Pop Culture Isn't Broken, But It's Different

Our popular culture lives in a nebulous paradox. Across domains like music, sports, and entertainment, we've seen data and analytics lead to optimized products to capture our attention. In several cases, the economy is stronger than ever. But for many critics, the vibes are off. Something feels empty. The skeptics believe that today's progress has come at the expense of cultural relevance.

I disagree. We're not in pop culture's worst era. There's plenty to be excited about. These complaints aren't unwarranted, though; they are the growing pains of our fragmented reality. But to understand what's really happening, we need to dig deeper into what optimization has actually done to culture.

In music, streaming has blown the doors open for global access and democratization. Artists can reach audiences without gatekeepers. The long tail has never been longer. Yet something else has shifted. Songs are shorter, instrumental breaks have largely vanished, and the chill Spotify-core aesthetic has overtaken up-tempo hits. Hooks arrive faster, verses are tighter, and everything is optimized for the 30-second attention span of playlist culture.

Music has always adapted to the culture enabled by its dominant format. When radio was king, you needed to grab attention in the first 15 seconds or risk getting skipped. But radio DJs were gatekeepers who could champion unique picks to their taste if they believed in them. When Jay-Z and Kanye West's “Otis” premiered in 2011, Funkmaster Flex played it for 22 minutes straight because he could. Meanwhile, playlist algorithms are optimized for engagement metrics. The difference is meaningful.

But let's be honest about what else has changed. Today's music economy rewards consistency over risk-taking. It favors artists who can deliver reliable playlist-friendly content over those who might swing for transcendent but uneven albums.

Consider Billie Eilish's Hit Me Hard and Soft, which I believe is one of the best pop albums of the 21st century. But even Billie, who broke through with genuinely unusual music on SoundCloud, now operates within certain streaming era constraints. Her latest album is still carefully calibrated for the attention economy in ways that Mariah Carey’s Daydream never had to be.

Tyler The Creator's Call Me If You Get Lost is a classic alongside any other great rap album. The fact that it doesn't feel as culturally seismic as Drake's Take Care says more about music's evolved role in culture than the underlying quality.

But to the critics’ point, our social media-dominated attention has put a higher price on the opportunity cost of our attention. It has never been higher. Artists can't afford to take listeners on the kind of journeys that previous generations could. We're less patient with slow builds, odd interludes, or experimental detours.

People often reminisce about the late-1990s commercial peak in recorded music, but they may also forget about the abundance of bad albums padded with filler tracks to justify CD prices. Some record labels intentionally held back good songs from albums to not give too much away!

In 1999, Def Jam Recordings reportedly incentivized DMX and Jay-Z to drop albums before the end of the year to boost the company's value in its sale to Polygram. I've heralded it as a wise business move, and I stand by that. But have you recently listened in full to Vol 3… Life and Times of S. Carter? To put it nicely, it sounds like the cash grab that it was.

The commercial peak of any entertainment industry will always enable its fair share of monetizable mid. But here's the key difference is that today's version of "monetizable mid" is algorithmically optimized. It's more sophisticated, more targeted, and arguably more effective at what it's trying to do. Whether that makes it better or worse depends on what you value.

The rise of social media's role in culture has heightened critique as a part of culture itself. Reading comments from people on YouTube and Letterboxd is an experience in itself. But if Michael Jackson's Thriller was released today, there would be a hive of people convinced that it's not a classic because "Baby Be Mine," "The Girl Is Mine," and "The Lady in My Life," one-third of the album, are skippable songs, and classics can't have that many skips.

This reveals something crucial: we've moved from a culture of patience to a culture of curation. We expect everything to be instantly accessible, immediately rewarding, and perfectly tailored to our tastes. That's created incredible efficiencies, but it's also changed what kinds of artistic risks feel viable.

The attention commanded by social media—the center of today's pop culture—is the biggest reason why it's harder for artists to break through the noise. Not the often-cited tens of thousands of tracks uploaded to streaming services daily. Most of those are from hobbyists with less than 10 streams on Spotify. They're not blocking your favorite artist from finding their audience.

I see cultural fragmentation as evolution, not decline. "Mainstream to me" is a term I use to describe how our social media bubbles can make things seem bigger than they are. In my circles, shows like Succession and The White Lotus felt culturally dominant even though the most recent White Lotus season had fewer viewers per episode (15 million) than CBS's revival of Matlock (17 million).

This fragmentation has created space for more diverse voices and niche excellence than ever before. We can follow music religiously through podcasts, YouTube shows, and curated feeds. That's a force multiplier on what existed before. Individual pieces of art may struggle to achieve the monocultural status they once did, but the collective volume of quality across niches has never been better.

The question isn't whether we're in pop culture's worst era; we're not. The question is whether we're comfortable with the trade-offs. We've gained accessibility, diversity, and efficiency. We may have lost some patience, risk-taking, and shared cultural moments. For most of us, most of the time, that trade seems worth it.

But the critics are picking up on something that feels "off"? They're not wrong. They're just experiencing the growing pains of a culture that's optimized itself in ways we're still learning to understand.

Chartmetric Stat of the Week - Kid Cudi

Kid Cudi has been in the news for testifying in the Sean Combs trial, so let’s take this moment to give one of the blog era’s best rappers his roses! He’s the 146th most-streamed artist ever on Spotify with 13.8 billion streams. By the end of 2025, both Day N Night and Pursuit of Happiness will likely cross 1 billion streams on Spotify.