Stat Significant’s Prediction Market Report 🎰

This page tracks activity across prominent prediction market platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket, offering a real-time view of what people think will happen next. The interactive charts and tables below highlight where attention (and money) is flowing, from the most active markets to newly trending bets to pop culture-driven speculation.

All visuals are updated regularly, with new data added daily and weekly. When available, click “Get Data” at the bottom of a chart to download the underlying dataset.

Because many of the graphics below are interactive, this page is best viewed on the web rather than in an email client or the Substack app.

Table of Contents

For paid subscribers — click a link below to jump straight to that section:

1. Section 1: Top Markets on Kalshi and Polymarket

   1. Top Kalshi Prediction Markets: Last 7 Days

   2. Top Polymarket Prediction Markets: Last 7 Days

2. Section 2: Top Newly Trending Prediction Markets on Kalshi and Polymarket

   1. Top Newly Trending Kalshi Prediction Markets: Last 7 Days

   2. Top Newly Trending Polymarket Prediction Markets: Last 7 Days

3. Section 3: Top Pop Culture Prediction Markets on Kalshi and Polymarket

   1. Top Kalshi Pop Culture Prediction Markets: Last 7 Days

   2. Top Polymarket Pop Culture Prediction Markets: Last 7 Days

   3. Top Newly Trending Kalshi Pop Culture Prediction Markets: Last 7 Days

Section 1: Top Markets on Kalshi and Polymarket

Top Kalshi Prediction Markets: Last 7 Days

• What This Chart Shows: Top Kalshi prediction markets sorted by recent trading volume.

• Data Source: Kalshi API

• Data Update Frequency: Daily || Data Can Be Downloaded: ✅

Top Polymarket Prediction Markets: Last 7 Days

• What This Chart Shows: Top Polymarket prediction markets sorted by recent trading volume.

• Data Source: Polymarket API

• Data Update Frequency: Daily || Data Can Be Downloaded: ✅

The Deep Dive: For Paying Subscribers

We also reserve several charts for paying subscribers, including:

• Newly trending markets on prominent prediction market platforms.

• The top pop culture-related prediction markets.

These views update daily or weekly, are fully interactive, and include downloadable data.

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Intro: The Near-Demise of Disney

In the late 1980s, Disney was on the precipice of bankruptcy. After the deaths of Walt Disney and his brother Roy O. Disney, the company had drifted creatively, culminating in the disastrous 1985 release of The Black Cauldron. The ambitious sword-and-sorcery epic was the most expensive film in the studio’s history—and, subsequently, a high-profile flop, losing roughly $70 million in today’s dollars.

Following The Black Cauldron’s failure, many predicted that the long-suffering conglomerate was nearing its end, as Wall Street raiders began launching takeover bids to gut the company.

Underlying the turmoil was a growing belief within Hollywood that feature animation—the medium Disney had brought to the mainstream with Snow White—was no longer commercially viable. To many, the idea that a major studio could build its future around animated films or family entertainment felt increasingly untenable.

Obviously, that consensus did not age well. In 2024, Disney-Pixar’s Inside Out 2 was the year’s highest-grossing film, while Zootopia 2 carried the company to yet another box office win in 2025. In fact, entertainment aimed at younger audiences has become one of the last bastions of box office stability, justifying continued investment in an uncertain post-pandemic movie landscape.

So today, we’ll explore the commercial resurgence of children’s entertainment, the volatile economics underpinning the genre, and the format’s uncertain future.

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How Kids’ Movies Became Hollywood’s Most Reliable Bet

For the purposes of this analysis, we’ll combine the “family” and “animation” genres into a single category of children’s entertainment, using both terms interchangeably. Got it? Great!

The first thing you’ll want to know about this family film category is that it’s among Hollywood’s most profitable theatrical formats, generating a return on investment comparable to that of the horror genre.

What’s especially notable here is that horror movies generate a 3x return on a ~$10M budget, while an animated film is tripling a budget five to ten times that amount. Amid post-pandemic volatility, this asymmetric upside has helped family films remain a core pillar of studio slates.

Yet the family film wasn’t always a box office juggernaut. The genre’s enduring dominance was shaped through two commercial renaissances:

1. Disney’s Revival in the 1990s: After a string of flops in the 1980s, Disney reversed its fortunes with the release of The Little Mermaid. The film became a massive commercial success, launching a new era for the studio and popularizing the name Ariel for decades. The company built on this momentum with a run of generational classics—like Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, Pocahontas, and Mulan—that reestablished animation as a dominant box office force.

2. The Rise of Pixar: In 1995, Pixar’s Toy Story stunned audiences with its groundbreaking computer animation, ushering in a new era for the medium. The film laid the foundation for an extraordinary run of Pixar hits, including WALL·E, Ratatouille, and Up!.

Each paradigm shift further cemented children’s entertainment as a cornerstone of the modern box office. By the end of Pixar’s late-2000s hot streak, family films routinely accounted for 30 to 40 percent of the year’s 25 highest-grossing releases.

Financially, the genre has a high floor and an almost unlimited ceiling. While creative execution matters, the format’s durability is underpinned by two behavioral forces outside Hollywood’s control:

1. Parents of young children want to leave the house when given the chance, because toddlers aren’t exactly wired for Netflix & chill.

2. Once you leave the house, you want an activity that will hold your child’s attention for an hour or two, ideally offering a brief reprieve from constant supervision.

If this explanation reads as reductive, it’s because the logic really is that simple.

Given considerable built-in demand, you’d expect the genre to expand indefinitely, churning out a growing slate of family blockbusters. And yet it hasn’t.

Around 2010, the genre’s release volume plateaued, and in recent years, the number of family films has plummeted (Note: these figures include streaming movies).

The clearest explanation for the genre’s stagnation is cost. These films are expensive to produce, with inflation-adjusted budgets that place family releases in the same high-cost tier as sci-fi and fantasy.

In an increasingly risk-averse Hollywood landscape, children’s entertainment has become an all-or-nothing proposition. The average family film now ranks among the industry’s most expensive bets, with a growing share of projects carrying inflation-adjusted budgets above $75 million. These films must then generate correspondingly large box office returns to justify the investment.

There is ample demand for children’s entertainment, yet the genre has been squeezed into a narrow economic mold, mirroring Hollywood’s broader reliance on franchises and reboots. Disney now leans heavily on animated sequels like Inside Out 2, Zootopia 2, and Moana 2, alongside live-action remakes that everyone hates but still manage to make $1B (Mulan, The Lion King, and also Moana).

So where does the genre go from here? The most likely outcome is a meaningful uptick in children’s films, driven by their outsized box office returns and, more recently, their strong performance on streaming platforms.

Each week, the analytics firm Nielsen publishes a ranking of the most-watched shows and movies on streaming platforms. Among the top films on streaming since 2024, a clear pattern emerges: every movie is aimed at children.

If your kid wants to watch Moana or the Minions for yet another week, that is yet another week that you will remain subscribed to Disney+ or Peacock. Congratulations.

Meanwhile, Netflix finally made a successful kids’ film (Kpop Demon Hunters) while Disney is running out of IP to tarnish. Together, these shifts could open the door to a new wave of children’s entertainment built on original stories and modest budgets. Or so I hope.

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Final Thoughts: Nostalgia for Deceptive Garbage

When I was a kid, I saw a movie trailer that featured a rapping CGI kangaroo. Being young and animal-obsessed, I was enamored. It was at this moment that I vowed to see Kangaroo Jack, and spent several days lobbying my mom to take me to this marsupial-centric crime comedy. When I finally saw the film, I was shocked to discover that the rapping kangaroo only appeared in a 30-second dream sequence, and that the movie was really about two human thieves whose stolen money gets swiped by a thoroughly non-musical kangaroo.

As the film reached its conclusion, I realized I’d been duped. And, as it turns out, I wasn’t alone. Internet lore tells of a group of aggrieved Kangaroo Jack viewers who banded together to sue the distributor for false advertising. Turns out the movie was originally shot as an R-rated mob comedy called Down and Under, before disastrous test screenings led producers to rework it into a PG family film, retrofitted around a hastily-inserted CGI kangaroo (which became central to its marketing). Yikes!

In writing this article, I found myself thinking about Kangaroo Jack often, and, somewhat unexpectedly, feeling nostalgic for this deceptive piece of garbage. Though in actuality, I’m nostalgic for what this deceptive piece of garbage represents.

Family films used to benefit from a perceived unimportance. Hollywood wasn’t relying on the genre to carry the box office, so a half-baked project like Kangaroo Jack could be tossed into theaters without much consequence because these movies didn’t require $2 billion in revenue to justify their existence. This period saw fewer sequels, more risk-taking, and, inevitably, more misses. Kangaroo Jack isn’t redeeming on its own merits—because, well, it’s terrible—it’s simply the opposite of everything family filmmaking has become.

Hollywood runs on cycles of imitation and exhaustion. A format or concept proves itself, the industry attempts to templatize that success, and abundant mechanization eventually strips that storytelling concept of its original appeal. Contrary to the Disney naysayers of the 1980s, children’s entertainment is alive and well. Whether the format survives its own success is another question.

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The Stat Significant Movie Report 🎬

This page tracks which movies are capturing audience attention across theaters, streaming services, and online platforms. The interactive charts and tables below highlight the films generating the most engagement—from review activity and box office performance to trailer views and pre-release buzz.

All visuals are updated regularly, with new data added daily and weekly. When available, click “Get Data” at the bottom of a chart to download the underlying dataset.

Because many of the graphics below are interactive, this page is best viewed on the web rather than in an email client or the Substack app.

Table of Contents

For paid subscribers — click a link below to jump straight to that section:

1. Section 1: The Most-Watched Films in Theaters and on Streaming

   1. The Most Reviewed Movies Online: Last 7 Days

   2. The Most Reviewed Movies Online: This Year

   3. Which Movies Are Performing Best on Streaming, According to Nielsen?

   4. Which Older Movies Dominate Online Activity?

2. Section 2: Box Office — This Year and Historical

   1. The Highest-Grossing Movies of the Year

   2. The Highest-Grossing Movies of All Time

3. Section 3: Most Anticipated Movies

   1. Most Anticipated Movies: According to Recent Online Traffic

   2. Most-Viewed Movie Trailers

4. Section 4: Genre Prevalence and Performance

   1. Genre Share of Movies Released by Year

   2. Financial Performance by Genre

Section 1: The Most-Watched Films in Theaters and on Streaming

The Most Reviewed Movies Online: Last 7 Days

• What This Chart Shows: The films with the most online reviews published over the past week. Review volume is indexed from 1 to 100, with 100 representing the highest volume.

• Data Source: TMDB online review volume.

• Data Update Frequency: Every 2 days. || Data Can Be Downloaded: ✅

The Most Reviewed Movies Online: This Year

• What This Chart Shows: The films with the most online reviews published during this calendar year. Review volume is indexed from 1 to 100, with 100 representing the highest volume.

• Data Source: TMDB online review volume.

• Data Update Frequency: Every 2 days. || Data Can Be Downloaded: ✅

Which Movies Are Performing Best on Streaming, According to Nielsen?

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Intro: New Music is Bad Music

Past a certain age, all new music starts to sound like bad music. For as long as pop has existed, there has been a reliable cohort of older listeners ready to dismiss today’s Top 40 as inferior. According to these elders, the best art was made—quite conveniently—when they were between the ages of 13 and 26. Anything outside this window is judged, by some vague and unverifiable standard, to be worse.

This generational bias is easily quantified. In a 2021 YouGov poll, respondents of varying ages were surveyed on their favorite musical era. Each generation—predictably, and quite stubbornly—chose the music of their youth.

In other words, whether modern music is good or bad depends on who you ask. Or does it?

Recently, while analyzing some Spotify Top 50 data, I noticed that newly released songs were losing popularity. If this reads as vague, know that’s intentional, since we’ll delve into the specifics shortly. As I dug deeper into the charts, a larger question emerged: how can we systematically measure the relevance of Top 40? Are newly released songs losing their cultural foothold, or is our perception distorted by confounding variables? Given the subjectivity of music taste, can we meaningfully evaluate whether the songs of 2026 are less loved than those of 1975?

So today, we’ll examine the case for and against the continued relevance of newly released music, and consider what our findings signify for aspiring musicians and listeners clinging to the songs of their youth.

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The Case for New Music’s Growing Popularity

In the 20th century, owning a chart-topping song meant buying an entire album—purchasing a bundle of 10 to 14 tunes to get one hit track. This changed with the introduction of digital distribution, which enabled single-song consumption on platforms like iTunes and Spotify. Today, one hit song can function as a standalone commercial enterprise, garnering billions of streams on Apple Music and YouTube.

Much of this shift reflects a longstanding listener preference: when given the option, consumers prefer to pick and choose songs across artists and albums—a dynamic the industry has increasingly rewarded. Since the Billboard Hot 100 launched in 1958, record labels and distributors have steadily shifted from maximizing album sales to extending the commercial lifespan of individual hits. As a result, the average Billboard-charting song has nearly doubled its stay on the Hot 100.

So what does this trend mean in practice? First, and perhaps quite confoundingly, the most commercially successful songs in recorded pop history are simply the newest ones. Case in point: “Lose Control” by Teddy Swims spent a combined 112 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100—spanning both a summer and winter Olympics—making it the longest-tenured track in the chart’s 70-year history.

Had you given me a blind taste test to identify the most consumed song in music history, I would not have picked “Lose Control” over “Hey Jude” or “Respect.” So yeah, you heard it here first: Teddy Swims tops The Beatles. As does LMFAO’s “Party Rock Anthem”, which is a song that—checks notes—really stinks.

So how do we reconcile Swims’ chart-topping dominance with the reality that he did not write a song better than “I Will Always Love You” or “Bohemian Rhapsody”? The answer is momentum. When a modern song—or a cluster of songs—catches on, it’s amplified throughout the streaming ecosystem via playlist curation and, most powerfully, through algorithmic recommendations. Success compounds, making big-name releases that much bigger.

When we examine the artists with the most Billboard-charting songs of all time, our list is dominated by contemporary acts at the peak of their powers, like Taylor Swift, Morgan Wallen, and The Weeknd.

We can attribute this hierarchy to a phenomenon I’ll call the New Music Friday Effect. In the streaming era, new music is typically released on Friday, as codified by Spotify’s prominent New Music Friday playlist. I’ve always found this decision counterintuitive, since streaming activity is much higher during the week when people are working, but whatever, some nerd at Spotify arbitrarily chose Friday, and the music industry recalibrated itself around this decision. So it goes.

