Monoculture is dead, and the media industry is worse off for it
Streaming + capitalism = no one wins.
Streaming’s insidious killing of monoculture didn’t just leave consumers in mourning. The people involved in creating and reviewing the entertainment are suffering, too, arguably dying alongside monoculture. As I discussed in my last post, CEOs’ relentless chase for virality to create exponential growth for their corporations has led to a hollow media landscape. We receive a lot of a little — sifting daily through a minefield of short songs and TV seasons (but somehow longer movies?? Still not sure how we got there).
Just about every corner of the industry that streaming has touched, it has ruined. It has complicated existing professional models that, while not failsafe, helped a lot more artists make a living. Let’s perform an autopsy on how each industry has been absolutely REKT by streaming.
Television
Streaming broke the model for television, and the industry has suffered greatly as a result. No aspiring showrunner wants to make television for network TV because no one has cable anymore. The proof is in the pudding: 2024 is seeing the fewest pilots ordered for networks ever. That means that 90% of the new series that people are looking to watch will be on streaming services, so that’s where the actors go.
But, as the SAG-AFTRA/WGA strikes for half of 2023 showed, the residuals from streaming services are abysmal compared to what network television offered. Plenty an article has been written about the various actors who’ve shared their residual paychecks on social media. If the residuals weren’t bad enough, we have promising young actors having their wings clipped by streaming companies that cancel their shows after one or two seasons.
Actors and writers had to strike for months to get the barest minimum pay raises from industry execs, only to still be threatened by the rapid evolution of AI. And because of things like mini (writers’) rooms and remote work post-COVID, entry-level writers and staff are not able to get the onsite mentorship from senior staff that would help them to climb the ladder professionally. Short seasons combined with high probability of cancellation mean that streamers aren’t investing in the new blood of the industry. Instead, these young creators are stuck on a hamster wheel of entry-level work1, bouncing from gig to gig without their salaries increasing.
The amount of creatives has not shrunk, but the amount of viable projects has considerably.
Film
Many of the shortcomings of the streaming model apply to film as well, but with the end of theater-to-streaming2 — where a film would show exclusively in theaters for a week or two before coming to a streaming service — this industry is getting its bearings again.
But, COVID has changed consumer habits irrevocably when it comes to films, or at least it seems that way right now. No one wants to go to the theater to see a movie, either because of COVID consciousness or the inconvenience of the entire moviegoing experience (travel, astronomical ticket prices, etc.). More than that, now that we’ve had the carrot of theater-to-streaming given to us for a year or two, we now find it difficult to revert back to the old habit of seeing new films as they hit the theater. As someone who wants the film industry to survive and maintain its whimsy, I understand the pivot back to the way things were. But as a consumer, and someone who still assesses COVID risk when I leave the house, I wish films came to streaming quickly like they did in 2020 and 2021.
I mentioned previously that the movie star is dead, and it’s largely because film actors today don’t seem to be starring in much. It seems like our favorite actors can either star in big-budget blockbusters or indie films and nothing in between. What happened to the mediocre films that you could just turn on for background noise on cable? The not-great-but-not-terrible movies that were filler between an actor’s bigger roles? I see few new bonafide movie stars on the landscape today; fewer younger actors that can give reliable performances in big-budget movies.
Who are the successors to Tom Cruise, to Julia Roberts, to Will Smith, to Cate Blanchett? They’re out there somewhere, trying to find their footing in an industry riddled with bad pay, poor contracts, and impossible-to-navigate politics with production studios who are in bed with streamers. I suppose these pedestrian kind of films are still being made, but they now exclusively exist on streaming services. They just appear on the carousel of content we see while browsing these apps — they don’t receive substantive promotion to encourage a big enough audience to guarantee future gigs for the actors involved. Streamers rely heavily on us to do the marketing for them — they drop movies and hope they become popular. And if not, well, just another feature buried in the algorithm.
We cling to the star power of under-30 hopefuls like Zendaya, Timothee Chalamet, Jacob Elordi, and Saoirse Ronan, and see the talent is certainly there to create the next generation of great actors. Yet, like so many of the Hulu, Netflix, Apple+ Original films out there, great actors are being lost in the shuffle.
Music
Since the dawn of streaming, many music artists have railed against the abysmal profits they make from platforms like Spotify and Apple Music. We all remember Taylor Swift keeping her music off select streaming platforms for years in protest of it. The music industry has long been guilty of screwing artists in the fine print of record contracts, with artists like TLC infamously going broke despite being the most popular act of their era3.
But, even still, the old profit model before streaming gave artists more money per unit sold. Not only because the percentage cut they were given was bigger, but also because the only way to listen to music on demand before streaming was to buy it. Even in streaming’s early days, you had to purchase individual songs or whole albums before you could stream/download them. I remember fondly the days I got a $15 Rhapsody (now Napster) gift card to spend on 15 songs to add to my mp3 player.
But album sales are undoubtedly more profitable for artists than streaming. Generally, an artist can earn between 10% and 20% on an album sale4. That raw dollar amount may dwindle depending on the details of the artist’s contract, but it’s still a decent starting point. With streaming, however, artists only make $0.003 to $0.005 per stream5, and they may not even get all of that if they don’t own their masters. What’s more, they earn less on Spotify when someone without a Premium account streams their music. This has led to artists seeking income streams elsewhere, with brand collabs, endorsements, and even product placement in music videos to supplement what little they earn from raw streams. You could argue that in some ways artists today have to work harder to earn what used to be possible to make just releasing music.
