My hypothesis: Lack of geographically local experts.

We've merged more and more into a megasociety. In a geographically distributed society, the power law for quality is more forgiving. You can be the best local band and make a living.

Now that we have ultra-efficient communications, there's less room for "mid-tier" art. Local art gets outcompeted by whatever the top stuff is among a much greater national or international population.

Because of this, there's also less of a breeding ground for maturing artists, or for experimental styles in isolated areas (think California surf rock, or NYC Salsa, etc). There's no place to go if you're not the best.

In one way that's true: An artist has to appeal to a global audience. A global audience does have a taste for local weirdness, but there's a lot less economic basis for locally weird things to spawn and germinate when every video goes online instantly. On the other hand, local weird shit blows up all the time on the internet into cross-cultural global phenomena. So it's not that it stopped existing, just that the economic model has changed.

Definitely an important factor. Industrial scale can wipe out diversity and with it subtlety, which in cultural terms means impoverishing artistic vocabulary and range.

> more and more into a megasociety.

My dim view is that it's just a rapacious monopolistic society. Why are there only three (four-ish) cell phone carriers in the US? Why are there only two app stores? Three (four-ish) major music platforms? The internet should have brought a diversity of choice that has failed to materialize because enforcement of monopoly laws in this space has been nascent and aggressively fought against.

> Local art gets outcompeted by whatever the top stuff is among a much greater national or international population.

It's the lack of access to infrastructure. Look at ticketmaster. You have to be this giant internationally recognized act to be able to afford the grift they're going to apply against you and your fans. The mid teir acts just can't access this space without financially or legally ruining themselves.

It's similar to the labor market. Monopolies _do_ make for more efficient consumer experiences. They completely _destroy_ the labor market to do this. Gains don't come from nowhere. It's no different for communications. Why are there only 6 major consumer ISPs? And look at who we let own some of them.

> there's also less of a breeding ground for maturing artists

I don't think that's true. There are cities where the venue spaces have been bought out and there are few places where these artists could draw a paying audience. It's not true everywhere though, and in those places, local artistry still thrives, but they run into the next problem...

> There's no place to go if you're not the best.

I think back to the 70s to 90s period of music. It was _incredibly rare_ that a new artist had a "good first album." It was usually barely tolerable, but you could see the kernel of something, something worth _investing_ in. Bruce Springsteen famously didn't make "good music" until his third album. Like anything else it takes time, experience, a little assistance, and long tours all across everywhere to build up the fan base.

Once the pipeline of Talent Agencies -> Production Companies -> Studio Companies -> Venue Ticketing got built you didn't need to do any of that anymore. You could literally grab 5 guys from a mall and _force_ them to be a hit in a few months. Being "the best" simply wasn't a factor anymore, they monopolized everything, why would they bother? Managing "the best" artists is a legal and marketing nightmare. Scumming up pretty girls and boys from malls and locking them down in embarrassing contracts is so much easier.

Anyways there are viable talent pipelines that still exist, but they need real investors, which they can only get if we break up the monopolies that prevent them from functioning somewhat properly, as they used to.

> enforcement of monopoly laws in this space has been nascent and aggressively fought against.

Monopoly laws in every space, since the ‘70s. Chicago School judges in the mid and late ‘70s changed the criteria for the government to pursue antitrust enforcement, so now it’s damn near impossible. The results were predictable.

> My dim view is that it's just a rapacious monopolistic society. Why are there only three (four-ish) cell phone carriers in the US? Why are there only two app stores? Three (four-ish) major music platforms? The internet should have brought a diversity of choice that has failed to materialize because enforcement of monopoly laws in this space has been nascent and aggressively fought against.

I think some of this aggregation is due to economies of scale, though.

> You could literally grab 5 guys from the mall and __force__ them to be a hit in a few months.

This is sort of a corollary to my hypothesis. Since we have a megasociety, everyone has access to music from everywhere, but limited time. There’s too much music being produced. So we now have a signaling game (advertising and marketing) to determine who people listen to. Signaling games will naturally be dominated by capital.

In terms of breeding grounds for local music, where are you thinking? Nashville?

> to determine who people listen to.

You've ignored the fact that discovery is now a new service component that really didn't exist before. We can tag music and artists and we can automatically discover related music and artists very easily. All the major services do this. Think of an expanded and federated (all the way back to the artist) open source version of this.

There's no reason to think that the previous model somehow produced the most efficient way of "determining who people listen to." It was almost certainly suboptimal. It's no surprise then that this suboptimal model was more or less copied onto the internet and all new players bought out so no new model could be revealed.

The lack of available artistry and market for it extends through multiple levels, and in this case, right into the software stack that _should_ exist for artists to self publish and for listeners to automatically discover.

> You've ignored the fact that discovery is now a new service component that really didn't exist before. We can tag music and artists and we can automatically discover related music and artists very easily. All the major services do this. Think of an expanded and federated (all the way back to the artist) open source version of this.

This is a good point. We have gone from diffusion-constrained to search-constrained. No clue what to make of that. I would submit to you that the amount of time people have to consume art has not changed, and that improved search now pushes people to consume the globally best art rather than niche content. Are there any domains or platforms that you think do a good job of surfacing specific niche content? Or am I misunderstanding your point?

>There's no reason to think that the previous model somehow produced the most efficient way of "determining who people listen to." It was almost certainly suboptimal. It's no surprise then that this suboptimal model was more or less copied onto the internet and all new players bought out so no new model could be revealed.

It's not about efficiency. I think the current system is more efficient (hence economies of scale). It's just that the rent extraction/profits are concentrated among the platform owners rather than spread out among local venue owners and artists.

> The lack of available artistry and market for it extends through multiple levels, and in this case, right into the software stack that _should_ exist for artists to self publish and for listeners to automatically discover.

I agree it should be possible, the problem is setting up the incentives correctly.

edit: clarity

> It's not about efficiency. I think the current system is more efficient (hence economies of scale). It's just that the rent extraction/profits are concentrated among the platform owners rather than spread out among local venue owners and artists.

Chiming in again. In some ways, this is "efficiency". Serving the globally best stuff is more efficient. The problem is we are trading exploration/variety for exploitation/efficiency. Reasonable minds may differ as to how that should be handled.

There was also something about scarcity driving exploration. You'd go to the video store for a certain movie, it wouldn't be available, so you'd grab something else. Now when you hear "X is on netflix" you go there and there are infinite copies, so you're never forced to explore. The only time it really happens is when your streaming service of choice doesn't have the specific thing you're looking for.

I remember the same thing happening in music stores. You'd go to buy a tape/CD and it wouldn't be in stock, but you'd be primed to buy one, so you just start browsing until you found something that looked interesting enough to buy.

The video store provides all the advantages of a physical place. Bookstores were probably more of a popular hangout spot than video stores, at least for me, but record stores were great for meeting like-minded people with deep knowledge of music. Video stores were at least similar in that the staff were often pretty happy to talk shop with you. My best friend from college worked at a Blockbuster and somewhat amazingly met the singer Pink there and got us invited to a party. That's the kind of thing that could almost be the plot of a movie and it can't happen browsing Netflix.