What’s a Monoculture? How Artists Are Bigger and Smaller Than Ever

Hi

ever

yone, I'm here with my good friend Rich Levy Rich has been on the channel before, I think a couple of times, but we can't remember when I think it was when Ghost in the Machine came out that we did a review of the album. It's been a while, Rich works for Live Nation. I think I have to say it from the beginning and he was the one who convinced me to do the live shows. I'm still mad at him for that, but no, I'm just kidding, Rich, welcome. thanks for having me uh it's a lot of fun so I'm not here in any official capacity with Live Nation.

I want to stay employed okay wait I just have to say this so one of the things about my channel is my channel is basically the discussions. that we used to have when I lived with Rich when I first moved here and there was a house of five musicians and we would sit around before the Internet watching MTV and we would have the exact discussions that I have here, like the one we're going to have today, okay, go ahead, Rich, yeah, it would be Sunday nights on The X-Files, so you know, Story Time with Rick, right, okay, okay, so, uh, big fan of the channel.

I watch probably one in

ever

y 20 videos and I. I caught the Usher one from the Super Bowl because I was interested in

what

you had to say, especially since it was Atlanta Centric with the lineup and also because it was a short 8 minute video. I thought this is in my wheelhouse, okay? I'm watching the video and I'm about six minutes in and you're talking about acts that can play the Super Bowl and how, and you read the list of Super Bowl performers through 2013, 2013 and you start talking. about how hard it is to become a global superstar in today's environment with algorithms etc., and I got some really interesting opinions on that because I'm looking at the globalization of music in a completely different way, okay, so give me your opinion, so I believe.

I think this madness is happening where the

monoculture

is breaking up. You and I are old enough to have lived through the pre-MTV era, the MTV era and, to some extent, the post-MTV era and now the Internet era, the early Internet era and now the social media and streaming era , I really like it, I like the way you broke it down in a radically different way and I work at Live Nation where we tour, we still see so many tours of

artists

from the '70s and '80s that are gigantic. Massive ticket sellers all over the world and then we see the music that has been developing since then for so many years.

They ask us

what

will happen when the Rolling Stones stop touring. What will happen? Will there be a Next Generation and everyone's defiant response? It's always good that we don't see the future and not our response, but usually the interviewer or news source says we don't see the future and then slowly but surely the future emerges, whether you know Pearl Jam and Dave Matthews. The band you know becomes Arena and Stadium Acts or Foo Fighters after them or Blink 182 or Green Day or Taylor Swift or Beyonce or the weekend you mentioned they played one of the Super Bowl halftime shows, it's very different because I don't I don't have that global mono culture where something came out on MTV and everyone everywhere knew about it, suddenly because something came out on MTV, every radio station played it, every supermarket had it now like they didn't there was that, like I don't even know where you hear it. music now that's a big thing when you told me that I thought to myself wow, that's true because the experience of listening I went to the mall with ilila and we were in a store and something clicked and I had it Shazam it CU.

I don't know what it was and I didn't recognize the artist even when she Shazam Shazam it, that's hard to say and then another one came up, it was a playlist and I'm finding all these different

artists

and of course I couldn't. I did it on my phone so I had to take a picture of their phone with Shazam but these are things you wouldn't hear on the radio and it turns out it's whatever playlist they were playing in the store and I asked the people and they didn't They knew it. Don't you have Shazam on your phone?

I have Shazam on my phone but it doesn't work on my phone for some reason it makes sense I don't know why it doesn't work I have an iPhone 15 because my phone broke and for some reason Shazam doesn't work on it interesting what did you say about Apple ? Okay, anyway, who's back on topic, but you couldn't help the songs, that's what you said, yeah and there. It was a time when you couldn't avoid songs. I remember going to the beach in the early 80's. I'm like a pre-teen and I was walking on the beach and you could almost jump from one beach radio to another listening to beach radio.

Toto's Rosanna was inevitable, right, and Toto can still tour. You've had Luke on your channel. I mean, they still come out and people love those songs. hearing the same simple

monoculture

for the people who are watching this like I don't even know what they're talking about monoculture that's right that's fair so the first credit or credits go to Bob Leets whose podcast you're on write Let's Talk about this all the time and a lot of my thinking and my drive comes from following what he said: monoculture is when it was much easier in the media environment for a single song to become ubiquitous throughout the world and in the global culture and That's easier to do when there are three television channels and five radio stations and then 11 television channels and then maybe even 40 with the first introduction of cable, but now it's endless and it was endless even before we were where we are in terms of the Internet. and social networks think about when satellite radio with 200 channels appeared.

I mean, it's amazing how stratified the media environment is now. We don't even talk about how people can. You were talking about how algorithms serve people more than they already like, so that's a lot. It's harder for them to even find the right thing because they get isolated is the term I used in a certain genre if you like that you're going to like this if you like that you like this it's like everything is similar to each other it's horrible like you're and you'll start to see what makes the song a great video, you might get more videos until there's nothing in your feed, but even though I did all the different genres of music, that's fair, so monoculture is when there was a single. culture, there might be a single list of songs that everyone would know and even if you didn't follow the genre well, maybe you weren't a country fan and you didn't know what was going on in country, but there were still things that would become so big. that would break into the public Consciousness in other ways and at the same time today let's say you're walking through the supermarket and they happen to be playing music, what music are they playing?