As consumers, the quality of well-rounded artists we’re seeing is also decreasing. We have music artists with no stage presence or media training because A&R doesn’t seem to be an investment for record labels anymore. In turn, labels aren’t investing in building artists for anything beyond going viral, if they’re lucky enough to achieve that.
As much as I don’t want to single anybody out, the young rapper Ice Spice is a perfect example of this. She recently caught flak for a lackluster performance for, ironically, Spotify. Even before this performance, however, a common criticism of hers from fans and detractors alike is that she has no stage presence. She had a few songs go viral and it seems that her label, rather than training her up to meet her hype, threw her out into the deep end for cheap attention.
She relies heavily on her looks — being pretty and lightskinned with a fat ass. Colorist politics in the music world have gotten many a talentless person far, and Ice Spice is lackadaisically bobbing her way to the bank off the backs of it. She’s merely the biggest example of the industry shifting to focus on virality of bite-sized songs that they hope will translate to streams.
Entertainment journalism
Lastly is entertainment journalism. This industry hasn’t been upended so much by streaming, but more the hyper-online climate we live in that grew concurrently with streaming. In many ways, entertainment journalism has begun to mirror the instant gratification model of streaming. Articles that generate more clicks are pushed to the fore to the detriment of writing quality. A thoughtful piece about how a movie embodies 1920s art deco aesthetics? No one cares, the people wanna know if the movie has a cutscene.
We have entertainment reviewers and writers like me (!!!) who are laid off en masse or have trouble finding staff jobs because publications are either shutting down, merging with sister publications under the same media company, or pivoting to use AI to produce articles. These publishers don’t care about quality, they care about clicks. SEO is king. Listicles, hot takes, and clickbait headlines are eclipsing thoughtful, nuanced critiques, because the latter doesn’t encourage high site traffic in the minds of executives.
And with perhaps less substantive content to review than ever, who needs a writing team with depth anyway? C-suites believe moving away from longform feature stories and laying off staff is the way to higher profits. They may be right in the short-term. But long-term, they’ll discover that all along the things that maintain a readership are credible writers and interesting writing, period.
I miss when art was art and spoke for itself, and didn’t have every person involved with creating it practically begging for it to be successful. Late capitalism demands endless growth. More streams is more money and anything less than infinite growth means that projects are killed before they have the chance to live or find their audiences. Streaming has created so much noise, so much talking, so much “content” that nothing feels special or intentional anymore.
The media landscape now is a buffet. Sure, there are seemingly endless options at your fingertips, and you may even find some delicious food among the cornucopia. Buffets are mostly a waste, though. They encourage you to be gluttonous. Overconsumption never feels good in the end.
This isn’t to say that all of the entertainment we consume is garbage. There have been plenty of gems in the last decade that have shone brightly despite executives every attempt to dull them with short-sighted business decisions. But we should be concerned, because as capitalism tamps down relentlessly on each industry, artists will find it harder and harder to create art with any sort of heart. They will struggle to find careers doing what they love, whether that’s making the entertainment or reviewing it. Fewer marginalized stories will be centered in pivots to “universal” — cis, white, straight, abled — ones. Writing will become worse in favor of SEO-driven buzzwords or one-liners aspiring to become memes online.
We should go back to menu-style media consumption. Maybe the menu is seasonal, maybe a dish is dropped if people don’t like it or aren’t ordering it enough. It has finality; you’re not terribly overwhelmed with options. When you look through the menu, you’re usually able to find something you like, because if it’s a restaurant worth a damn, they’ve tested each dish to ensure it’s delicious for you. They don’t provide dozens of dry, underseasoned dishes that have been in a warmer all day. Your dish is made to order. When you leave the restaurant, you may have lingering desires for more food, but in reality you are sated.
The point of this metaphor being: sometimes less is better. When things are made with a purpose, with intentionality, people notice. I think about this as I watch The Sopranos for the first time. I’m discovering the excellence of the show at almost the same pace as audiences did during its actual run (I’m a toddler mom, for context, IYKYK). I think constantly how different the show would feel if it was made today. The characters, the dialogue, the storylines — everything feels intentional. A show this good couldn’t be made today. HBO under WBD is too busy chasing high streaming numbers to focus on quality at the scale of The Sopranos. When quantity is prioritized, quality inevitably suffers.
It didn’t have to be this way, but regrettably, streaming has made it so.
If you want to have a thorough understanding of the old network model of TV, I’d recommend you read the feature I linked. It’s one of the best pieces of journalism I’ve ever read.
This is not an official term. Came up with it off the dome.
Each artist obviously chooses to spend what disposable income they have differently, and I’m not sure if frivolous spending aided TLC’s bankruptcy. Yet, what Left Eye didn’t mention in her cost breakdown was the fees that must be paid to an artist’s team if not provided by the record label. Everyone else has to get paid before the artist sees a red cent.
I'm sad about the state of tv right now. I don't have the appetite to binge watch a show I once did, and find myself not watching things that are dropped all at once because by the time I finish watching the conversation has moved on (see The Bear). I have come to really cherish shows that air episodes weekly, even if the show has a shorter (compared to network tv seasons) 6-12 episode run.