Major artists have adapted to this condensed release timeline by building anticipation ahead of Friday drops and using playlist placement as a major accelerant. If you checked a trending music playlist from October 2025, you’d see Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl overtaking the charts. Instead of slowly rolling out singles, Swift can release a full album at once and let the algorithmic hype machine handle much of the promotional work.

So does this mean newer music is actually more popular? Yes and no. Recent releases can dominate attention for months, and sometimes years, but that success is concentrated among a narrow class of superstars and mega-hits. The Taylor Swifts, Drakes, and Morgan Wallens of the world benefit enormously from New Music Friday and the playlist ecosystem. But the rise of this elite tier has come at the expense of smaller acts trying to break through.

Working-class musicians must contend with a Taylor Swift track released four months ago, and, quite surprisingly, a Fleetwood Mac song from the late 1970s or Radiohead’s “Creep” from the mid-1990s.

The Case for New Music’s Declining Popularity

Spotify’s marquee charts and playlists are heavily informed by listener demographics. The platform’s earliest adopters skewed younger, giving contemporary hits an outsized presence on the streamer—particularly youth-driven genres like hip-hop. But as Spotify scaled, older cohorts began reshaping its streaming ecosystem, lifting classic rock and late-20th-century alternative into heavy rotation. By 2025, roughly 30% of listeners were over 45, a meaningful shift from the platform’s early user base.

So what does this mean in practice? Well, over the past five years, a growing share of Spotify’s Top 100 has gone to decades-old tracks like The Killers’ “Mr. Brightside” and Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams.” Each holiday season, the platform sees a pronounced spike in Christmas classics, followed by a sustained rise in canonical hits from The Killers and Radiohead.

As of this writing, the following songs have made Spotify’s Top 50 almost every day for the last three months:

• “Mr. Brightside” by The Killers (2004)

• “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac (1977)

• “Iris” by Goo Goo Dolls (1998)

• “Creep” by Radiohead (1992)

• “Sweater Weather” by The Neighbourhood (2012)

• "505" by Arctic Monkeys (2007)

To recap, we’ve observed two parallel forces reshaping modern music consumption over the last decade:

1. Elite artists and mega-hits are occupying an ever-growing share of charts and playlists.

2. Older songs are increasingly durable within the streaming zeitgeist.

Taken together, these structural shifts have effectively boxed out a proverbial “middle class” of mainstream musicians. Without the momentum of existing celebrity or nostalgia, new songs struggle to gain a foothold on streaming platforms.

These dynamics have led to a drastic increase in the average time a track trends in Spotify’s Top 50, while also resulting in a significant dip in the number of new songs charting each year.

There are countless ways to illustrate the erosion of novelty within mainstream culture, but I chose to approach this particular issue through the prism of my favorite musical phenomenon: the one-hit wonder.

The one-hit wonder has given us so much: The Macarena, The Cotton-Eyed Joe, 867-5309, and What Does the Fox Say? Few things inject more novelty into a dance party than a hit song from an artist devoid of long-term commercial staying power. Yet the one-hit wonder may be a thing of the past. As of 2021, the share of one-time entrants on the Billboard Hot 100 has fallen to an all-time low.

The one-hit wonder represents an extreme case of fleeting music stardom, while also serving as an effective proxy for a vast middle class of musicians boxed out of the Top 40. In a landscape dominated by elite superstars and nostalgic hits, how does anyone break through?

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Final Thoughts: What Controls the Zeitgeist?

Popularized in the late 19th century, the German word Zeitgeist describes the defining cultural climate and artistic touchstones of a given era. The term’s usage expanded throughout the 20th century to interrogate the rise of mass-distributed media like recorded music, big-budget filmmaking, nationally syndicated newspapers, and broadcast television. Prior to the digital age, the zeitgeist was heavily shaped by intermediaries, including radio DJs, studio executives, record labels, journalists, and culture critics.

The 21st century promised disintermediation—with digital platforms like Spotify connecting artists and listeners directly, absent gatekeepers. In theory, collective preference would emerge organically, expressed through algorithmic recommendations.

At their core, algorithms are designed to give us what we want, often serving as a mirror of our collective id—revealing unfortunate truths hiding in plain sight. In the case of new music, algorithmic curation suggests that we may have long overvalued novelty. In a flattened digital landscape, absent critics and DJs, listeners tend to default to inertia—gravitating toward nostalgic favorites or months-old Taylor Swift songs rather than taking a chance on something new. Perhaps the zeitgeist isn’t always defined by recency.

I have mixed feelings about these trends:

• On the one hand, all musicians should be able to make a living. More novelty is good. Art matters. We shouldn’t get lost in abstractions because some of the best moments of our lives are soundtracked to music.

• On the other hand, there may have been a musical middle class propped up by invasive radio curation and record label lobbying. Now, in an unmediated digital marketplace, these acts no longer get their 15 minutes in the zeitgeist.

Perhaps the next generation of listeners will be the first to favor a different cohort’s music. Maybe Gen Beta and Baby Boomers will converge on the same cultural consensus: that new music isn’t the best music. Whether that’s a sign of progress or stagnation depends on who you ask.

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Stat Significant’s Wikipedia Traffic Trends Report 📕

This page tracks trends across Wikipedia—surfacing the pages and topics capturing global attention right now. The interactive charts and tables below explore search behavior, breakout interest, and historical viewership, providing a real-time survey of the cultural zeitgeist as reflected through Wikipedia traffic.

All visuals are updated regularly, with new data added daily and weekly. When available, click “Get Data” at the bottom of a chart to download the underlying dataset.

Because many of the graphics below are interactive, this page is best viewed on the web rather than in an email client or the Substack app.

Table of Contents

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1. Section 1: Recent Wikipedia Search Trends

   1. The Most-Visited Wikipedia Pages in the Last 7 Days

   2. First-Time Pages Trending in the Top 100 (Last 7 Days)

2. Section 2: Historical Wikipedia Search Trends

   1. Most-Visited Wikipedia Pages this Year

   2. Most-Visited Wikipedia Pages All Time

   3. Wikipedia Pages with the Most Views in a Single Day

Section 1: Recent Wikipedia Search Trends

The Most-Visited Wikipedia Pages in the Last 7 Days

• What This Chart Shows: Wikipedia pages ranked by the number of days spent in the Top 100 and by daily traffic over the last 7 days.

• Data Source: Wikipedia API

• Data Update Frequency: Daily || Data Can Be Downloaded: ✅

First-Time Pages Trending in the Top 100 (Last 7 Days)

• What This Chart Shows: Wikipedia pages making their first-ever appearances in the Top 100 most-viewed list, ranked by days trending and traffic over the last 7 days.

• Data Source: Wikipedia API

• Data Update Frequency: Daily || Data Can Be Downloaded: ✅

The Deep Dive: For Paying Subscribers

We also reserve several charts for paying subscribers, including:

• Most-Visited Wikipedia Pages this Year

• Most-Visited Wikipedia Pages All Time

• Wikipedia Pages with the Most Views in a Single Day

These views update daily or weekly, are fully interactive, and include downloadable data.

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Stat Significant’s Online Trends Report 🖥️

This page tracks trends across Google, Reddit, TikTok, and YouTube—surfacing the topics and pop culture phenomena capturing our attention right now. The interactive charts and tables below explore search behavior, social media mentions, and trending videos, providing a real-time view of the cultural zeitgeist.

All visuals are updated regularly, with new data added daily and weekly. When available, click “Get Data” at the bottom of a chart to download the underlying dataset.

Because many of the graphics below are interactive, this page is best viewed on the web rather than in an email client or the Substack app.

Table of Contents

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1. Section 1: Trending on YouTube

   1. Top 1,000 Trending Videos on YouTube in the Last 15 Days

2. Section 2: Trending on Google

   1. The Top Search Terms Trending on Google: Last 10 Days

   2. The Top Entertainment Search Terms Trending on Google: Last 10 Days

3. Section 3: Trending on TikTok

   1. Top Trending Hashtags on TikTok: Last 7 Days

4. Section 4: Trending on Reddit

   1. Most Discussed Movies on Reddit: Last 30 Days

   2. Most Discussed TV Shows on Reddit: Last 30 Days

   3. Most Discussed Music Acts on Reddit: Last 30 Days

Section 1: Trending on YouTube

Top 1,000 Trending Videos on YouTube in the Last 15 Days

• What This Chart Shows: The top trending videos on YouTube, sorted by peak trending rank and then views recorded while trending.

• Data Source: YouTube API

• Data Update Frequency: Every 2 days. || Data Can Be Downloaded: ✅

Section 2: Trending on Google

The Top Search Terms Trending on Google: Last 10 Days

• What This Chart Shows: The top search terms trending on Google in the last 10 days.

• Data Source: Google Trends API

• Data Update Frequency: Daily || Data Can Be Downloaded: ✅

The Top Entertainment Search Terms Trending on Google: Last 10 Days

• What This Chart Shows: The top entertainment-related search terms trending on Google in the last 10 days.

• Data Source: Google Trends API

• Data Update Frequency: Daily || Data Can Be Downloaded: ✅

The Deep Dive: For Paying Subscribers

We also reserve several charts for paying subscribers, including:

• Trending TikTok Hashtags

• Trending Movies on Reddit

• Trending TV Shows on Reddit

• Trending Music Acts on Reddit

These views update daily or weekly, are fully interactive, and include downloadable data.

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Today’s essay uses data from Stat Significant’s Streaming Report—a suite of interactive charts, updated weekly, that tracks what people actually watch across streaming. You can explore The Streaming Report’s 20+ deep-dive graphics here.

Intro: Awe-Inspiring

The mythologist Joseph Campbell once wrote, “Awe is what moves us forward,” while astronaut Neil Armstrong mused that, “Mystery creates wonder, and wonder is the basis of man’s desire to understand.” I could pile on more awe-centric quotes, but the gist is this: the universe is unknowable, filled with endless mystery for mortals and data journalists alike. Just when I understand the machinations of our big, beautiful planet and its cultural patterns, I review some streaming data and realize I know nothing.

Such was the case while building a recent streaming dashboard, where I discovered that the most valuable show on television isn’t Stranger Things, Squid Game, or even the Sopranos back-catalog, but an Australian kid’s cartoon about a dog named Bluey. For parents of young children, this is painfully obvious. For everyone else, it’s surprising, perhaps even awe-inspiring for how little we know.

Bluey’s success is one of the great case studies of the streaming era—a show that reveals what people actually want from television and the fundamental shortcomings of the platform that hosts it. That an Australian children’s cartoon became Disney+’s biggest hit is, paradoxically, a testament to everything the century-old conglomerate gets wrong.

So today, we’ll dig into the Bluey phenomenon, explore the unexpected winners of the streaming wars, and examine what the show’s success reveals about Disney’s strategic failures.

Why Bluey is the Biggest Show on Television

Bluey was originally commissioned by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), where it premiered on public television in October 2018. In 2019, Disney struck a deal with ABC and BBC Studios to acquire international broadcasting and streaming rights, and the show made its way onto Disney+ when the platform launched in early 2020. What followed was beyond anyone’s wildest expectations.

Every week since late 2023, Nielsen has published a ranking of the 10 most-streamed programs in the U.S. Over the past three months, Bluey has appeared on this chart every single week, demonstrating a level of staying power that far exceeds prestige hits like The Pitt and Landman.

But wait, there’s more: across the 101 weeks captured in this Nielsen Top 10 dataset, Bluey has appeared on the chart a staggering 100 times.

The next-closest shows are Grey’s Anatomy, NCIS, Family Guy, and Bob’s Burgers—all syndicated content with deep back catalogs whose popularity predates streaming. Only further down the list do true streaming-era hits begin to appear, like Love is Blind, Landman, and Reacher.

Bluey’s success—and the success of other Nielsen mainstays offers two lessons for TV tastemakers:

1. The Power of Children’s Programming: Bluey, SpongeBob, Family Guy, and Bob’s Burgers are widely consumed by adolescents and teenagers. These shows have extensive episode catalogs that lend themselves to binge-watching. I exhibited the same behavior when I was a kid, except I was consuming reruns of Full House and Boy Meets World when I got home from school.

2. Syndication’s Silent Streaming Domination: Coverage of the streaming wars is hyperfixated on new and expensive series like Stranger Things and Masters of the Air, but in reality, an outsized share of viewership goes to long-running cable shows dumped on streaming services.

Indeed, when we look at the breakdown of Nielsen-charting programs by content type, around 60% to 70% of spots go to syndicated programs like Grey’s Anatomy and Bluey.

In a TV landscape dominated by long-running, widely recognizable programs, Disney has stumbled onto the ultimate prize. At first glance, it looks like a major win for the Mouse House—but beneath the surface, Bluey’s success reveals deeper strategic shortcomings.

Despite its vast film library and unmatched brand recognition, Disney—along with its subsidiary Hulu—is a distant third in streaming viewership and has ceded meaningful audience share since 2022.

Even with the single biggest program on streaming, Disney draws half the viewership of Netflix—a gap made even more glaring by one inconvenient detail: Disney doesn’t own Bluey. One recent estimate suggests the Australian series accounts for 29% of all Disney+ watch time, which raises an uncomfortable question: if Bluey were to run away, how much of that audience would leave with it?

In fact, since late 2023, the top shows on Disney+ and Hulu have been dominated by syndicated staples like Bluey and Grey’s Anatomy—with the latter program also licensed to Netflix—while streaming-first hits like Andor and The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives draw far less viewership.

On paper, this seems like a win: if syndication and familiarity are the secret sauce, Disney can keep licensing decades-old shows that toddlers and teenagers will happily binge.

But beneath this ostensible advantage lies Disney’s core problem—one that cuts across both film and television: the hundred-year-old conglomerate struggles to create anything new. At some point, this lack of innovation will cause problems for Disney. For example, what would happen if Bluey secedes from Disney and launches its own service called Bluey+ Max?

Historically, Disney+ and Hulu have captured a combined 25% of Nielsen’s Top 10 streaming chart. But if Bluey were to leave the platform and we exclude titles that make the chart while on multiple services (e.g., streaming on Netflix and Disney+ at the same time), that combined share drops to 8.4%.

Streaming subscriptions thrive on week-to-week engagement. If your kid is a Bluey-holic and craves their daily or weekly dose of adorable Australian canine, then you will remain a Disney+ subscriber until your child moves on to Family Guy or goes to college.

