Blog: cultural insight

Over the last few weeks, I had the opportunity to present at both Gamescom in Cologne, and PAX West in Seattle. It has been a few years since I visited Gamescom. Back then, I wrote about how gaming has fully established itself as a cultural phenomenon and was edging towards the mainstream.

For the past week, hip-hop Twitter was buzzing with debate. The Weeknd and Gunna both released surprise albums on 7thJanuary: Dawn FM and DS4EVER , respectively. So, whose album would come out on top? Though The Weeknd is the bigger household name, the two artists’ rollout strategies were remarkably similar.

The recent UK DCMS committee findings on streaming – namely, that artists should receive a greater share of streaming revenues – is merely one facet of the growing pains of a music industry reshaped by streaming and having evolved, willingly or not, into a digital-first proposition.

“Mortgage-backed securities, sub-prime loans, tranches… It’s pretty confusing right? Does it make you feel bored, or stupid? Well, it’s supposed to. Wall Street loves to use confusing terms to make you think only they can do what they do.

Since the announced US ban of ByteDance and WeChat in August, the future of the widely popular short-form social video app TikTok has been murky and vaguely chaotic. Two weeks ago, Microsoft and Walmart looked to be the partnership to take up the torch.

News has become culturally vital in 2020. In a year of global health, social and economic disruption, it now possesses a relevant edge to compete vigorously for consumer attention in a saturated content marketplace.

The strides gaming has made in recent years regarding its cultural relevance are hard to ignore. Twenty years ago, consumers defined their cultural image through the music they listened to, the clothes they wore and the sports teams they supported.

Decade retrospectives are almost doomed to fail. Assess the 60s in 1969 and you would have likely overweighed the influence of Grand Funk Railroad compared to The Velvet Underground. When it comes to the 70s, proto Hip-Hop pioneers such as Grandmaster Flash or the Post-Punk of Joy Division would have been a mere footnote in favour of David Naughton or Melissa Manchester.

Last week MIDiA’s Mark Mulligan overviewed how , in a recession, discretionary expenditures are the first to be cut. Given the non-obligatory nature of subscriptions and the contractual shackles of cable, services like Netflix and Spotify would likely lose out quickly as consumers rush to minimise their spending.

History (so they say) repeats itself. While in some instances this might bring about the comfort of cyclical certainty, in others – as we near a new roaring 20’s with what looks to be thematic similarity to all the economic boom and political chaos of the last – this can prove, shall we say, disheartening.