The State of the Culture (2023)

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.

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 generatio

People are shocked by the notion that MrBeast can have 20 times the reach of the largest newspaper in the world. But even more shocking is the fact that this cultural shift is still in its early stages.  You ain’t seen nothing yet, folks.  And all this is happening much faster than most people realize—especially those who live inside the

The  NY Times , by comparison, has just 9 million subscribers. That’s a drop in the bucket compared to MrBeast, who runs 18 YouTube channels with more than 200 million subscribers—and now has his videos translated into Spanish, Hindi, Portuguese, and Russian.

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.

But what we really need is a robust indie environment—in which many arts and culture businesses flourish and present their diverse offerings. Let a thousand flowers blossom.

• 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 cont

We really ought to help them out. We all ought to buy more albums on Bandcamp or subscribe to worthy Substackers or whatever. But I have a hunch that those people are going to succeed no matter what.

The real question is whether those huge dinosaurs—major record labels or movie studios or non-profits—start working in the same direction. If they star

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