Cultural trends

Mainstream is the new niche

Cover image for Mainstream is the new niche
Mark Mulligan
mainstream
Niche
superstars
Five years ago, we made the call that ‘niche is the new mainstream’ . Today, this dynamic is so fundamental to music and culture that we are firmly in the stage of second order consequences. Superstars are getting smaller, the long tail is getting longer, and rightsholders are bringing in earnings thresholds to keep that growing long tail at bay.
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Death of the town square
Social fragmentation and a decentralised digital future

Cover image for Death of the town square
Hanna Kahlert
Cultural trends
Social platforms have long ‘civilised’ the online world by providing common gathering grounds, but internal disruption and proliferating competition threaten this status quo. While the dominant players are unlikely to change substantially, competition, on-platform feature fragmentation, and algorithmic ‘filter bubbles’ will dilute social platforms’ common-ground value.
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Another Fake Drake? AI is decoupling artists and their voices (and there’s no coming back)

Cover image for Another Fake Drake? AI is decoupling artists and their voices (and there’s no coming back)
Hanna Kahlert
AI
Drake
heart on my sleeve
Drake has had perhaps one of the most publicly up-and-down relationships with generative AI. There was the AI Drake music generator, which he was dead set against. Then there was ‘Heart on My Sleeve’, the AI-generated mix using the voices of Drake and The Weeknd by a creator known as ghostwriter, where Drake again expressed displeasure at the use of his voice.
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Audience agency and the value of social media: the rise of the “digitine”

Cover image for Audience agency and the value of social media: the rise of the “digitine”
Hanna Kahlert
digitine
TikTok
influencer
“Let them eat cake,” declared model and influencer Haley Kalil , dressed for the $75,000-per-ticket Met Gala in an unironically Marie Antoinette-style dress, in a viral TikTok video last weekend. Somehow, this did not go down very well among audiences on social media, tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of whom are currently struggling to remain encamped in University campuses or taking to the streets in protest worldwide.
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Kendrick vs. Drake is a rare ‘mainstream’ moment — and streaming is on the sidelines

Cover image for Kendrick vs. Drake is a rare ‘mainstream’ moment — and streaming is on the sidelines
Tatiana Cirisano
Social media
Bifurcation theory
music industry
Over the last week, it has been hard to go anywhere, or speak to anyone, without some mention of the epic diss track battle between Drake and Kendrick Lamar. When is the last time we could say that about a pop culture moment? The domination of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour is arguably the only bit of music news in the last year that managed to cut across every niche and break into “mainstream” conversation.
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Format versus context: Can a YouTuber make it on TV?

Cover image for Format versus context: Can a YouTuber make it on TV?
Hanna Kahlert
Media and Marketing
Cultural trends
Fandom
YouTube star MrBeast is making recent headlines for his video upload experiment with X , and now a potential partnership with Amazon Prime Video for a new reality series. The competition to turn the popular YouTuber into an audience draw for other platforms is on –but can a star in one place, still be a star anywhere else? This would not be the first time an entertainment company has tried to convert a popular social media figure.
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