s who I’m talking about! But they’re reflective of more power to the people rather than less. You see similar phenomena in other regions too, I think
OMG, well, color me dumb. I completely misread your point. Please forgive me. Yes, well said, Dave! I'm loving this essay and definitely was one of those weird young kids/adults obsessed with chronology. I would have been the one to correct another kid or adult that the "year was 1977, not 1979!" or whatever it was.
The most interesting thing about posing my question about how "old" music felt etc on Bluesky the other day was there was a discernible difference between people who were born closer to the 60s and those who were born closer to the 70s and 80s. My own touchstones as a kid included a lot of 60s rock but almost nothing from the c. 5 to 10 year period just before I was born.
Meanwhile, my father is Silent Generation and listened to almost only 70s soul music. So, Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes' "If You Don't Know Me By Now" pre-dated my birth by eight years, but as a kid I recognized it as 'dad music,' therefore, 'old,' but at a similar age (5-8) was taken with a compilation of pre-Beatles and mostly post Rock and Roll ballads: https://www.discogs.com/release/21643492-Various-Senior-Prom
my sister and I blasted these tapes as if they were current tunes despite my mother's confusion.
Yeah, I rewrote that section a lot because there are just so many exceptions and different ways that people experience music, tried to keep it more personal since I can't assume that anything about my experience even extrapolates out to other people in my own *household*!
I live near a college, and it has often surprised me what % of songs playing at the parties the students throw on the weekends are the same songs that would have played one or two decades ago. Perhaps it was the same when I was in college and I just never noticed (but I really don't think so!) So I have some bias towards believing the analysis that streaming making the bottom fall out of gatekeeping has fundamentally changed the game.
In any case, wondering if you would consider at some point making a glossary - maybe with a definitive song or two - for each term like 'bort pop' etc?? I started reading your blog sometime during your Taylor Swift series, and I probably read every other post, which means that it can be sometimes disorienting to drop in, and have to do 'remedial' reading to catch up on the terms I missed before
Thank you for this comment — I do really try to assume I’m missing context when I point out big structural things but it’s interesting to hear from people that some of it tracks. There was a big difference when I was in college between chart music and indie rock — I could still play The Pixies in my dorm in 2002 to attract nerds, whereas you wouldn’t play 1989 pop at a party. It may just be that chart pop is more like indie rock now — would it be terminally uncool to play 2NE1 instead of NewJeans? Etc etc
It's had for me to really know since I'm more than a decade out and hardly talk to anyone under 30, but I do get more of a sense that the overwhelming hipster-era snobbery of my college days is just less common with the youth these days. Not just in music, but in all realms (music, movies, shows etc).
Yeah, I notice this with younger kids, too -- just a lot of basic social friction that I experienced is gone. There may be new frictions, but they're hard to tell!
Discovered this *very* A-pop-relevant paragraph on a link supplied by Krugman in one of his enshittification essays (so your most recent post and this one connect!). Of course, "foreign language" may be more of a barrier in TV than in music, but good subtitling (if Americans are willing to stand for subtitles) can at least partially overcome the barrier. My casual reading of the subject says that at the start it was Korean soap operas playing in Japan, Taiwan, and mainland China that fueled Hallyu (the Korean Wave) as much and maybe even earlier than K-pop, and K-pop itself was crossing to Japan seven or eight years before non-Asian-American Americans like me were catching on (BoA hit big in Japan in 2002).
"Another area experiencing growth is international TV formats, much like the trend seen in the music industry. International shows are often cheaper to produce and were not affected by the WGA strike, contributing to an increase in non English SVOD releases from 24% in 2019 to 33% in 2023. In fact, according to Luminate data, 'foreign language' became the most common category for original streaming content in 2023, surpassing all other subgenres for the first time."
--Nick Palmer, "The Rise And Fall Of Peak TV," EssenceMediacom
Yes, I tried to connect this thread a little in the black sheep of the series, pt. 4 on Eurovision -- my experience with television formats (though usually not with foreign films) is that they are a little more dependent on deeper cross-cultural understanding than music usually is. But my bigger concerns are (1) I think Hollywood has an even bigger role in global film and television than the US has ever had in global music, where I don't know what an alternative center of gravity looks like that actually reaches the US successfully, and (2) there are much cheaper formats -- short content, livestreams, podcasts -- that will increasingly threaten the money people will be willing to put into things like scripted content and especially mid-budget films everywhere, not just in the US. But I may be overly pessimistic here, you can also produce television and film content more cheaply than ever, even if it's not at music levels of reduced costs.
"If one impact of the end of old-school gatekeeping is the endless, stagnant reigns of megacelebrities..." But aren't the reigns of Taylor Swift and Drake quite stagnant by this point even sans old-school gatekeepers?