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Final Thoughts: The Allure of Glowing Tablets

I recently had a kid (yay!), and one day I brought him into my office to bounce in his BabyBjörn while I answered a few emails—because parents can have it all. After a few minutes of bouncing, I noticed something strange: complete silence. No coos, no giggles, no fussing. I looked up and saw him locked onto my desktop monitor, wide-eyed and perfectly still—captivated by his first-ever screen.

Then came a familiar wave of good old-fashioned parent guilt. Was he supposed to be looking at screens this young? Was I rewiring his brain in real time? Had I compromised his analog purity? I had no good answer to these questions, so I turned him away from the monitor, at which point he started to fuss.

It was at this moment that I realized how easy it would be to turn him around and pacify him with a screen, and how this impulse would remain evergreen: from toddlerhood with Bluey to adulthood with NCIS and Grey’s Anatomy.

I am not advocating for or against screens as part of someone’s parenting philosophy. What I can say is that there is probably some deep-seated drive associated with glowing tablets, not unlike the instinctive comfort of sucking, rocking, and white noise.

But the pull of screens is only part of the story. Equally important is what we choose to watch on them. The streaming wars have trained us to value novelty above all else—to subscribe for the latest prestige release. Yet so much of this programming is strangely disposable. We race through a buzzy limited series, talk about it for a week, and then move on to the next new thing, rarely to return.

Yet hiding in plain sight is an entirely different class of TV programming defined not by novelty, but by abundance and familiarity—call it comfort viewing. For this silent majority, lack of newness is an asset, as is volume. Shows like The Office and Friends endure because they soothe us, filling time and regulating mood (by way of glowing tablet).

Perhaps familiarity is more powerful than awe, or at least more than we care to admit. In this light, Disney is actually well-positioned for a streaming landscape built around comfort consumption, serving us reheated leftovers and licensing binge-able commodities. Audiences aren’t chasing astonishment every time they press play. More often than not, they just want to be pacified by their old friends—Peter Griffin, Sheldon (both young and old), Meredith Grey, and, of course, Bluey.

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  • The Streaming Report: what people are watching on streaming.

  • The Spotify & TikTok Music Trend Report: the songs, artists, genres, and styles dominating Spotify and TikTok. And the older hits that refuse to fade.

  • Pop Music History: a deep dive into music history, Billboard chart performance, genre trends, and song composition.

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Now Live: New Data Hubs for Tracking Music Trends

Today’s essay on hip-hop uses data from two of Stat Significant’s interactive data hubs:

1. The Spotify & TikTok Trend Report: a real-time view of the songs, artists, genres, and styles dominating Spotify and TikTok. And the older hits that refuse to fade.

2. A History of Popular Music: a deep dive into music history, Billboard chart performance, genre trends, and song composition.

Each page features interactive graphics that update daily or weekly, with underlying datasets often available for download. Paying subscribers get full access to the reports, with 7-day trials available.

Explore Spotify & TikTok Music Trends

Intro: Kendrick Curiosity

Traditionally speaking, the Super Bowl halftime show is designed for people in their mid-thirties. Each year’s headliner must carry broad name recognition, spark nostalgia, and—most importantly—appeal to the demographic advertisers value most. In many cases, this honor functions as a late-career coronation, a sign that an artist’s cultural peak has passed. If pop music thrives on novelty, the Super Bowl stands as the opposite.

Yet in 2025, the NFL defied conventional wisdom by selecting Kendrick Lamar as its Super Bowl headliner. Here was an artist at the peak of his powers, a few years removed from a Pulitzer Prize, and months removed from a feud with Drake that consumed the internet.

In the aftermath of the 2025 halftime show, my dad—a culturally curious Baby Boomer—took a sudden interest in Kendrick Lamar, sending me a stream of think pieces on the performance’s significance and the lyrical complexity of the rapper’s music. As this deep dive continued, I found myself wondering what his appreciation said about the state of hip-hop: was my dad’s Kendrick-curiosity evidence of the genre’s continued expansion, or a harbinger of impending obsolescence?

Flash forward to today, when hip-hop is allegedly in decline and media outlets are quick to eulogize the art form. CNN recently asked, “Are We Living Through a Rap Drought?”, while Rolling Stone warned, “Hip-Hop Has Slid on the Charts. YouTube’s Exit [From Billboard Tracking] Will Only Make it Worse,” and Complex contradicted these claims by arguing, “Rap Music Was Declining, But It’s Back.” In short, my dad killed hip-hop. Not actually (love you, dad!)—though the growing narrative surrounding the genre’s commercial decline has caught my attention. Is hip-hop receding from the mainstream? And if so, why?

So today, we’ll explore hip-hop’s meteoric rise and supposed fall, the genres gaining traction in recent years, and the forces that shape music popularity.

Is Hip-Hop in Decline?

Nothing is sacred in popular music. What feels ubiquitous today can quickly become obsolete. Consider four defining genres of 20th-century pop culture: rock, hip-hop, pop, and soul.

Each one of these formats has ridden its own wave of adoption and irrelevance. Rock hit a staggering peak in the mid-1980s before falling off. Soul saw its heyday in the 1960s before evolving into modern R&B and hip-hop. Pop came into its own with drum machines and digital production in the early 1980s. And hip-hop captured the countercultural energy rock left behind in the early 1990s.

Hip-hop eventually solidified itself as the defining sound of the digital age—at least thus far. Among the 20 artists with the most Billboard-charting hits (all-time), seven are hip-hop acts—a remarkable feat for a genre that first entered the mainstream in the mid-to-late 1990s.

When we look at the ages of these category-defining artists, most are still relatively early in their careers, making Kanye West something of an elder statesman at 48 years old:

• Kanye West: 48

• Drake: 39

• YoungBoy Never Broke Again: 26

• Rod Wave: 27

• Future: 42

• J. Cole: 41

• Lil Uzi Vert: 30

And yet, rumors of a hip-hop recession are indeed true. Over the past two years, the genre’s share of Billboard and Spotify hits has slipped, and in October of 2025, Billboard reported a week with zero hip-hop songs in the Top 40—the first such absence in more than 35 years.

So, what’s filled the space hip-hop once dominated? A blend of new arrivals and familiar mainstays. Latin music—led by Bad Bunny—and Asian pop, powered by K-pop acts like BTS, have expanded their global footprint. At the same time, legacy formats are resurging: country is booming, driven in large part by Morgan Wallen, while the loosely defined “alternative” category continues to gain share across the charts.

It is at this point that we’ll probe one of the universe’s greatest mysteries: What is alternative music? When I think about the creation of the “alternative” label, I like to imagine a high-stakes hostage situation that went something like this:

• Captor: “Come up with a new genre that is both rock but not classic rock that can’t use the word rock!”

• Hostage: “What? No!”

• Captor: “Do it!”

• Hostage: “No, I can’t—it’s too difficult!”

• Captor: “Do it, or things will get bad!”

• Hostage: “Fine! Fine! Alternative.”

• Captor: “Alternative to what?”

• Hostage: “Nothing. Just alternative.”

• Captor: “Ah, yes, perfect! That’s the type of vague semantical nonsense that will be displeasing to all.” [Captor lets out an evil laugh]

• END SCENE

Joking aside, this deliberately vague category has carved out a real presence on both the Billboard and Spotify charts. To better understand the shape of “alternative” today, we can look at the songs dominating Spotify’s Top 100 over the last 90 days—a mix of newer artists like Djo and Sombr alongside nostalgic mainstays like The Killers and Goo Goo Dolls.

And here is where things get kinda weird: in a flattened digital landscape like streaming, an artist competes with both new and old songs alike.

Over the past five years, an increasing share of Spotify’s Top 100 has gone to older tracks like Radiohead’s “Creep” and Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams.”

Once a year, Spotify sees an abrupt uptick in trending Christmas classics during the holiday months, followed by an ever-increasing share of older tracks from canonical acts like The Killers and Radiohead.

So how do we reconcile this constellation of datapoints into a single, cohesive narrative about hip-hop’s current dip? In my view, we can’t.

All told, the genre’s shifting popularity is best understood through four broad hypotheses:

1. Streaming adoption laggards: Hip-hop uniquely benefited from early streaming adopters in the 2010s. Younger listeners—who were predisposed to the genre—were among the first to embrace platforms like Spotify, giving hip-hop an outsized digital footprint. More recently, late adopters—like country fans, older cohorts, and global audiences—have rebalanced the charts, lifting genres like country and K-pop.

2. Other styles offering greater novelty: Latin music and K-pop have introduced fresh sounds to the mainstream, while country is enjoying a resurgence, driven by artists like Shaboozey and Morgan Wallen, who infuse hip-hop beats into traditional country tracks.

3. Commercial oversaturation: Rock’s spectacular decline is often used as a template for analyzing the ascension and obsolescence of other genres. In rock’s case, the format became commercially oversaturated—through glam metal and stadium rock—and gradually lost its countercultural edge. Soon after, youth culture abandoned the genre entirely. Some observers see a similar pattern emerging in hip-hop, where ubiquity may be diluting its appeal.

4. Hip-hop was never meant to be mainstream: Personally speaking, I’m not a fan of this theory. The argument reads like a post hoc justification rather than a causal force. At an individual level, most artists are incentivized to get streams and sell out concerts because that’s what’s in their best interest. A coordinated pullback from the mainstream seems unlikely, even if some fragmentation benefits the genre’s long-term evolution.

There is also a distinct possibility that this entire episode is simply a blip. A major artist like Drake could return with a big release in the coming months—reinvigorating the genre’s cultural footprint—and this period will be canonized as a brief, highly unusual lull.

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Final Thoughts: Failure to Innovate

My writing process usually starts with a cultural hypothesis, followed by analysis to determine whether the topic merits an article. Around 75% of the time, it does—and I ultimately write the essay (hooray!). The other 25%? I essentially assign myself a homework problem that I cannot solve, which is a humbling outcome for a 32-year-old (sad!).

This essay was one of the rare cases where I stumbled onto a topic by accident. As such, my immediate reaction was disbelief. I’m not a hip-hop fan; if anything, the music I gravitate toward is at least two cultural cycles removed from whatever defines modern hip-hop.

Unsure whether my findings were legitimate, I did what any good statistician would: I asked a roomful of random dudes. Several of my brother-in-law’s friends self-identify as hip-hop fans, so I posed two questions to this group: (1) Is the genre actually in decline, and (2) if so, why?

The consensus was surprisingly consistent. My gaggle of guys agreed the genre was past its peak, and pointed to the same signal of decline: a lack of new, exciting artists. Does this insight qualify as anec-data? Absolutely. But it gestures toward something broader: the sense that hip-hop’s current moment is one of stagnant cultural innovation (allegedly).

Step back, and the genre’s shifting popularity follows a familiar arc seen across domains, from BlackBerry phones to TV sitcoms to rock music, in which a cultural form rises through innovation and subversion, scales on the strength of its novelty, and is eventually undermined by the very forces that fueled its ascent, such as:

• Changes in distribution that reshape consumption and competition: Streaming is no longer novel. As adoption has saturated, late-adopting audiences and their tastes are now fully reflected in major playlists and Top 100 charts. The result is a more crowded landscape, with hip-hop competing not just across genres, but across eras, as older songs resurface alongside new releases.

• Cultural drift: Once controversial enough to be banned from record stores, hip-hop now headlines the Super Bowl, an event watched by ~75% of Americans. The art form is no longer anti-establishment or exclusive to youth culture.

• Lack of (intra-genre) innovation: Genres sustain themselves by evolving, either through new subgenres or breakout artists who redefine the sound. When that pipeline slows, so does cultural momentum.

Hip-hop is far from extinct, but it does require some degree of reinvention to avoid the same fate as rock. Its next phase hinges on artists who will take the genre somewhere new—ideally in a direction my dad won’t understand.

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Become a paying subscriber for interactive dashboards, free datasets, and to support independent data journalism.

Paying subscribers get:

• The Stat Significant Dataset Hub (Updated Weekly): a collection of free datasets across movies, music, TV, cultural trends, and economics.

• Interactive Data Hubs:

  • The Streaming Report: what people are watching on streaming.

  • The Spotify & TikTok Music Trend Report: the songs, artists, genres, and styles dominating Spotify and TikTok. And the older hits that refuse to fade.

  • Pop Music History: a deep dive into music history, Billboard chart performance, genre trends, and song composition.

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• A $72/year Substack subscription

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Introducing Stat Significant’s Interactive Culture Dashboards

Over the past few months, I’ve been building something new for Stat Significant: a suite of interactive data hubs designed to track culture in real time.

Paying subscribers now get access to a growing suite of continuously updated, interactive data pages—packed with charts and graphics—starting with:

• The Streaming Report: tracking what people are actually watching on TV streaming platforms.

• The Spotify Trend Report: a real-time view of the songs and artists dominating streaming, alongside older hits that refuse to fade.

• A History of Popular Music: a deep dive into music history, Billboard chart performance, genre trends, one-hit wonders, and song composition.

Each page features interactive visuals that update daily or weekly, with underlying datasets often available for download. And this is just the beginning—I’m planning to delve into other subjects (YouTube, TikTok music data, movies, actors, etc.), and expand this group of pages in the coming weeks.

Explore The Streaming Report

Today’s essay on TV quality uses data from The Streaming Report. Enjoy!

Intro: Is Ginny & Georgia a Real Show?

Everyone has a favorite conspiracy theory—an irrational belief they cling to, while knowing it’s (probably) false. Some people question the moon landing. Others insist Nelson Mandela died while in prison. While many “remember” the Monopoly Man having a monocle (even though he doesn’t).

As for me, I believe that Netflix’s mega-hit show Ginny & Georgia doesn’t actually exist. As far as I’m concerned, if you “believe” in Ginny & Georgia, you’ve fallen victim to an elaborate psy-op with no clear objective.

Several times a year, Netflix releases fresh Ginny & Georgia propaganda in an attempt to convince the masses that this series is (a) real and (b) widely watched. A few notable examples include:

• Season one of Ginny & Georgia reached an estimated 52 million viewers in its first 28 days.

• Season two of Ginny & Georgia racked up ~665 million viewing hours in the first half of 2023, making it Netflix’s second most-watched show during this time.

• Apparently, Ginny & Georgia boasted Netflix’s highest season completion rate among viewers who started the show in 2023.

These statistics paint a portrait of a show beloved by tens of millions, yet in today’s streaming landscape, popularity doesn’t always translate into cultural relevance. Saturday Night Live took aim at this disconnect in a 2023 sketch called “Hollywood Quiz Show,” a fictional game show that asks everyday contestants to identify modern entertainment. Throughout the sketch, the host hints at contemporary streaming hits, and the contestants fail to name a single one, including a pointed jab at the relative anonymity of Ginny & Georgia:

In a streaming abyss of endless content, shared cultural recognition is increasingly elusive—even for Netflix’s biggest shows.

