Following up: I was wrong about my most testable prediction. The biggest media hits in the USA are getting proportionally larger, not smaller, though this may be mediated by streaming/ebooks taking away from the traditional outlets.
(If you find more complete sources for any of these, let me know. I restricted to the US because the international market is growing so rapidly it would skew any trends.)
Music: This is obviously confounded by the switch from buying physical albums to streaming music, but in any case, it looks as if I was wrong: the top albums have sold comparable numbers of copies (after averaging out by 5-year increments) since 2005, while the total number of album sales has plummeted. (Maybe people are only buying albums for the most popular artists and massively diversifying their streaming music, but in any case I would have antipredicted the top artist album sales staying constant.)
Books: Total revenue for trade books has stayed remarkably consistent at about $15 billion per year for the past five years; I didn’t find first-half-of-decade results as easily. Top books by print copies might be misleading, but they’re easy to find retrospectively using Publishers Weekly lists like this one. And they’ve been increasing since 2014, though 2013 had the massive outlier of the Fifty Shades series (sigh). Another loss for the theory.
And more broadly/vaguely, the US social media landscape looks less like a land of ten thousand subcultures and more like a land of fewer than ten megacultures, each fairly defined by their politics and united on their morality and aesthetics.
Following up: I was wrong about my most testable prediction. The biggest media hits in the USA are getting proportionally larger, not smaller, though this may be mediated by streaming/ebooks taking away from the traditional outlets.
(If you find more complete sources for any of these, let me know. I restricted to the US because the international market is growing so rapidly it would skew any trends.)
Music: This is obviously confounded by the switch from buying physical albums to streaming music, but in any case, it looks as if I was wrong: the top albums have sold comparable numbers of copies (after averaging out by 5-year increments) since 2005, while the total number of album sales has plummeted. (Maybe people are only buying albums for the most popular artists and massively diversifying their streaming music, but in any case I would have antipredicted the top artist album sales staying constant.)
Books: Total revenue for trade books has stayed remarkably consistent at about $15 billion per year for the past five years; I didn’t find first-half-of-decade results as easily. Top books by print copies might be misleading, but they’re easy to find retrospectively using Publishers Weekly lists like this one. And they’ve been increasing since 2014, though 2013 had the massive outlier of the Fifty Shades series (sigh). Another loss for the theory.
Movies: Domestic box office has been growing slowly, and the biggest domestic hits have been growing rapidly. Essentially, Disney is eating the movie theater market with their big franchises.
And more broadly/vaguely, the US social media landscape looks less like a land of ten thousand subcultures and more like a land of fewer than ten megacultures, each fairly defined by their politics and united on their morality and aesthetics.