Yes, that’s who I’m talking about! But they’re reflective of more power to the people rather than less. You see similar phenomena in other regions too, I think
OMG, well, color me dumb. I completely misread your point. Please forgive me. Yes, well said, Dave! I'm loving this essay and definitely was one of those weird young kids/adults obsessed with chronology. I would have been the one to correct another kid or adult that the "year was 1977, not 1979!" or whatever it was.
The most interesting thing about posing my question about how "old" music felt etc on Bluesky the other day was there was a discernible difference between people who were born closer to the 60s and those who were born closer to the 70s and 80s. My own touchstones as a kid included a lot of 60s rock but almost nothing from the c. 5 to 10 year period just before I was born.
Meanwhile, my father is Silent Generation and listened to almost only 70s soul music. So, Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes' "If You Don't Know Me By Now" pre-dated my birth by eight years, but as a kid I recognized it as 'dad music,' therefore, 'old,' but at a similar age (5-8) was taken with a compilation of pre-Beatles and mostly post Rock and Roll ballads: https://www.discogs.com/release/21643492-Various-Senior-Prom
my sister and I blasted these tapes as if they were current tunes despite my mother's confusion.
Yeah, I rewrote that section a lot because there are just so many exceptions and different ways that people experience music, tried to keep it more personal since I can't assume that anything about my experience even extrapolates out to other people in my own *household*!
I live near a college, and it has often surprised me what % of songs playing at the parties the students throw on the weekends are the same songs that would have played one or two decades ago. Perhaps it was the same when I was in college and I just never noticed (but I really don't think so!) So I have some bias towards believing the analysis that streaming making the bottom fall out of gatekeeping has fundamentally changed the game.
In any case, wondering if you would consider at some point making a glossary - maybe with a definitive song or two - for each term like 'bort pop' etc?? I started reading your blog sometime during your Taylor Swift series, and I probably read every other post, which means that it can be sometimes disorienting to drop in, and have to do 'remedial' reading to catch up on the terms I missed before
Thank you!
Haha yes I have attempted a glossary before but should make it a dedicated page! Closest I have to one is here: https://www.otherdavemoore.com/p/carve-me-to-pieces
Thank you for this comment — I do really try to assume I’m missing context when I point out big structural things but it’s interesting to hear from people that some of it tracks. There was a big difference when I was in college between chart music and indie rock — I could still play The Pixies in my dorm in 2002 to attract nerds, whereas you wouldn’t play 1989 pop at a party. It may just be that chart pop is more like indie rock now — would it be terminally uncool to play 2NE1 instead of NewJeans? Etc etc
It's had for me to really know since I'm more than a decade out and hardly talk to anyone under 30, but I do get more of a sense that the overwhelming hipster-era snobbery of my college days is just less common with the youth these days. Not just in music, but in all realms (music, movies, shows etc).
Yeah, I notice this with younger kids, too -- just a lot of basic social friction that I experienced is gone. There may be new frictions, but they're hard to tell!
I went ahead and made a dedicated glossary page on the nav bar -- here you go! https://www.otherdavemoore.com/p/the-other-dave-glossary
Discovered this *very* A-pop-relevant paragraph on a link supplied by Krugman in one of his enshittification essays (so your most recent post and this one connect!). Of course, "foreign language" may be more of a barrier in TV than in music, but good subtitling (if Americans are willing to stand for subtitles) can at least partially overcome the barrier. My casual reading of the subject says that at the start it was Korean soap operas playing in Japan, Taiwan, and mainland China that fueled Hallyu (the Korean Wave) as much and maybe even earlier than K-pop, and K-pop itself was crossing to Japan seven or eight years before non-Asian-American Americans like me were catching on (BoA hit big in Japan in 2002).
"Another area experiencing growth is international TV formats, much like the trend seen in the music industry. International shows are often cheaper to produce and were not affected by the WGA strike, contributing to an increase in non English SVOD releases from 24% in 2019 to 33% in 2023. In fact, according to Luminate data, 'foreign language' became the most common category for original streaming content in 2023, surpassing all other subgenres for the first time."
--Nick Palmer, "The Rise And Fall Of Peak TV," EssenceMediacom
https://www.essencemediacom.com/thought-leadership/new-communications-economy-entertainment-special-report/the-rise-and-fall-of-peak-tv
Yes, I tried to connect this thread a little in the black sheep of the series, pt. 4 on Eurovision -- my experience with television formats (though usually not with foreign films) is that they are a little more dependent on deeper cross-cultural understanding than music usually is. But my bigger concerns are (1) I think Hollywood has an even bigger role in global film and television than the US has ever had in global music, where I don't know what an alternative center of gravity looks like that actually reaches the US successfully, and (2) there are much cheaper formats -- short content, livestreams, podcasts -- that will increasingly threaten the money people will be willing to put into things like scripted content and especially mid-budget films everywhere, not just in the US. But I may be overly pessimistic here, you can also produce television and film content more cheaply than ever, even if it's not at music levels of reduced costs.