The perceived obscurity of a streamer’s “hits” has reinforced a common belief that the shows succeeding on streaming are low-quality—widely consumed and rarely acclaimed. The logic underlying this belief is simple: if you’ve never heard of Ginny & Georgia, it must be bad, and the people watching it have bad taste, while you, a discerning viewer, only consume high-quality content.

As more unheralded series populate Netflix’s Top 10, I, like many others, have started to question the relationship between program quality and popularity. Do critical acclaim and storytelling prowess actually matter on streaming? Or is Netflix’s vaunted Top 10 the product of pure randomness?

So today, we’ll investigate the relationship between artistic merit and television viewership, examining which series attract audiences on Netflix, Hulu, HBO Max, and beyond.

Does TV Show Quality Matter on Streaming?

For this analysis, we’ll draw on several views from Stat Significant’s Streaming Report—a new subscriber-only page that tracks the streaming landscape through automated dashboards. In these graphics, series quality is gauged via TMDB user ratings, while streaming popularity is measured using three years of Nielsen weekly Top 10 data.

To illustrate how this scoring works, we’ll examine a small sample of series from our dataset that spent multiple weeks in Nielsen’s Top 10, along with their assigned quality tiers. This list is topped by a handful of “elite” programs that earned critical acclaim and were consistent fixtures on the weekly charts, such as Landman, The Pitt, and Fallout.

When we group our full dataset of shows by quality and calculate the share of titles that reached Nielsen’s Weekly Top 10, a clear pattern emerges: “good” series appear most often, while “excellent” and “elite” programs show up less frequently.

Yikes! If you’re the type of cynic who loves declaring that we live in a “dead culture” without fully understanding what the term means, then you can stop here. Congratulations, you’ve got your sound bite.

Yet reaching the Nielsen charts is only half the battle. When we consider program viewership, a show’s audience is typically the product of two interrelated phenomena:

1. Reach: How many people are predisposed to watch the series? This may stem from the title’s presence on Netflix or a story’s roots in beloved intellectual property with a preexisting fanbase.

2. Longevity (often referred to as “legs”): Whether viewers stick with a show through all its episodes—and whether that program gains momentum through word of mouth.

In my opinion, making Nielsen’s Top 10 suggests meaningful reach. A show can be widely sampled—perhaps it’s trending on Hulu or HBO Max for a few days—but that doesn’t indicate longevity. So what does?

To ascertain cultural staying power, we’ll examine how long a program remains in Nielsen’s Top 10 and the total viewership hours reported by Nielsen while it’s on the charts.

When we repeat our quality bucketing exercise, we find that well-reviewed programs—like The Pitt, Fallout, Stranger Things, Squid Game, and Landman—remain on the charts significantly longer than lower-rated titles.

But wait, there’s more: shows that garner online acclaim generate significantly more viewing hours—nearly four times as much—when they appear on the Nielsen charts.

In short: Hooray, quality matters. Maybe our culture isn’t so “dead” after all! 🙌 And notably, this pattern holds even when isolating the data to Netflix titles—meaning quality matters on Netflix, too.

The next question is how we reconcile our findings: do these incentives push us toward mediocre programming that will make the charts, or to prestige content that may possess stronger word-of-mouth? Ultimately, the tradeoff boils down to an oversimplified equation that goes something like: [Expected Program Value] = [Reach] x [Longevity]

For those doing the math, this calculus favors the elite TV show. The entertainment industry has been, and always will be, heavily reliant on outliers—like a summer blockbuster or Oscar winner—and TV shows are no exception. A well-reviewed program like Adolescence is not predisposed to significant reach—compared to a superhero series or a video game adaptation—but if this show can break through and garner exceptional word-of-mouth, then it will stay on the charts for many weeks.

So how should our findings impact show development? If you’re a studio executive and you’re programming the perfect Q4 slate 🙌, what should you do?

To understand how streamers balance quality versus quantity, we’ll evaluate TV catalog strength by platform using one of our new Streaming Report views. The graph below displays a 2x2 comparison of library breadth (measured by number of programs available, for shows with a minimum number of TMDB reviews) vs. the percentage of these titles that are “acclaimed.”

According to this view, Netflix offers the largest TV catalog, HBO Max boasts the highest “hit rate” for high-quality programming (because it’s not TV—it’s HBO!), and Netflix ultimately delivers the greatest absolute number of high-quality series due to its scale.

So is the answer to the question of “which programming” just “as many shows as humanly possible”? Kind of.

What I can’t display here—and what is perhaps most crucial to content development—is capital investment.

When I worked at DoorDash, we roughly segmented restaurants into (1) highly valuable outliers and (2) merchants of average popularity. If you’re thinking purely in terms of a single cuisine, this might mean assigning your best salespeople to a single buzzy Greek restaurant that is disproportionately popular in San Francisco, and your second-tier sales reps to the 20 less-heralded Greek places. You need breadth—to give people as many Greek options as possible—while also getting the one special restaurant that you can build marketing campaigns around.

The same logic applies to streaming. Spend more money on prestige fare—like the final season of Stranger Things—and less money on run-of-the-mill content that will fill out your catalog—such as true crime, reality dating shows, and Is It Cake?.

Final Thoughts: Consecrating Mediocrity

Coverage of the entertainment industry has always skewed hypercritical. For frame of reference, consider this collection of pundit pull quotes in the run-up to a particularly contentious Oscar year:

• Pauline Kael (The New Yorker): “The Academy Awards are a consecration of mediocrity.”

• Vincent Camby (The New York Times): “The nominations…suggest not so much a vintage year as a confused one.”

• Judith Crist (ABC News): “Another year, another batch of questionable choices.”

Sounds like a ceremony celebrating a grab bag of big-time stinkers, right? Wrong! So very wrong.

In fact, the 1975 Oscars saw Best Picture nominations go to The Godfather Part II, Chinatown, and The Conversation, among others. Today, these films are widely regarded as all-time classics—cornerstones of the much-mythologized New Hollywood canon, alongside Taxi Driver, American Graffiti, Apocalypse Now, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

In retrospect, the mid-1970s are remembered not as a period of decline, but as a creative high-water mark—an era when commercial filmmaking and artistic ambition aligned.

The critics of 1975 didn’t realize how good they had it—a classic case of rosy retrospection (or “golden age thinking”), the tendency to view the present as broken while idealizing the past. This bias is evergreen. We fixate on what’s mediocre or disappointing, overlooking the broader foundation that makes those critiques possible in the first place.

Throughout this analysis, I was struck by two findings:

• First, the sheer volume of well-regarded television released in just the past two years is remarkable.

• Second, the industry’s economic incentives are meaningfully aligned with artistic ambition (prestige still pays). Put differently, we don’t realize how good we have it.

If you could drop a television viewer from 1975 into today’s landscape—handing them The Pitt, Squid Game, and Stranger Things—they’d be stunned by the TV content we receive for $9.99 a month (without ads!).

There will always be middling television shows—just as there have always been middling movies, plays, and songs—but we’re far from living in a “dead” culture that consecrates mediocrity. Even if Ginny & Georgia does exist—and is both bad and widely watched—there are just as many counterexamples that showcase television at its best.

Want more data like this?

Become a paying subscriber for interactive dashboards, free datasets, and to support independent data journalism.

Paying subscribers get:

• The Stat Significant Dataset Hub (Updated Weekly): a collection of free datasets across movies, music, TV, cultural trends, and economics.

• Interactive Data Hubs:

  • The Streaming Report: what people are watching on streaming.

  • The Spotify Trend Report: the songs and artists dominating Spotify.

  • Pop Music History: a deep dive into music history, Billboard chart performance, genre trends, and song composition.

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• A $72/year Substack subscription

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Stat Significant’s Spotify & TikTok Music Trend Report 🎧

This page tracks what’s trending on Spotify and TikTok—highlighting the songs and artists driving the most listening today, as well as older acts and tracks that continue to thrive on those channels. The interactive charts and tables below explore chart performance, artist momentum, genre trends, and song composition, offering a real-time view of how popular music is evolving.

All visuals are updated regularly, with new data added daily and weekly. When available, click “Get Data” at the bottom of a chart to download the underlying dataset.

Because many of the graphics below are interactive, this page is best viewed on the web rather than in an email client or the Substack app.

Table of Contents

For paid subscribers — click a link below to jump straight to that section:

1. Section 1: The Top Artists and Songs on Spotify in the Last 90 Days:

   1. Top Artists on Spotify in the Last 90 Days

   2. Top Songs on Spotify in the Last 90 Days

   3. Top Artists on Spotify in the Last 7 Days

   4. Top Songs on Spotify in the Last 7 Days

2. Section 2: The Older Artists and Songs That Thrive on Spotify:

   1. Which Older Artists Still Thrive on Streaming?

   2. Which Older Songs Still Thrive on Streaming?

3. Section 3: What Music is Trending on TikTok?

   1. Which Songs Have Trended on TikTok in the Last 90, 30, and 7 Days?

   2. Which Artists Have Been Trending on TikTok in the Last 90, 30, and 7 Days?

   3. Which Popular Music Genres Trend on TikTok?

   4. How Much Overlap is There Between Songs Trending on TikTok and Spotify?

4. Section 4: How Song Genre, Composition, and Lyrical Themes Have Evolved on Spotify

   1. How Popular Music Genres Have Evolved On Streaming

   2. How Has Popular Music Composition Change Over Time?

   3. Song Composition by Musician: Which Artists Have the Most Positive Songs, Make the Most Dance-able Music, and More

   4. How Has Song Subject Matter Changed Over Time?

Section 1: The Top Artists and Songs on Spotify in the Last 90 Days

Top Artists on Spotify in the Last 90 Days

• What This Chart Shows: The top artists on Spotify in the last 90 days, determined by the most song entries on the Spotify Top 50 chart (each song + charting day combination counts as an “entry”).

• Data Source: Spotify Chart data provided by Soundcharts

• Data Update Frequency: Daily || Data Can Be Downloaded: ✅

Top Songs on Spotify in the Last 90 Days

• What This Chart Shows: The top songs on Spotify in the last 90 days, determined by number of days in the Spotify Top 50 chart.

• Data Source: Spotify Chart data provided by Soundcharts

• Data Update Frequency: Daily || Data Can Be Downloaded: ✅

Top Artists on Spotify in the Last 7 Days

• What This Chart Shows: The top artists on Spotify in the last 7 days, determined by the most song entries on the Spotify Top 50 chart (each song + charting day combination counts as an “entry”).

• Data Source: Spotify Chart data provided by Soundcharts

• Data Update Frequency: Daily || Data Can Be Downloaded: ✅

Top Songs on Spotify in the Last 7 Days

• What This Chart Shows: The top songs on Spotify in the last 7 days, determined by number of days in the Spotify Top 50 chart.

• Data Source: Spotify Chart data provided by Soundcharts

• Data Update Frequency: Daily || Data Can Be Downloaded: ✅

The Deep Dive: For Paying Subscribers

We also reserve several charts for paying subscribers, including:

• Which older artists still thrive on streaming?

• Which older songs still thrive on streaming?

• Which songs and artists are trending on TikTok?

• How much overlap is there between songs trending on TikTok and Spotify?

• How genre popularity has evolved on Spotify.

• How song composition has changed over time.

• Which artists make the most danceable, energetic, or positive music—and more.

• How lyrical themes in popular music have shifted over time.

These views update daily or weekly, are fully interactive, and include downloadable data.

Read more

Stat Significant’s Pop Music History Report

This page tracks the biggest songs, artists, and albums in popular music history—and breaks down what makes them successful. The interactive charts and tables below highlight chart performance, genre trends, and song composition, revealing how hits are made and how music has evolved over time.

All visuals are updated regularly, with new data added daily and weekly. When available, click “Get Data” at the bottom of a chart to download the underlying dataset.

Because many of the graphics below are interactive, this page is best viewed on the web rather than in an email client or the Substack app.

Table of Contents

For paid subscribers — click a link below to jump straight to that section:

1. Section 1: The Greatest of all Time — According to the Charts:

   1. The Greatest Songs of All Time

   2. The Greatest Artists of All Time

   3. The Greatest Albums of All Time

2. Section 2: How Popular Music Has Evolved Since the 1950s:

   1. How Popular Music Genres Have Evolved Over Time

   2. How Has Popular Music Composition Change Over Time?

   3. Breakdown: Song Composition by Musician

   4. Number of Songs and Artists on the Hot 100 Charts, and the Average Lifespan of a Hit

3. Section 3: Pop Music Curiosities — One-Hit Wonders, Rediscovered Hits, and More

   1. Share of Billboard Hot 100 Hits That Are One-Hit Wonders

   2. A Comprehensive List of One-Hit Wonders

Section 1: The Greatest Songs, Artists, and Albums of All Time

The Greatest Songs of All Time — According to the Charts

• What This Chart Shows: The top 1000 songs of all time, determined by a combination of top Billboard Hot 100 ranking and number of weeks spent in the Hot 100.

• Data Source: Billboard data from 1958 to present.

• Data Update Frequency: Weekly || Data Can Be Downloaded: ✅

The Greatest Artists of All Time — According to the Charts

• What This Chart Shows: The top 2500 artists of all time, determined by the number of songs that made the Hot 100.

• Data Source: Billboard data from 1958 to present.

• Data Update Frequency: Weekly || Data Can Be Downloaded: ✅

The Greatest Albums of All Time — According to the Charts

• What This Chart Shows: The top 500 albums of all time, determined by the number of weeks spent on the Billboard Top 200 chart.

• Data Source: Billboard data from 1958 to present.

• Data Update Frequency: Weekly || Data Can Be Downloaded: ✅

The Deep Dive: For Paying Subscribers

We also reserve several charts for paying subscribers, including:

• How genre popularity has evolved over time.

• How music composition has changed over time.

• Which artists have the most positive songs, make the most Dance-able music, and more.

• Other fun stuff!

These views update daily or weekly, are fully interactive, and include downloadable data.

Read more

Intro: London is for ABBA-Lovers

If you love ABBA, then London is the place for you. You can begin your day by attending a production of Mamma Mia!, where you’ll listen to theatrical singers belt ABBA classics like “Dancing Queen.” Then you can take the Tube to ABBA Arena, a purpose-built stadium that seats over 3,000 people, where you can watch holograms of the band perform “Take a Chance on Me.” And if you’re hungry after a long day of ABBA consumption, you can head over to Mamma Mia! The Party, a theatrical dining experience where you’ll eat a four-course Greek meal while being serenaded with more ABBA tunes. And if your ABBA appetite has yet to be quenched, you can return home to watch Mamma Mia! the movie and its sequel, Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, or you can play ABBA: You Can Dance, a dance-dance-revolution-style video game on Nintendo Wii.

