What Does the “Pop” in “Pop Culture” Even Mean Anymore?
There are days in this life where you turn on the radio (yes, terrestrial CAR RADIO people) and think, “huh, that’s sort of a bizarre song to make it into the Top 40 world.”
Or browse through Spotify’s Chart Toppers (or even better yet the “Viral” charts). At least 50% of the stuff on there I’ve never heard of.
Now I get it, I’m no longer a cool, young whipper snapper with my finger on the pulse of the coolest new music. However as a person who has spent most of my career dabbling in the world of pop culture, I pride myself on knowing a thing or two.
Or so I thought.
Enter: Post Malone
Enter: YBN Nahmir
Even enter: Cardi B
What do these folks all have in common? Well, they’re originally “self-made” brands. Post Malone, YouTube star. YBN Nahmir, Soundcloud streams / YouTube. Cardi B, Vine star. Ok, ok — so this is simply another case of social media influence taking over right? Stars made by the people vs. the industry. Easy right?
Sure, kinda. And there’s a little bit of manufactured destiny to boot.
As this really interesting New Yorker article uncovered, pop culture propagation can be as calculated as digital advertising with taste graphs and algorithms shaping what we see and hear. The deep dive was around the world of Post Malone:
“What I found was a three-minute-and-thirty-eight-second loop of the chorus to “Rockstar,” with (at the time) more than forty million views and the comments disabled, uploaded to YouTube by Republic Records and tagged as if it were the full single…If my eyes and ears were to be believed, Republic Records seemed to have created a YouTube video that could generate fully counted streams for Post Malone’s new single while also preventing YouTubers from hearing the full song. My stream of this loop seemed to count toward its tally (and chart position), but I’d have to listen to the full version on Spotify, iTunes, or elsewhere — platforms that record companies have said pay more money to labels and artists per play than YouTube.”
Huh. Now this isn’t taking anything away from the artist himself — CLEARLY people care and love his music. However, in a world where “top” charts are now being determined by digital streams / views, etc there are new ways that artist’s can play the game (JUST like the rest of us marketing folks do- so again, no hate) to propagate an artist’s popularity.
So like many things in our worlds (ahem, political ads), we are creating tight echo chambers for ourselves to not only hear the same kinds of messages from brands, but are also sociocultural echo chambers, as each and everyone of us learned from the election this year. However, when it comes to cultural propagation, it feels a little…odd.
In a way, it’s always what has happened, I get that. But there’s something about the transparency / clear strategy around it that is kind of unnerving.
And then let’s dissect another incredible phenomenon — Despacito.
over 4 BILLION VIEWS.
Let’s all let that sink in for a moment.
While this is data from when it was a mere 2 billion views:
Though it has been wildly successful in Mexico (385 million views), the song’s appeal extends to places where Spanish isn’t the first or even second language, from Italy (146 million) to Indonesia (41 million) to Israel (18 million). “Despacito” is the most-watched video of 2017 in more than 40 countries.
This is telling us something about the global composition of the listening universe.
Or maybe there are a lot of global bots.
I kid.
Kinda.
But will we ever know?
Moral of this wandering story — clearly, popular culture today is so heavily swayed by algorithms and social graphs, therefore as consumers of aforementioned culture, we have to be conscious of what we are consuming (ditto for buying — I am not laying blame where I play the same game). And at the very least be cognizant of how a good chunk of popularity is being dictated by the marionette strings of our echo chambers of social.
Now excuse me while I return to my rocking chair. *shakes walking stick at the wind.*
