The best-seller list is an artifact of dying mass media. The first best-seller list ever came in The Bookman in 1895, when steam-powered presses enabled publishers to print more than a few thousand copies at a pop, resetting the scale of success. 1/ nytimes.com/2022/02/17/boo…
Why do we even care about best-seller lists? Of course, publishers & producers do, for blockbusters are their most highly profitable products. In their risk-capital economy, blockbusters are for them what unicorns are for VCs. 2/
But what do best-seller lists really tell us about the culture? The number of people who read the biggest best-sellers (bless them all) is still relatively small judged as penetration in the population. 3/
The music industry, the first struck by the snowball-cum-avalanche of the net, has learned that the tail of taste is much more profitable on the whole: more genres, deeper fan loyalty, less risk. The rest of media have yet to learn that lesson. 4/
The top 25 newspapers in America sell fewer print copies together than People magazine: to about 1% of the population. Super Bowl apart, all mass media are shrinking. So what does a best-seller list actually tell us? 5/
When I worked at Condé I argued, unsuccessfully, that I wanted to have a list of the books that just New Yorker readers read. Now that'd tell me something; that'd be useful as recommendation. It'd also be more telling about that culture. 6/
Apply all this to the state of podcasts, which, like blogs, enabled the blooming of unlimited flowers. Then come old-media to plow the field. Spotify is proving to be old media, buying podcasts, paying huge dollars, buildilng a wall, turning off RSS, buying up other tools. 7/
Spotify is the last gasp of old, mass media. It depends on the blockbuster economy. The blockbuster economy has to destroy the upstart economy. The battle in Tokyo Bay is underway. Murdoch et al lobbying for protectionism is much the same: Old v. new. 8/
I understand we'll never get rid of best-seller lists. Habit. But I want to see the cultural press find different ways to find and highlight talent and art and ideas as a service to both the art and the people formerly known as the audience. 9/
Having said all this, I want you all to buy my next book, please. /The end.
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