London is essentially Las Vegas for ABBA tourism, a central hub for fanatics to celebrate their beloved pop act with near-religious devotion. If you think the deification of this ‘70s music group is overkill, well, you’re severely underestimating the band’s cultural imprint.

Somehow, a group of quirky Swedes and their catalog of happy-go-lucky pop tunes has become the basis for lucrative intellectual property that rivals the Fast and Furious franchise. So today, we’ll explore ABBA’s unique appeal and the band’s enduring commercial afterlife.

ABBA’s Unique Commercial Longevity

A key facet of ABBA’s origin story begins with tax regulation. In the 1970s, Sweden introduced taxation laws surrounding the deductibility of poorly styled work clothing. Those who could prove that their work outfits were unwearable in everyday life could claim these clothes as tax deductions. Seeking financial relief, the newly formed ABBA decided to capitalize on this incentive, and, out of frugality and tax strategy, the band’s aesthetic was born.

A few years later, ABBA catapulted to international fame after winning the Eurovision Song Contest, propelled by their flamboyant stage outfits and the hit track “Waterloo.”

The band’s iconic look remains central to its legacy, serving as a prominent element of Mamma Mia! (both stage and screen) and inspiring children’s Halloween costumes, which can be purchased for only $60!

ABBA formally retired in 1982 after a 10-year run in which the band produced 20 Billboard hits and sold over 385 million albums. Most bands typically see a gradual decline in fandom following retirement, but not ABBA.

In the late ‘90s, Mamma Mia! took the theater world by storm, offering audiences ample ABBA music amid a breezy, largely nonsensical plot. When Mamma Mia’s New York City production ended its 14-year run, it was Broadway’s ninth-longest-running show and the first successful jukebox musical.

When estimated music sales are combined with ticket revenue from the Mamma Mia! franchise, and the hologram-driven ABBA Voyage concert experience, the ABBA Music Universe (AMU) plausibly exceeds $5.5 billion in cumulative revenue.

This estimation does not include ABBA’s 1970s and 1980s touring revenue, additional Mamma Mia! adaptations, dining sales at Mamma Mia! The Party, or purchases of ABBA video games. If anything, our projection is a gross underestimate.

These adaptations have propelled ABBA into a state of perpetual relevance. According to Chartmasters, ABBA ranks as the ninth-most-streamed artist among musicians who debuted before 1980, amassing more than 6.7 billion lifetime streams—a striking figure for a band that officially retired over four decades ago.

At this point, a natural question emerges: why ABBA? How did a band of unassuming Swedes, who produced music for less than a decade and disbanded 43 years ago, become the source material for a vast, self-renewing ecosystem of musical performance?

ABBA’s Unique Geographical Appeal

Twenty-one of the world’s twenty-five best-selling music acts hail from either the United States or the United Kingdom. Of the remaining four, three emerged from former British Commonwealth countries (Australia, Canada, and Ireland), while ABBA is the lone exception, hailing from Stockholm, Sweden.

ABBA is a distinctly European phenomenon, with a core fanbase spread throughout the continent. Using YouTube streaming data, we can compare the band’s geographic footprint to that of other canonical acts. Take The Beatles as a point of comparison: their YouTube viewership is heavily weighted toward North and South America, with a meaningful but secondary presence across parts of Europe.

ABBA’s audience, by contrast, is far more Eurocentric.

ABBA’s outsized appeal in Europe is central to the band’s commercial afterlife. Film and theater producers gravitate toward intellectual property with a built-in global fandom. In the case of Mamma Mia!, the show has been headquartered in London and New York City, two hubs of international tourism. For Hollywood and Broadway producers seeking to de-risk their investment, adapting ABBA’s music is a low-risk endeavor.

ABBA Makes People (Very) Happy

Music acts are often defined by the emotional states they evoke: Adele trades in withering despair, Eminem delivers disaffected catharsis, and Céline Dion specializes in operatic sorrow. ABBA, by contrast, occupies a different emotional register altogether: producing joyful tracks intended for dancing and delight.

This distinction is readily apparent in the data. According to Spotify’s audio-feature dataset, ABBA’s catalog scores highly on musical positivity, placing the group alongside disco-era acts like Kool & The Gang, Donna Summer, and The Spinners. These artists reliably soundtrack parties, weddings, and pretty much every other form of communal celebration. If you’ve assembled a mixed-aged group of drunk partygoers, these bands will surely make the playlist.

In fact, ABBA is among the most frequently featured artists on wedding playlists, appearing alongside staples like Stevie Wonder, Whitney Houston, and The Beach Boys.

Certain songs and artists become the soundtrack to our happiest moments—Bar Mitzvahs, weddings, and impromptu dance parties alike. ABBA’s music thrives in these settings, offering simple pleasures for joyful occasions.

This past July, I visited the ABBA Museum, which—according to TripAdvisor—is the fourth-most-popular tourist attraction in Stockholm, Sweden. For frame of reference, the exhibition ranks ahead of Stockholm’s City Hall and Sweden’s Royal Palace.

The ABBA museum is surprisingly elaborate, featuring exhibits of Smithsonian-level quality. Throughout the space, fans are repeatedly invited to sing along: you can belt “Dancing Queen” with ABBA holograms, record your own version of “Mamma Mia!” in a replica studio booth, or remix the original multitrack recordings as if you were the song’s producer.

I visited the museum partly as a bit, driven by my longstanding ABBA curiosity. What I encountered was sincere joy and a reminder that cynicism should not be my default reaction to most things. As we walked through the exhibit, I was struck by the sheer amount of giggling. Visitors were delighted to reexperience these buoyant, happy-go-lucky classics in unfamiliar ways. ABBA had once again found a way to bottle and sell its emotional affect—and judging by the plethora of giddy museumgoers, everyone seemed to be getting their money’s worth.

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Final Thoughts: Nostalgia as a Service

I saw a West End production of Mamma Mia! a few years back. During the curtain call, once the show’s almost-nonexistent plot had been resolved, the entire cast rushed on stage, with the leads dressed in stereotypical ABBA costumes, and the group mounted a second performance of “Mamma Mia” and “Dancing Queen.”

I found the final ten minutes of unapologetic ABBA mimicry equal parts enjoyable and ludicrous. Why did I have to sit through this loosely plotted musical if they could have just come out and performed these songs concert-style? As this thought crossed my mind, the woman beside me started to cry.

Now, I don’t know why this stranger was crying, nor will I ever know. She either:

1. Had other stuff going on in her life, and just happened to be crying at this show.

2. Was so overcome by her love of ABBA that she could not help but cry.

I prefer the thought of her crying as she wrestled with the enormity of her ABBA fandom. Perhaps she had come to hear the music of her youth, and the wistful joy of hearing these songs sent her into a state of bittersweet reflection. She paid to hear songs associated with her happiest moments, and this transaction clearly provided her with something meaningful. Or so I assume.

As I played out this invented backstory, I started thinking about the commercialization of nostalgia. If people yearn to hear their beloved ABBA hits across an ever-growing array of media formats (musicals, video games, movies, etc.), is it wrong to give the people what they want?

Cultural taste typically calcifies in our early thirties, and from then on, we like what we like. I am not a baby boomer; nostalgia is not currently a strong driver of my cultural consumption. But maybe twenty years from now, I’ll be paying to see a jukebox musical utilizing songs from The Killers, Miley Cyrus, and Bruno Mars—music I associate with my happiest formative experiences. Maybe I’ll be more than willing to fork over my hard-earned money to see Mr. Brightside: The Musical, play Bruno Mars: The Video Game, or watch a Miley Cyrus hologram. Maybe I’ll be sobbing tears of joy as a 3D rendering of Green Day sings “American Idiot,” and maybe I should just accept that this is my future.

Happiness can be hard to find. Thankfully, ABBA delivers a dependable dose of celebration—no matter the medium.

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Intro: A Fleeting Meme Turned Petition

On November 4, 2021, Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande were announced as the leads in Universal’s big-screen adaptation of Wicked. On November 21, 2021—just 17 days after this announcement—one highly specific concern crystallized amongst diehard fans: keep actor-turned-late-night-talk-show-host James Corden away from Wicked. If this sounds like a fleeting meme, it was not.

Escalating online chatter eventually gave rise to a Change.org petition titled Keep James Corden Out of Wicked the Movie. What read as snark was taken quite seriously, as the petition amassed more than 109,000 signatures. I have no idea whether Corden was actually considered for a role in Wicked, and we’ll probably never know.

While I, too, have strong opinions about certain actors, I’m struck by the paradox of being a widely known—and widely disliked—movie star. Actors aspire to headline films and achieve cultural relevance. Yet that same recognizability can mutate into parasocial hostility. If James Corden’s lifelong dream was simply to achieve name recognition, he succeeded. If his goal was to be both widely known and widely liked, the results are more mixed.

The strangeness of the Corden-Wicked debacle got me thinking about the improbability of notoriety and longevity: how hard is it to reach the highest levels of acting success, let alone maintain consistent quality and public goodwill once you get there? Said differently, how difficult is it to achieve—and sustain—movie stardom?

So today, we’ll explore film stardom as a statistical anomaly, unpack the challenge of balancing celebrity and quality, and assess the precarious nature of a career in the performing arts.

How Improbable is Movie Stardom?

Among actors who secure a credited role in a feature film, what share will ever go on to headline a movie (at any point in their career)? To quantify this, we’ll analyze filmography data from Letterboxd and define a “starring role” as a performer listed first or second on a film’s call sheet.

Across all budgets and box-office outcomes, just 13 percent of credited actors will ever star in a film—whether that’s a student short, The Room, a Hallmark movie, or a Marvel franchise.

Leading a single film is relatively common among credited screen actors; leading multiple films is not. Among performers who have ever headlined a movie, more than 75% will never do so again.

Unfortunately, this framing is overly generous. Our initial statistics have excluded a large pool of working actors who will never be cast in a feature film. Put simply: What initially read as a bummer is actually a much bigger bummer! To account for this, we must broaden our dataset to include actors with a single Law & Order credit or Ozempic commercial appearance.

We’ll benchmark stardom among the working actor population by calculating the share of Screen Actors Guild (SAG-AFTRA) members who receive a starring credit in a given year. By this measure, roughly 2% of card-carrying performers headline a film in any given year.

The obvious caveat is that hundreds of thousands of performers never qualify for SAG-AFTRA membership, which means we’re still undercounting. Industry estimates suggest that roughly 5 to 10% of working actors achieve union status each year. In practical terms, this implies that the share of all working actors—union and non-union—that star in a film (of any budget) likely falls between 0.02% and 0.2%: a wide, but nonetheless dispiriting, range. I concede this analysis is a Russian nesting doll of bad news.

But wait—there’s more. Securing a single starring role does not guarantee a lifetime of movie stardom. There is no assurance that your film will be widely seen, commercially successful, or critically well-regarded. Let’s say you’re fortunate enough to star in 5, 10, or 20 movies—how many of those projects will be any good?

As you might expect, the numbers are not encouraging. To assess quality, we’ll calculate a performer’s career-long “hit rate,” defined as the share of their filmography with a Letterboxd score of 3.5 or higher (out of 5 stars). For example, an actor with five “acclaimed” films across ten leading roles would have a 50% hit rate.

Amongst cinema’s most elite performers—legendary stars like Leonardo DiCaprio, Daniel Day-Lewis, and Philip Seymour Hoffman—career “hit rates” tend to top out in the mid-60 percent range. Yikes.

When we examine the full distribution of career hit rates, we find nearly 30 percent of lead actors will never appear in a well-regarded film, while most stars see fewer than 20 percent of their movies earn critical acclaim.

But wait—there’s even more 🙉. If you’re feeling crummy right now, remember: you decided to read an essay on the near-impossibility of movie stardom. I will not apologize for the ever-increasing improbability of a career path that is famously a crapshoot. You were warned: it’s literally in the title!!

Okay, now on to my next dispiriting statistic: So far, our analysis has examined starring roles agnostic of budget and commercial success. What happens when we focus on performers pursuing the most traditional form of movie stardom: headlining big-budget Hollywood films intended for wide theatrical release.

To do this, we’ll impose a stricter definition of movie stardom. An actor or actress will qualify as a “star” if they have held a leading role in at least three films within a five-year window, where each film carries an inflation-adjusted production budget of $20 million or more.

When we chart a rolling count of movie stars over time, we see a distinct peak in stardom in the mid-2000s, with over 150 actors qualifying as “stars” during this period. From that point forward, the number of marquee film actors steadily declines. This downward trend persists even after adjusting for the pandemic-era slowdown in film production.

This data piqued my curiosity about the current state of film celebrity in Hollywood. Which actors sell movie tickets in an industry incapable of mythologizing new figures? The answer is: the old ones.

In late 2023, a survey conducted by the National Research Group asked consumers, “Which actor do you most want to see in theaters?” The results were remarkable: not a single actor in the top 15 was under 44. Unsurprisingly, these findings threw the entertainment industry into a (minor) existential crisis.

One day, Tom Cruise will cease to exist (or at least that’s my current belief). In that distant future, who, or what, will be headlining movies? Will we still need organic, Non-GMO human actors? Or will the movie stars of yesteryear have been replaced by AI performers and CGI monkeys—who, if nothing else, are technically not James Corden.

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Final Thoughts: Never Tell Me the Odds

For two summers, I interned in the entertainment industry, the last of which was at Conan O’Brien’s talk show. I disliked nearly every aspect of these internships, and my conversations with full-time employees suggested that things would not improve after graduation. And yet, I did not care. All of this was in service of some greater goal.

When an executive assistant would tell me to change careers because they did not recommend the lifestyle or likelihood of success, I would immediately discount that advice and think, “Never tell me the odds.” This was a daily occurrence.

Sure, for the next 10 years I would be fielding phone calls, getting staplers thrown at my head, and mastering highly specific coffee orders, but it would be in service of *my dream*. And then I met someone who was actually successful in the film industry, and my entire opinion shifted.

During my sophomore year of college, I gave a campus tour to a family whose patriarch was a Hollywood screenwriter. We stayed in touch, and he became a mentor over the next few years of my short-lived entertainment career.

During my final summer in LA, I met him for coffee, and it just so happened that a few months prior, he had been nominated for an Oscar. To me, this was the ultimate achievement—the thing that would make coffee runs and stapler dodgeball worthwhile.

