| (Almost) every week, I answer a question from the previous Monday’s Act Four Live chat in the Wednesday edition of this newsletter. You can read the transcript of the super-size Dec. 18 chat, the last of this year due to the holidays, here, and submit questions for the Jan. 8, 2018, chat here. This week, a reader checks in with a cross-generational question. From one of your older followers: It seems as though there’s been a great explosion in pop culture during recent years — compared to in my youth, or my parents’ — which I suspect is due to the proliferation of media (social and otherwise). Agree? Or have I forgotten more than I can recall? This is an interesting question, and one with a variety of different answers! Unfortunately, though, data is such that I’m not sure I can exactly answer whether there’s more or less pop culture than there was in your youth, given the data sets I’m working with and the fact that I don’t know exactly when your youth took place. In general, though, I think the answer is that generally, yes: There’s a lot more pop culture out there, and people have much better access to information about what’s in production, what’s coming out and when than they did a generation or two ago. In television, there are more series in production than ever before; 455 scripted series aired in 2016, up 150 percent since 2002. A lot of that growth is driven by online services such as Netflix and Hulu; between 2011 and 2016 alone, the number of series those outlets produced rose 1,450 percent. But the number of scripted shows in production was up everywhere: 25 percent in broadcast, 9 percent in premium cable and 63 percent in basic cable. What you’re seeing here is one manifestation of the “proliferation of media” you describe: There are more outlets now, and because they’re all competing to be everyone’s favorite network (if they’re a network), or to be the streaming service everyone pays for on top of their cable, they are all frantically greenlighting lots of things that can only be found there in order to have exclusives. That said, the picture is not the same everywhere. The number of movies released by the Major 6 Hollywood studios last reached 100 in 2011 and has hovered between the high 70s and low 90s ever since. The number released by other studios has bounced around a lot, rising from 28 in 1995, to 50 in 2007, and back down to 43 last year. This also probably reflects a number of trends in the industry, among them the concentration into those Major 6 studios, the increasing importance of tent-pole blockbusters, and more recently, the entrance of new players, like STX Entertainment, which was founded in 2014. I’m having a bit more trouble finding easily analyzable data about records, though some reporting from 2011 suggests that the overall number of albums released in the United States was declining after a 2008 high of 106,000. Given all of this, I’d be curious to know how readers who have been around and plugged into pop culture for longer than I have are managing your cultural consumption, particularly when it comes to D.C. I struggle with it as a professional (especially a professional who doesn’t have a single medium as my beat), and I can’t imagine what it’s like after growing up with fewer options! |
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