brostep like Skrillex and Deadmau5 was really like the pop punk of dub music (and incidentally popular during the same era)

@nyx very true, a bunch of genres briefly became huge and then basically died from overexposure, homogenization, elavated mediocrity etc.

around the same time the music industry basically devoured itself and stopped taking risks altogeher why mainstream music is primarily artists who have been around 10+ years ( used to be rare for a musician to stay relevant for more than a few albums )

Something about late capitalists culture industry accelleration or something

and yet there’s nostalgia for that period, like white guys are still like “Eminem is the greatest rapper of all time” and it’s like, his good shit doesn’t even hold up lol

@monk I've never even thought about this because I just don't think almost any mass culture post 1999 is worth paying attention to, for exactly this reason that capitalist realism has had history and culture on pause since then and is perpetually looking backwards at the 20th century (Mark Fisher wrote a lot about this). but it hadn't even occurred to me that this is reflected in the literal economics of mass culture since then with mainstream musicians monopolizing most of the industry market for a much longer period than they used to.

the film industry is very similar where the studios long ago stopped taking risks on auteur directors (this is why the 70s and New Hollywood made so many films that are regarded now as medium-defining works) in favor of "high concept" mass culture films that became popular in the 80s with the works of Spielberg and Lucasfilm. the film industry stopped taking risks, so now the budgets for making movies that can get wide releases have inflated significantly. the one exception for this is incidentally usually established auteur directors like Tarantino, Scorcese, Nolan, Fincher, etc. unless someone makes a lot of waves at a film festival maybe (this is how we at least have mostly decent indie studios like A24).

@nyx

“Culture on pause” is a good way to say it,

To get into the economics a bit more, I think old record labels and movie studios never really adapted to internet, Netflix and Spotify filled a niche so that they didn’t have to change, the label’s and studios just kind of defer to big tech and make money thru licensing, but in other ways they’re are stuck in time.

I mean, why can’t we just stream movies directly from Warner Bros, or Universal? Or download Albums directly from Record Lables? it’s because they’re fucking idiots.

The rise of the internet coincided with concentration/monopolization, of basically everything but especially hollywood and music industries. It became impossible to afford to operate an independant video/record store at about the time the internet destroyed the demand for them.

I haven’t bought a CD in many years, but when i was a kid a new CD was around $20, and I think it’s still about that price. Today $20 is too much, more so in 2003. This is amonopoly price, it is a price arbitrary set by executives, and having it so expensive means only the superstars can expect to sell CD’s, so why even sign an artist that isn’t garunteed to go platinum?

Same with movies, how much is a movie ticket these days? too expensive, not to mention the exorbitant popcorn/soda prices, which again are the result of big finance monopolizing the threatre industry. So there’s no small theatre’s showing Eraserehead at midnight, they’re only going to show blockbusters because whose going to waste all that money going to the theatre at all unless it’s garunteed to be a good time? DVD sales used to provide a cousine for indie movies but these days those are even more niche than CD’s.

But increasingly albums and ticket sales are secondary to copyright rent-seeking. And this has all kinds of consequences, better to milk as much out of existing IP’s as possible ( this include Drake, Taylor Swift, Star Wars etc. ) They’re all brands, properties, content.

Along with putting all their money into safe properties, part of this rent seeking is an obsession with making content unavailable, only releasing certain Movies to stream at different times, so you have to pay for multiple streaming services to get a decent selection, making old movies impossible to find legally.

@monk yeah this is also a good point, it's kind of an early example really of what the tech industry would eventually involve into with social media of finding really arbitrary nonsense ways to monetize data itself, and they're able to do this by having monopolies. but starting with intellectual property, another abstraction of value that very transparently reveals the absurdity of the value form in general, is a good transitory state to the social media model. the timeline works out too with how big iTunes became in the 2000s and how a significant amount of internet culture for awhile had to do with piracy before media streaming gradually killed it off.

@nyx

Yeah the internet generated a major crisis of Value in many ways, probably why there was such a cultural explosion in the 2000’s – you might not remember but there were a lot of edgy young cable channels like MTV2, Current, Fuse, G4, catering to the exiting new internet culture, which in retrospect were the death throws of a dying medium.

the Metallica / napster shit, was the music industry flailing, trying to use state terror to protect copyright claims, but it couldn’t put the genie in the bottle. The old Media Barons no idea what to do about piracy, but it did lay the foundation of a new copyright regime we’re stealing dealing with.

Naturally Big Tech stepped in with a more elegant solution, iTunes is brilliantly evil, it’s not finger wagging, no, having an ipod is cool, now it’s cool to pay for music. With that then Spotify, there’s a social dimension. Amazon too, understanding the role of gatekeeper, mass consumerism that’s also infinitely personalized.

Disney is much more forward thinking that other studios, while they’re the vanguard of nastalgia milking they also understood the value of controlling the medium and not just the content.

Web 2.0, and the smart phone really nailed the coffin shut tho. The previous internet required a certain level of technical education, even Myspace encouraged people to learn a bit of HTML. So Limewire or torrenting wasn’t much different than doing anything else on the internet: browsing forums, chatrooms, porn sites, with exeption of google and wikipedia, there were very few central hubs.

With Web 2, Facebook/twitter/ youtube, and smartphones, everything is an app and everything is mediated by the gatekeepers. There’s an entire ideological indoctrination that goes along with it, the app teaches you how to use the internet and everything outside of the app is scary.