Being an excitable twenty-something, I asked roughly 50 variations of the same two questions: “What’s it like to be nominated for an Oscar?“ and “What’s next???” To which he downplayed the achievement and talked about the fact that he had yet to figure out his next project. I assumed that if you made it to the top of Maslow‘s hierarchy, you would pretty much stay there for the rest of your life. You would no longer need to walk because you’d simply levitate. But here was someone at the pinnacle of his field who seemed—for lack of better phrasing—kind of bummed.

A few days later, I decided to give up on my entertainment career. If I didn’t like where I was, didn’t like what the next ten years entailed, and somehow the end goal didn’t justify the heartache, then what was the point?

Intellectually speaking, I have no regrets about this decision. I’ve enjoyed my new career and have returned to entertainment on my own terms. And yet my lizard brain remains unconvinced that I made the right call. This “lizard brain” is the part of me that committed to a career in film at age eleven—the naïve, idealistic version of myself that still thinks: “Never tell me the odds!”

At the risk of being reductive, most people in the entertainment industry probably live with some version of this internal tug-of-war: between the hyper-rational self—the one that pays taxes—and an irrational dreamer that loves “da’ movies” or “da’ acclaimed limited series on HBO.”

In my case, a specific mix of experiences pushed me to confront the odds, assess my near-term future, and walk away. Others, with different temperaments and distinct experiences, make a different choice.

It’s a strange, random crapshoot, but I’m glad there are people willing to give it a shot. They will look at this data—see how hard it is to star in a movie, how difficult it is to repeat that feat, and the near impossibility of starring in more great films than bad ones—and think, “Never tell me the odds!!” Or they might just scan the list of all-time actors, see names like Daniel Day-Lewis and Philip Seymour Hoffman, and think, “Wow, it’d be cool to be like them.” And, honestly, the world is a lot better off for these people.

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Intro: The Greatest “Worst Movie” of All Time

In 1978, film critic Michael Medved and his brother Harry published “The Fifty Worst Films of All Time,” a compendium of cinema’s most spectacular failures. Tucked into the book’s final pages was a mailing address inviting readers to submit their nominees for all-time stinkers—an afterthought that would eventually unearth a cinematic gem.

Numerous respondents, including film critic Roger Ebert, contacted the Medved brothers to protest a single omission: Ed Wood’s legendarily terrible Plan 9 from Outer Space. After obtaining a rare print of the film, the Medveds enthusiastically crowned Plan 9 “the worst movie of all time,” showcasing this find in their follow-up book, “The Golden Turkey Awards.”

Released in 1959, Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space is a low-budget sci-fi yarn about aliens who resurrect the Earth’s dead as zombies. Wood’s masterpiece features glaring continuity errors, cheap special effects, heavy use of footage from unrelated projects, and wooden, over-the-top acting. The film’s sets are unmistakably fake, including a cardboard gravestone that simply falls over while in frame.

Following its coronation in the “Golden Turkey Awards,” Plan 9 was embraced by cinephiles and quickly became a staple of the midnight movie circuit. Yet the film’s revival came with a divided cultural reputation: some celebrate its ineptitude, while others simply consider it bad (with no sense of irony).

Ed Wood’s bizarro sci-fi masterpiece sits within a highly specific canon of polarizing films—movies subject to intense adoration or derision. People watch these films and hail them as misunderstood classics or ridicule them as artistic malpractice. So today, we’ll examine the most polarizing movies in cinema history, investigate the traits that make these works so unique, and explore why divisive filmmaking is on the decline.

The Most Polarizing Movies of All Time

We’ll use variance amongst online movie reviews as an indicator of polarization. When reviewers disagree on a film, its ratings tend to fluctuate between low and high marks (i.e., one star and five stars). Meanwhile, the “average” film usually receives scores within a much tighter range. Our analysis will use the standard deviation of online ratings to identify divisive films, calculated as follows:

When we calculate our variance metric by film, our resulting list is headlined by Plan 9 from Outer Space, followed by works spanning a wide range of genres, budgets, and subject matter.

We can sort this collection of movies into a few categories:

1. Low-Budget Cult Classics: Rocky Horror Picture Show, Pink Flamingos, and Plan 9 from Outer Space are eclectic low-budget releases that found enthusiastic audiences among camp devotees. These movies developed dedicated followings through midnight screenings at arthouse theaters and became infamous for transgressive content. For example, the climax of Pink Flamingos features a drag queen named Divine eating literal dog poop, which some filmgoers find endearing. Part of the appeal of these films is their failure to resonate with general audiences.

2. Inescapable Franchise Films: Most franchise films are engineered for mass appeal—but mass appeal does not preclude mass irritation. Twilight, Transformers, and (somehow) Babe are serialized stories that provoked backlash due to their combination of mediocrity and ubiquity. Few franchises illustrate this dynamic better than Twilight. Though the series debuted to mixed critical reception, its cultural footprint in the late 2000s was inescapable, shaping fashion, spawning waves of young-adult romance novels (and a romantasy subgenre known as “Vampire-smut”), and driving tourism to Forks, Washington, a real town where the series was set. People either embraced Twilight with fervent devotion or despised its omnipresence.

3. The Passion of the Christ: I’ve never seen The Passion of the Christ. I was a kid when the film premiered, but I vividly remember the grown-ups around me being unusually cranky about this movie. Based on my limited research, this project reads like an alphabet soup of polarizing cultural flashpoints: graphic violence, overt religiosity, an unconventional release outside the traditional studio system, and a director, Mel Gibson, emerging from a public-relations debacle. Mercifully, this film predated social media.

4. Horror Movies That Went Mainstream: In horror, box office success is often loosely tethered to conventional measures of quality. Genre enthusiasts are largely indifferent to critical opinion—they’re buying tickets to experience visceral scares in a communal environment. But what happens when a horror film crosses over into the mainstream? Hits like The Blair Witch Project and Texas Chainsaw Massacre made their way into the zeitgeist, and may have proven a bit much for the average moviegoer.

These observations emerged from a small set of highly polarizing films, prompting a natural follow-up question: do the same patterns persist across thousands of other releases? The answer is largely yes. When we aggregate rating variance by genre, horror elicits the most polarized audience response.

Family films are also subject to significant rating variance, as they must appeal to both parents and children. Younger audiences may love Ice Age: Continental Drift (the fourth Ice Age movie), while older audiences may be frustrated that they have to watch this film in the first place.

Genre, however, is decidedly broad. To dig deeper, we’ll analyze review polarization by user-generated movie tags—online labels that capture elements of story, cast, and filmmaking, such as “3D,” “Africa,” “Bill Murray,” “violent,” or “whimsical.”

When we aggregate rating variance by MovieLens tag, systematic patterns emerge across production economy (low budget, franchise), subject matter (Jesus, bad science), and genre (musical, horror).

Using these tags, we can engineer the ultimate polarizing film: a low-budget horror musical franchise about Jesus that is “stupid,” full of dancing, and stars Jim Carrey.

While we’ve gone to considerable lengths to quantify these patterns, many studio executives have absorbed the same lessons through industry lore and lived experience. Hollywood has long oscillated between cycles of imitation and overcorrection—swinging from trend-chasing to heightened risk aversion. So how has this dynamic shaped divisive filmmaking over the past century?

When we calculate rating variance by release year, we observe an increase in review variability starting in the late 1970s, followed by a relative decline beginning in the early 2000s.

The rise and subsequent decline of review polarization reflect social and economic conditions that shaped both daily life and industry norms:

• The 1970s to late 1990s: From the late 1970s through the 1990s, transgressive filmmaking proliferated in B-movie silos before slowly entering the mainstream. Horror franchises like Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street normalized graphic violence, while erotic thrillers (Basic Instinct, Fatal Attraction) and action blockbusters (Predator, Rambo: First Blood Part II) expanded the acceptable limits of sex and brutality in Hollywood movies. In the early 1990s, the rise of independent cinema further accelerated these shifts, as filmmakers operating outside studio constraints produced celebrated hits (Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs) and deliberately provocative works (Kids, Natural Born Killers). By the end of the century, boundary-pushing storytelling was no longer niche.

• 2000s to Today: Beginning in the early 2000s, Hollywood shifted toward franchise filmmaking, as The Lord of the Rings and Sony’s Spider-Man proved the value of serialized stories built on intellectual property. Expansive cinematic universes such as Marvel’s MCU were designed to appeal to the widest possible audience, leaving little room for risk-taking. At the same time, ascendant social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook introduced an instant feedback loop for moviemakers, where small creative choices—such as Peter Rabbit’s depiction of a character with an anaphylactic blackberry allergy—could spark overwhelming criticism. Together, these forces pushed modern films toward greater uniformity, prioritizing predictability over provocation.

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Final Thoughts: Disagreement for Better Conversation

I was a film major in college, which means “discussion sections” played an outsized role in determining my grades. These sessions were essentially movie-themed book clubs where no one wanted to speak (because they were hungover or had not watched the film, often both). One course in particular, which focused on world cinema, was notorious for painfully underwhelming discussions. That is, until we watched Lars von Trier’s The Idiots.

Lars von Trier’s The Idiots follows a group of young adults who feign mental disability as a form of social experimentation and liberation. The movie courted considerable controversy for its depiction of disability and its unsimulated sex scenes (centered on characters pretending to be disabled). During the movie’s premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, critic Mark Kermode was kicked out of the screening for screaming, “It is shit!” at the screen.

For some reason, our professor decided to make The Idiots the focus of a week’s worth of material. While I was pretty unhappy to think about this movie for a full seven days, the resulting class discussion was surprisingly lively. Students disagreed on nearly every element of the movie. Was The Idiots an incisive Marxist critique, or was it low-minded garbage masquerading as an incisive Marxist critique? Did the movie’s depictions of disability and sexuality go too far, or was excess necessary for the director to prove his point?

I remember these conversations vividly. In fact, this remains the only college discussion section I can recall years later. Turns out that disagreement—when productively channeled—can amplify a film’s impact. I did not enjoy watching The Idiots, nor would I recommend this movie to anyone, but I did genuinely enjoy discussing it with my peers.

Transgressive works like A Clockwork Orange, American History X, and Oldboy aren’t intended to elicit one standard reaction. These movies endure because viewers experience an array of emotions.

Failing isn’t fun, nor is losing money or being told that your work “is shit.” Yet conversations about art are far less thrilling when everybody agrees.

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Intro: Rocky Raccoon

Throughout my time writing this newsletter, I have continually returned to the idea of Chesterton’s Fence, an economic principle that cautions against dismantling a (proverbial) “fence” before understanding why it was built in the first place. This maxim is especially relevant for younger generations assessing the past without the benefit of hindsight.

Consider my newfound investment in a record player and vinyl collection: buying vinyl records and subsequently listening to these albums has led me, full circle, to the appeal of playlists. I could cite several examples where I back-solved the benefits of Spotify, but my most recent epiphany came while listening to The Beatles’ White Album—specifically a three-track run from “Blackbird” to “Rocky Raccoon.”

“Blackbird” is one of the most beautiful protest songs ever written—so much so that you are only now realizing it is, indeed, a protest song (inspired by footage of civil rights activists). Then the White Album effectively record-scratches, as this somber elegy is immediately followed by “Piggies” and “Rocky Raccoon.”

“Piggies” is a heavy-handed satire of patrician greed that will hit hard for anyone who has never read Animal Farm or encountered a metaphor, while “Rocky Raccoon” is a strange folk western pastiche that sounds like it should have been unearthed from a lost archive and not made readily accessible on Spotify.

As I trudged through this strange three-song stretch, I began contemplating the continued existence of albums. Sure, vinyl has seen a resurgence, but most consumers pay for streaming services or individual tracks, and thus will know little of “Piggies” and “Rocky Raccoon.” Instead, they’ll hear “Blackbird” by way of a playlist, consuming an all-you-can-eat buffet of their favorite content.

And yet the album format persists, embraced by pop stars like Taylor Swift, Sabrina Carpenter, and Bad Bunny. Which led me to a very simple question: why? Why are albums still popular, and do contemporary listening patterns support the continued existence of this medium?

So today, we’ll explore the album’s commercial decline, how listening patterns have shifted with digital distribution, and whether artists have altered their release strategies in the 21st century.

Are Albums Obsolete in the Streaming Era?

Music distribution has evolved rapidly over the past three decades—from CDs to digital downloads to streaming. The most consequential shift came in the early 2000s with the launch of iTunes, which unbundled the album and reframed music consumption around individual tracks. Consumers embraced this flexibility, and song-level spending—first through downloads, then through streaming subscriptions—started dominating industry revenues.

Nearly 90% of music spending is now concentrated at the song level, yet albums of ten or more tracks remain the default release format. This raises an admittedly cynical question: given the extreme imbalance in popularity across tracks on a single record, how inefficient is the album as a distribution strategy?

To quantify how modern listeners engage with albums, we’ll use Spotify listening data to calculate a track’s share of an album’s total streams. For example, if an album generates 100 streams and one song accounts for 25 of them, that track has captured a 25% stream share.

When we apply this calculation to widely-streamed releases, we find a heavily skewed distribution: nearly 75% of songs capture 5% or less of their album’s total streaming activity.

Attention clusters around a record’s two or three hit singles, while most other tracks receive a small fraction of overall listens. The natural next question is whether this pattern is a recent development.

To test this, I analyzed the average streaming share captured by an album’s most-played song. This approach rests on a simple assumption: listeners of works from the 1960s are more likely to engage with albums as complete works, while contemporary listening increasingly centers on standout singles.

Indeed, the album share captured by a record’s best-known track has nearly doubled since the 1960s, subsequently leveling off in the 2010s.

Shifts in listening behavior point to a structural change in how songs are popularized and ingrained in cultural memory. Listeners who encountered Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in the 1960s are probably familiar with deep cuts like “Fixing a Hole” or “A Day in the Life,” while I cannot tell you a Carly Rae Jepsen song that isn’t “Call Me Maybe.”

So how have artists adjusted their release strategies in response to listeners’ growing preference for mixing and matching singles? According to Discogs, the average number of tracks per release has steadily declined since the turn of the century.

This is mostly driven by an uptick in singles and EPs, formats containing two or fewer songs.

If you were to show this pattern to someone in the 1960s, they would probably be dumbfounded. Until the early 21st century, storage space was a scarce resource that dictated how much music a consumer could receive. With each upgrade in physical media—be it a shift from the 45 rpm record to the 33 rpm vinyl, or a move from cassettes to CDs—consumers typically received more music.