Are they playing something current? listening Are you on a phone call? Are you listening to a podcast? Are you listening with headphones? Do you have many people? You just walk around and see people with headphones on all the time listening to their own music in their own world. That's exactly right. So the possibilities of those shared Music Discovery experiences are incredibly different now, so you have this stratification, where people are sinking deeper and deeper into

smaller

silos and you know a lot of people say that artists aren't as big in the music. it's not that big since the monoculture was broken, that's where I disagree with what you had to say because I agree that not everyone knows the same things, but the misconception is that music was

bigger

and music artists were Bigger in the '80s and '90s compared to today, in a way they were in the sense that everyone knew them and we had a shared vocabulary of what was popular, but the things that are big today are much

bigger

. bigger than they were then, give an example of the Journey on the Escape or Frontiers tour.

I could have gone out and played one or two dates in a row at the stadium. I haven't gone back to check the previous route so don't make me do it, but the big acts of the time would play one stadium, maybe two stadiums in a Marketplace today Coldplay will play six stadiums in one city in six stadiums in a single city Taylor Swift will play in four or five stadiums in a single city and she will not stop because there is no demand but because she simply does not want to do any more shows in that city because she wants to succeed in another part of the world or the country or anywhere else , so you have this crazy dissonance that music is bigger than ever and yet the artists also don't have the same level of penetration as them.

I have had so how is that possible? Wait, wait, wait, let me, let me go back to 1992. I saw you two at Veteran Stadium on the second night of a stadium tour. Now, they would never really do more than two nights on a tour, but could they? I have performed over two nights at Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia, the answer is there is no way to know and there are many people I work with who were the people who did those shows at that time and could give real answers that Any What I would say would be speculative, but no one did it and that suggests that there was some level of fear in doing it now that might have been fear in doing it because the singer didn't want to do it another night because of his voice. it could have been because there were other places they wanted to get to and there was a limited amount of time to rewind for a second.

People don't remember that pre-internet releases were so different that you were talking about how there was a preview in the press and publicity months in advance and then a single and finally the album did well, that would be in a territory, it could be a period preview 3-6 Monon for the US and then if the artist wasn't available to go to other countries and do press. and touring and radio, it may never be released there, which is why we grew up with things called Imports, where you had to bring physical records or CDs from other countries because they weren't released in your country, simply because you had a release Here it didn't mean that you were guaranteed to be released in Europe, that's exactly right, or anywhere else in the world beyond that, if you can think about it, now we fast forward to where we are today, uh, with an experience of Internet. where there are no barriers to distribution there is immediate worldwide distribution there are no barriers to promotion you can reach people fans can fans can reach people artists can reach people directly in ways they have never been able to before have done it and that there was no way in 1970 or 1980 or 1990 to address L to your fans, you couldn't just make a blast on social media, you would have to do an interview in a print publication or go on a late night talk show and even so you were just hoping your fans would tune in now that there's direct streaming. communication is now gaining people's attention, that's a different problem, right, but what has happened now is that artists are bigger and

smaller

than ever.

Wow, okay, explain that because music is released immediately and distributed everywhere without barriers, there is more demand around the world. For artists I've never seen before, I once again try not to speak too much out of my Live Nation hat because this is not an authorized interview. I didn't ask, so they probably would have said okay, but you know there's more demand for artists making their way to play in the world than the time artists have to do it. Taylor Swift could stop making albums and tour for four years straight and still never meet worldwide demand.

In reality, she never worked in Europe. How many albums has she made? 10 oh like she's a country artist they don't usually go to europe she went there as a stadium artist which is kind of unfathomable for the people who came up in Before Time plus there's a globalization of music we've never seen . seen before Bad Bunny is a gigantic global superstar who doesn't sing in English, right, that was never even a glimmer of a possibility in a pre-internet era, it was the paradigm of Hollywood where he was either a US export or he was one from London. export and that's what was popular or it was a band from Sweden saying in English that's fair or there I mean, look, I'm not talking about discounts on Bollywood or things that were specific to specific countries, but there was very little talk.

English outside of Sweden and, uh, you've got the UK and the US and Australia and Canada, and then occasionally acts would emerge that sang in English and came from outside of those countries. That's how it is now, suddenly, not everyone. Act is generated from the US. US acts can tour places they have never been able to travel before, India, Israel, etc. um and AXS from all those places can come and tour places in cities across the US that would never have been imaginable before Ax was able to do it. being able to come and perform in New York and Los Angeles in Chicago, now we're seeing foreign artists come and perform in stadiums in 8, 10, 20 cities and they can do that kind of sold-out business, again, bigger and more small than it is.

Has there ever beenbefore, all at the same time, which brings me back to the original thought of the initiator of the Super Bowl, the Super Bowl, who can play the Super Bowl, the Super Bowl is like what 100 to 125 million people watch, yeah, I think the answer to that is. that there are many artists like the answer to that question who will replace the classic rock artists when they leave who will replace the Super Bowl artists and the answer is that there are many artists that will play at the Super Bowl. forward as the audience continues to age and as those artists find their way generationally.

Yesterday I read a story that Imagine Dragons has 10 songs that have surpassed 1 billion streams each on Spotify. It's amazing, plus, yes, some of those songs have over a billion separate views on YouTube. Yes, now I understand that not everyone is an Imagine Dragons Fan, not everyone knows who is right Imagine Dragons, but there will be a point in the future. I'm not sure where the tipping point is where enough people around the world know they can play the Super Bowl. That's exactly the right thing. Mr. Reynolds, you're welcome, well I'd love to know his opinion on this topic.

Thank you very much for being here. Hey, one more thing, I love you buddy, you too my friend, keep doing your thing, thanks.