In an era of unlimited digital storage, the way artists package their songs is increasingly obsolete. And while there has been an uptick in EP and single releases, it’s significantly below expectation—or at least my expectation—especially when you consider the complete and total flattening of the discovery experience.

So why has the album persisted amidst all these changes in distribution and discovery? The rationale is a counterintuitive combination of philosophical and economic.

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Final Thoughts: A Complete Artistic Statement

In 2024, long-simmering tensions between Drake and Kendrick Lamar erupted into open feud, with both artists trading increasingly personal diss tracks. Rather than waiting for a traditional album release, the rappers dropped new songs within days—and at times hours—of one another, using streaming platforms to respond in real time.

The episode underscored how easily modern artists can compress release timelines when they want to. Which raises an intriguing question: if rapid, single-track releases are commercially viable, why do roughly 70% of artists package their music in ten-to-fourteen-track chunks?

Ultimately, the album’s cultural staying power can be traced to three underlying phenomena:

1. Industry Inertia and Promotion: Record deals, rollout playbooks, advances, tour planning, promotion cycles, and coordinated label support remain organized around multi-track albums. Listening habits have changed, but the industry’s marketing machinery is still calibrated to the album format.

2. Risk Diversification: Song popularity is highly skewed, favoring outlier mega-hits. Releasing multiple tracks at once increases the odds that at least one song will break through.

3. A Complete Artistic Statement: Albums offer cohesion, intention, and a unified point of view in a way individual tracks rarely can. By bundling songs together, artists assert greater control over how their work is framed and interpreted.

I find this last point particularly compelling when examining artists with long-running careers.

Recently, a friend asked what my favorite Taylor Swift album is, and as I considered my answer, I thought about what each record represents in her career. I understand this reads like an advertisement for The Eras Tour, but perhaps that’s a testament to how well she monetizes awareness of her celebrity (after all, she’s a billionaire and we’re not).

I first encountered Taylor Swift when I was a teenager who enjoyed country music (because yes, she used to be a country artist; a fact that will one day sound apocryphal). Over the past two decades, it’s been fascinating to watch her move from country to pop and ultimately become the defining pop star of her generation—an evolution you can track album by album.

The same lens can be applied to most legendary music acts: you can trace when The Beatles embraced psychedelia, or watch David Bowie’s shifting personas unfold record by record.

The album may be inflexible in design, but it’s remarkably dynamic in function. It can serve as a marketing vehicle, a career milestone, a calculated attempt at a hit, or a cohesive artistic statement. It’s a medium where the whole may be greater than the sum of its parts, especially when those parts are “Piggies” and “Rocky Raccoon.”

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Intro: The Death of Physical Media

2023 was a disastrous year for physical media and a disorienting one for me personally, marked by a series of ominous milestones:

1. DVD Sales Declined for the Sixteenth Straight Year: In the first half of 2023, physical media sales in the U.S. decreased to $754 million, down from $1.05 billion during the same period in 2022.

2. Netflix Ended its DVD Rental Service: On September 29, 2023, Netflix mailed its final disc, marking the end of its DVD rental service.

3. Best Buy Discontinued DVD Sales: In October 2023, Best Buy announced that it would stop selling DVDs and Blu-rays.

4. I Decided to Start Collecting DVDs: In November of 2023, I informed my wife that I wanted to begin collecting DVDs, to which she responded, “Why?”

There was once a time when people would buy the right to watch a film twice, once in theaters and then on DVD. Consumers could own their favorite films, and studios made tons of money serving this demand. But over the last 20 years, physical media has declined to near-extinction as streaming has evolved into the predominant mode of home entertainment.

And yet, in recent years, DVDs have seen a modest revival—not as a durable consumer good, but as a form of self-expression. If that sounds hokey or illogical, it’s because it is. People (myself included) are trading convenience and economic efficiency for emotional gratification. And, so far, I’m loving it.

So today, we’ll explore the rise and fall of physical media, the changing economics of movie ownership, and the minor resurgence of a dying technology.

The Rise and Fall of Physical Media

Fifty years ago, you couldn’t watch movies at home (apart from whatever played on cable television). Let’s say you actively wanted to see Citizen Kane or take in Alfred Hitchcock’s entire filmography; well, you couldn’t. You’d accept the ephemeral nature of movie consumption and think, “I guess I may never see my favorite film again. What a bummer.”

The arrival of VHS in the late 1970s marked the birth of the home entertainment industry, giving consumers unprecedented control over what they watched.

The late 1990s brought DVDs, which offered higher video quality and interactive features. Discs swiftly overtook videotape as the go-to format for home entertainment, with annual DVD sales peaking at $16 billion in 2005.

This dependable revenue stream allowed studios to take bigger risks. If a film underperformed in theaters, strong DVD sales allowed those projects to turn a profit.

Based on a handful of case studies from the early 2000s, it appears DVDs generated revenue equivalent to roughly 50% of a film’s international box office.

Physical media was a cash cow for movie studios, who could sell a single film to the same consumer multiple times. Let’s say you loved The Lion King in a world before streaming: you might be paying Disney for a movie ticket, a VHS tape, a DVD, a Blu-ray, and now a 4K disc. That’s at least $100 of Lion King spending.

Many films enjoyed active second lives on DVD and VHS, with hit titles grossing over $500M in additional revenue for Hollywood studios.

If these numbers seem too good to be true, it’s because they were.

In January of 2007, Netflix launched its streaming service, providing consumers with an expansive selection of film and TV programming with virtually no friction. Movie watching was no longer bound by physical constraints, and a treasure trove of content was yours for a measly $5 a month. DVD sales plummeted as streaming subscriptions, digital rentals, and digital purchases grew to a combined ~$60B in annual sales.

Consumers didn’t have to settle for video rental stores or cable reruns of Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives; consumers could watch something remarkable whenever they pleased. Thus began the era of Peak TV, as numerous streaming platforms entered the market while content production and consumption increased exponentially.

Suddenly, the idea of owning your favorite film became impractical. Let’s say I want to buy every movie from my Letterboxd list of 100 all-time favorites: I can buy these titles in physical format, or I can rent and stream them whenever I want. Assuming I watch each of these films two more times before I die, it will cost me significantly more to build a DVD collection while also taking up a non-trivial amount of space in my apartment. See the calculations below:

To collect DVDs is to embark upon a path of financial inconvenience. The economic reality is that streaming is cheaper, provides greater selection, and offers minimal friction. It is the superior format for most consumers.

The discontinuation of Best Buy and Netflix’s DVD programs was broadly seen as a death knell for physical media. Slate lamented, “The Death of Netflix DVD Marks the Loss of Something Even Bigger,” and The Hollywood Reporter wrote a eulogy for the era of physical media. And just like that, DVDs were an anachronism, a tool rendered extinct by technological progress, much like 8-tracks, BlackBerrys, floppy disks, Quibi, and pagers.

And yet, physical media lives. While retail demand for movie collecting has diminished, DVDs still prosper in a niche secondary market, much like stamps, coins, and baseball cards.

The Second Life of DVDs

The past six years have been rough for cinephiles. Moviegoing collapsed during the pandemic and has been slow to recover. Stories previously produced for the big screen are more likely to be adapted into limited series. Streaming content is unlimited, yet these cultural products have no tangible form. In short, it’s been a weird time for da’ movies.

In response, cinephiles have retreated online and turned backward. Platforms like Letterboxd—a social network for cinema obsessives—offer film lovers a digital community for logging, debating, and cataloging movies, serving as an at-home substitute for the social ritual of moviegoing. At the same time, many film nerds have quietly rejected the ubiquity and amorphousness of streaming in favor of the tangibility of DVD collecting.

In recent years, online communities centered on physical media have experienced substantial membership growth, with Reddit groups dedicated to DVD ownership gaining hundreds of thousands of new members.

These communities allow hobbyists to connect through their passion, offering tips on finding rare titles and a forum for showcasing their collections.

The collapse of DVD sales channels has turned physical media into a collector’s pursuit. eBay, the world’s largest platform for trading memorabilia, has benefited significantly from retail’s abandonment of physical media. An industry report from Self on “The Best Items to Sell on eBay in 2023” found DVD and Blu-ray to be the third-highest-selling category on the site.

eBay’s DVD listings constitute a bizarre market bifurcated into two distinctive product offerings. On one end are sellers indiscriminately unloading boxfuls of Blu-rays for less than $2 a disc.

On the other end of the spectrum is an upscale market for collectors interested in high-quality packaging (slipcovers, beautiful artwork, steel casing, etc.) for 4K-mastered movies, like this copy of The Social Network, which I really want to buy.

Unfortunately, this collectible is priced at $73(!!!), which is equivalent to ~5.5 Chipotle burritos, and is, therefore, too much to spend on a dying media format. Or is it?

Boutique labels like Vingar Syndrome, Shout Factory, and the Criterion Collection have seen considerable growth in recent years, offering premium collectibles for enthusiasts. Criterion, in particular, has emerged as the de facto leader in this highly specific space, and has seen search traffic nearly triple over the past year.

Recently, the label released a 4K version of the 1976 film Network, one of my all-time favorite movies, thus giving me the opportunity to repurchase a film I already own. Only a very small percentage of readers will find this transaction “cool” or “defensible.”

Herein lies the perpetual dilemma of this absurd hobby. On the one hand, I want to own this aesthetically pleasing physical representation of a beloved film. On the other hand, I could rent this film 18 times if I didn’t buy the DVD. Should I indulge myself or be a rational actor? And why am I doing this in the first place?

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Final Thoughts: The Irrational High of Collecting

The other week, I stumbled on a $2.99 Blu-ray copy of Inception at a record store. “What a steal!” I thought to myself. Upon completing my purchase, I hustled out of the shop, fearing the cashier might notice the pricing error.

Standing outside the record store, prize in hand, I couldn’t help but rejoice. “What idiot would price this so low?” I thought. And then, standing there, holding a relic of a dying technology, I realized that I might have been the idiot. $2.99 was a fair price for something most people consider junk. It was at this point that I got a bit sad.

But then I took the movie home, and I watched it. There was something wonderful about watching a film that I owned. I love knowing the movie is physically in my apartment, and I enjoy looking at my DVD collection—marveling at the cases, like Gollum from The Lord of the Rings.

That said, I am deeply conflicted about this newfound hobby. I quantify things for a living, and this collector’s pursuit is quantifiably foolish.

I do not believe:

1. That my favorite movies will disappear from streaming services.

2. That I am single-handedly preserving film history, as Guillermo Del Toro has suggested.

3. That streaming is terrible and will eventually fade away.

4. That other people should do this.

I have one reason for collecting physical media:

1. Movies have been a big part of my life, and I want to own the things I love in material form.

At times, I feel like an eight-year-old collecting Pokémon cards, questing for a holographic Charizard. Forming an emotional attachment to a piece of cardboard or a DVD case is bizarre, but is it wrong? I don’t really know. Perhaps it’s best to suspend my cynicism, stop quantifying everything ad nauseam, and simply enjoy the thrill of caring about something.

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The Stat Significant Streaming Report 📺

This page tracks what people are watching across the streaming landscape. The interactive charts and tables below highlight the platforms, shows, and movies attracting the largest audiences—and how viewing trends are evolving over time.

All visuals are updated regularly, with new data added daily and weekly. When available, click “Get Data” at the bottom of a chart to download the underlying dataset.

Because many of the graphics below are interactive, this page is best viewed on the web rather than in an email client or the Substack app.

Table of Contents

For paid subscribers — click a link below to jump straight to that section:

1. Top Line:

   1. Who is Winning the Streaming Wars?

   2. What Were Last Week’s Most-Watched Streaming Originals?

   3. Which Streaming Services Produce the Biggest Hits?

2. Section 1: The Most Popular Shows and Movies on Streaming

   1. Which Shows and Movies Have Recently Dominated Nielsen’s Weekly Top 10?

   2. A Historical Look at “Hit” Streaming Shows and Movies

   3. Which Older Shows Dominate Online Activity?

   4. Which Older Movies Dominate Online Activity?

   5. New Content vs. Syndicated Content vs. Movies in the Nielsen Ratings

3. Section 2: How Content Production is Changing

   1. How Has Television Genre Popularity Changed Over Time?

Who is Winning the Streaming Wars?

• What This Chart Shows: How streaming market share has shifted from 2022 onward.

• Data Source: Every month, Nielsen publishes The Gauge, which tracks how U.S. television viewing is distributed across streaming platforms (Netflix, Disney+, etc.) and mediums (cable, broadcast, etc.).

• Data Update Frequency: Monthly || Data Can Be Downloaded: No.

What Were Last Week’s Most-Watched Streaming Originals?

• What This Chart Shows: The television series and streaming-first films that drew the largest audiences last week.

• Data Source: Every week, industry data provider Luminate publishes a ranking of the most-watched streaming titles in the U.S., estimating viewership across major platforms.

• Data Update Frequency: Weekly || Data Can Be Downloaded: No.

*Note: Use the chart’s format filter to toggle between “TV Shows” and “Films.”

Which Streaming Services Produce the Biggest Hits?

• What This Chart Shows: How often titles from each streaming service appear in Nielsen’s weekly Top 10 since November 2023.

• Data Source: Every week since late 2023, Nielsen has published a list of the ten most-streamed titles in the U.S.

  • You can see an example screenshot of these rankings below:

    

• Data Update Frequency: Weekly

The Deep Dive: For Paying Subscribers

We also reserve several charts for paying subscribers, including:

• Which shows and movies appear most often on the streaming charts?

• A historical view of streaming shows and films that qualify as “mega-hits.”

• The older shows and movies that garner unusually high levels of viewership (Game of Thrones, Seinfeld, Interstellar, etc.).

• And more!

These views update daily or weekly, are fully interactive, and include downloadable data.

Read more

Intro: Beguiled Physical Media Skeptic

A few weeks ago, I was out to dinner with some friends when the conversation turned to music and, eventually, physical media. It was at this point that I mentioned I had recently begun collecting vinyl, and my friend admitted that he had done the same. For a brief two minutes, I experienced the misplaced satisfaction that only a self-righteous record collector can exude. And then the unthinkable happened: my other friend earnestly confessed that he and his girlfriend had started listening to CDs. This revelation thoroughly cooked my noodle.

In the span of three seconds, I flipped from performatively open-minded vinyl advocate to beguiled physical media skeptic. CDs? Like the small discs with the unappealing casing? Like the preferred delivery vehicle for Now That’s What I Call Music 23 or Kidz Bop? My friend admitted that he and his girlfriend enjoyed the ritual of putting on a CD, and after weathering the initial shock, I agreed that this ritual sounded quite nice.

Over the past few months, I’ve noticed a steady drumbeat of media coverage centered on the resurrection of the compact disc. According to these articles, vinyl is no longer the hipster favorite, replaced by Gen Z trendsters purchasing an antiquated format whose heyday preceded their birth by two to three decades.

And while I’m game for the revival of any physical medium, be it cassettes or laserdiscs, the (alleged) commercial resurrection of CDs piqued my curiosity. Were compact discs really back? Is this format primed for a vinyl-esque resurgence?

So today, we’ll investigate claims of a CD revival, explore the buyer demographics behind this purported trend, and examine whether the music industry has adapted to news of the medium’s reemergence.

Are CDs Making a Comeback?

Every change in music distribution begets a benefit in buyer experience. Cassettes offered greater portability, the iPod allowed for individual song consumption, and Spotify enabled greater music accessibility at a fraction of the price.

When CDs first came on the scene, they offered greater storage (more songs per album), increased durability (less wear and tear), and the ability to skip between songs (rather than guessing when a track would end).

At the peak of the CD era, the format generated roughly $24B in annual (inflation-adjusted) sales and accounted for almost 100% of music industry revenue. And then Shawn Fanning launched Napster, Steve Jobs launched iTunes, and Daniel Ek launched Spotify, marking music’s transformation from physical ownership to digital distribution.

In recent years, vinyl sales have overtaken CD purchases, with listeners several generations removed from the format’s cultural apex leading its unlikely revival. By all accounts, CDs are dead.

Looking at this graph, you may be wondering where we go from here. CDs do not appear to be in the midst of an epic comeback, so how will I entertain you for the next five to ten minutes? Well, not so fast! If you squint really hard and zoom in on a hyper-specific section of the data, you’ll notice the slightest of trend breaks: around 2022, CD sales stopped their rapid decline.

Media coverage of this nominal sales increase prophesied an imminent compact disc revival. The absence of overwhelmingly bad news is actually good news for physical media.

In fact, scattered across the interwebs are clues of an impending CD resurgence. If you had a corkboard and yarn, you could make a pretty convincing case for Big CD’s growing influence and the return of the Compact Disc Industrial Complex.

For example, Google search traffic for the term “CD Player” has begun increasing over the past 16 months, after two decades of precipitous decline.

Is this a coincidence, or the first sign of a glorious resurrection?? Will this minor uptick disappear a few weeks after I publish this article?? Quite possibly.

But wait, there’s more! A recent YouGov poll found that Americans are more willing to pay for CDs than vinyl and online streaming—a datapoint that is complicated by the fact that real-life humans are more likely to pay for streaming and vinyl.

Who, exactly, are these hypothetical CD buyers?

When the survey broke down preferences by generation, respondents under 45 years old were more likely to express interest in purchasing outdated formats. Said differently, those who did not live through the peak of physical media are now its most enthusiastic adopters.

Perhaps these generations do not understand what it’s like to listen to B-sides or spend $3,000 cultivating a music library that encapsulates the totality of one’s taste (versus paying $10 a month to Spotify for that same privilege).

While the consumer side of the equation shows some signs of a CD resurrection, the supply side does not. And by supply side, I mean the artists themselves. According to Discogs, vinyl remains the go-to format for physical releases, with no demonstrable reemergence for the compact disc (yet!!).

In practice, this means a music act with a modest or moderate following is more likely to release a vinyl than a CD.

So what does all this say about the future of CDs? The medium appears to be at a crossroads: primed for a slight reemergence or in the midst of a last gasp before commercial obsolescence. I genuinely have no idea how this will play out, so I will not forecast the medium’s prospects. And because I make no predictions, I will not be wrong. Five years ago, I would have prognosticated annual CD sales hitting near-zero, so consider my abstinence a relative improvement.

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Final Thoughts: Everybody Loves an Underdog

There are several aspects of the 1998 rom-com You’ve Got Mail that have not aged well. Yet on a recent rewatch, what stood out most was the David-and-Goliath struggle between an evil corporate bookstore (a stand-in for Barnes & Noble) and a local bookshop on the Upper West Side.

Today, people are happy to cheer for both the local bookshop and the corporate megaseller. Against all odds, Barnes & Noble has been recast as a scrappy upstart, with media coverage celebrating the modest revival of a chain that helped drive thousands of independent bookstores out of business in the 1990s.

Like Barnes & Noble or Waterstones, CDs have inexplicably taken on the mantle of music industry underdog, an absurd role reversal when you consider the medium’s commercial dominance:

• At the peak of the CD era, annual US music revenues reached $27B (inflation-adjusted)—roughly $10B higher than total sales in 2024. More than two decades later, the industry is still clawing its way back to this commercial high point.

• CDs were significantly more expensive than every format that came before them. Record labels and distributors justified the higher price by pointing to increased storage capacity (more songs) and the convenience of track-skipping.

• Somehow, the music industry convinced long-suffering consumers to invest in yet another medium. People had to ditch their turntables and tape decks for CD players.

After all this spending and inconvenience, CDs have inexplicably been reframed as the little engine that could. How is this possible?

The most obvious explanation is that people instinctively root against market leaders. Facebook was celebrated when it overtook MySpace, Tesla was praised as a challenger to the auto industry, and Netflix was embraced in its fight against Blockbuster. Once these companies became dominant, that support largely dissipated. The same dynamic applies to Spotify and music streaming. Anything that is not Spotify is suddenly good: I would happily root for iTunes if it ever experienced a resurgence, despite this platform being owned by the most valuable company on planet Earth. Everybody loves an underdog, even if that underdog once thrived on vanquishing other underdogs.

But the appeal of discarded trends goes beyond commercial cyclicality or class resentment. Many of these cultural revivals are the simple product of nostalgia. A bookstore or music medium becomes an avatar for an outdated way of life, and is subsequently imbued with greater meaning. When I was a kid, my friends and I played hide-and-seek at our local Barnes & Noble every week, and so for reasons entirely unrelated to books, I’ll forever root for this faceless corporation.

The same logic applies to CDs: many people’s happiest moments are tied to the compact disc (even if it was the music, not the medium, that mattered at the time). Some long for lazy afternoons digging through CD stacks at Tower Records or Sam Goody (now-defunct music stores). Others miss the ritual of putting on a CD and listening to Now That’s What I Call Music 25 in its entirety. And some are simply nostalgic for a time they never knew: when culture was tangible, and people owned the art that they consumed (instead of leasing it from the cloud).

Our disdain for commercial hegemony and longing for bygone cultural experience is a palpable mix. Whether these forces can resurrect the once-dominant-now-lowly compact disc is anyone’s guess.

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Intro: Similarity by Happenstance

Can you claim plagiarism in a genre that thrives on familiarity? A 2022 lawsuit put this contradiction to the test, forcing courts to define the boundaries of unlawful copying within modern romance literature.

The case centered on an Anchorage author who filed a copyright-infringement lawsuit against best-selling writer Tracy Wolff, whose Crave series has sold more than 3.5M copies. The complaint pointed to a shared Alaskan setting, a supernatural heroine with identical powers, multiple overlapping plot elements, and the plaintiff’s unpublished manuscript being shared with Wolff’s publisher—details that, at first glance, make the case read like a textbook example of plagiarism.

And here is where things get wacky: the defense argued that the novels’ resemblance was not evidence of copying but of coincidence, an inevitable byproduct of a commercially oversaturated genre built around a narrow set of well-worn tropes. Wolff’s attorneys asserted that in a crowded market, two independently written romance novels can (and did) arrive at similar stories precisely because the genre rewards predictability.

As of this writing, the lawsuit is headed for trial, marking a strange inflection point for the publishing industry, which is increasingly reliant on romance’s explosive growth.

Once considered niche, romance novels now account for roughly 20% of annual book sales, with their influence no longer confined to book clubs and die-hard Austenites (a nickname for Jane Austen fans). In recent years, the genre has spilled into mainstream culture, fueling a steady pipeline of streaming and big screen adaptations (Red, White & Royal Blue, Heated Rivalry, It Ends With Us, and beyond).

So today, we’ll explore the rise of romance novels, how the genre is reshaping the publishing industry and the word “smut,” and why the genre’s grip on popular culture is stronger than ever.

How Romance, Romantasy, and “Smut” Took Over Publishing—and Hollywood

A new bookstore opened down the street from my house a few months ago. Eager to support a local business, I wandered in and began scanning the shelves. After two minutes of unfamiliarity with the store’s titles—many of them romance or romantasy—I asked the clerk where I might find a copy of [insert the name of a well-known cerebral novel I will never read, for now let’s just say it was The Sun Also Rises]. To which the store manager responded, “We don’t do that.” She then launched into a well-choreographed—and clearly oft-delivered—explanation of the store’s schtick. Their inventory, she explained, was driven by influencer recommendations and community-centric book clubs.

Even today, I don’t understand how this place pays its rent. My fundamental confusion is not the store’s focus on community—which, as best I could tell, skewed female—but that a bookshop could afford to be niche in this day and age. Can a bookstore thrive while selling a narrow subset of contemporary favorites? The answer is yes—provided that subset includes romance.

The genre has exploded in the post-pandemic era, propelled by TikTok’s #BookTok community. In print alone, romance novels have more than doubled their sales over the past five years—an outcome roughly equivalent to DVDs staging a cultural comeback.

The readership of these novels is overwhelmingly female—and if that comes as news to you, then that’s somewhat impressive on your part. According to a Nielsen study on the romance format, 84% of readers are women, with more than half falling between the ages of 18 and 44.

This gender imbalance underlies a persistent media tendency to trivialize romance literature. The genre is rarely covered favorably—treated less as a durable cultural force, and more like an inexplicable fad or collective delusion. Meanwhile, I can “manage” a fantasy football team composed of athletes I will never meet, and this behavior is widely endorsed.

For example, Colleen Hoover—the genre’s most popular author—has increasingly become shorthand for unserious fiction, replacing older stand-ins like Tom Clancy or the term “airport novel.” You can see this framing at work in a recent Economist graphic on declining sentence length (where Hoover signifies the range’s lower end).

And if you’re somehow unfamiliar with the name Colleen Hoover, prepare to learn about a phenomenon that’s been hiding in plain sight—like the arrow in the FedEx logo. Despite the flood of novels into an already crowded market, Hoover alone accounts for nearly half of all romance fiction sales.

Hoover’s tremendous popularity has produced two big-screen adaptations in 14 months—It Ends With Us and Regretting You—with two more slated for release this year (Verity and Reminder of You).

That success has sparked a broader wave of film and television projects based on popular romance novels, including My Oxford Year, People We Meet on Vacation, and, of course, Heated Rivalry. Industry coverage has framed these adaptations as an inflection point for the genre’s cultural recognition. Yet there’s nothing especially new about romance’s appeal.

For decades, best-selling romance novels have reliably translated into film and television series—a pattern evident among the genre’s ten best-selling books.

So what feels new about this recent wave of best-selling series and adaptations? Ultimately, the modern incarnation of romance books is the product of three cultural shifts:

1. BookTok and Book Clubs: When TikTok first came on the scene, I assumed its rapid growth would be another blow to reading—but that wasn’t entirely true. There is now a thriving community of literary influencers recommending novels on social media, leading people to label every popular book they do not know as “a BookTok thing.” This community is not exclusively based around romance, but the genre has been one of its biggest beneficiaries.

2. The Blending of Romance and Fantasy: Twilight forever changed the genre by successfully blending romance and fantasy elements for pop sensibilities. In recent years, Twilight’s descendants have been grouped into a subgenre of their own: romantasy. There are many flavors of romantasy: fae romantasy (fairies and elves), dark romantasy (disturbing content and horror elements), paranormal/monster romantasy (vampires and werewolves), enemies-to-lovers romantasy (self-explanatory), and these are but the tip of the iceberg. If you cannot wrap your mind around these stories, be forewarned: there will probably be 20 film and television adaptations of romantasy novels in the next few years.

3. Graphic Sex: Once again, Twilight casts a long shadow over the genre, as fan fiction inspired by the series produced the most commercially consequential romance title of the past two decades. I’m of course talking about Fifty Shades of Grey, the best-selling romance novel of all time—by a wide margin. Much of the book’s initial reputation centered on its graphic sex scenes and depictions of BDSM. The unprecedented success of the Fifty Shades series, coupled with a broader cultural tolerance for explicit sexual content in literature, helped usher risqué material into the mainstream.

While these dynamics do not define modern romance in its entirety, many best-selling series exhibit some or all of these traits. As the genre has evolved and expanded, imitation has also accelerated, with writers rapidly adopting the structures and tropes of earlier commercial hits.

Take, for example, the vocabulary used to depict sex in novels. Over the past two decades, words like “quiver,” “ache,” “mate,” and “embrace” have become more prevalent in English literature as writers increasingly rely on a shared lexicon of sexually charged language to convey desire.

And it’s at this point that we arrive at “smut,” a reductive and surprisingly endearing label for romance novels that depict sex (often lots of it).

Before researching this piece, I’d heard the word “smut” used in reference to romance novels and assumed it was dismissive shorthand meant to undercut the genre’s popularity. Then I went to fact-check a Colleen Hoover statistic and was met with this auto-complete result.

I am not alone in my curiosity. Nearly 200,000 people per month are attempting to unpack what “smut” means in relation to this emergent wave of stories.

For those unfamiliar: “smut” is a tongue-in-cheek term embraced by romance readers to describe stories with explicit emphasis on sexual content. The moniker becomes even more playful when combined with romance subgenres. There’s fae smut (fairy romance with an erotic tilt), werewolf smut, hockey smut (yes, that’s Heated Rivalry), and countless other micro-categories that guide readers to their preferred story format. Once a word meant to describe soil-feeding fungi—smut has been reclaimed as a term of endearment.

If the success of Heated Rivalry and Fifty Shades proves anything, it’s that audiences have a healthy appetite for smut of all kinds. The inevitable follow-up question is what happens when smut goes mainstream.

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Final Thoughts: The Superhero Fatigue Blueprint

The first Comic-Con—then called the Golden State Comic-Minicon—took place in 1970 and drew roughly 200 attendees. The event was squarely focused on superhero comics from publishers like Marvel and DC, with programming designed for creators and devoted collectors. And while that small group of attendees may have hoped their community would grow, few could have imagined what the event would become—or how they might lose control of their own subculture.

Fast-forward to 2019, when Comic-Con was forced to cap attendance at 135,000 after the San Diego Convention Center reached its capacity limits. Over the course of five decades, comics have evolved from a dedicated niche into the entertainment industry’s most valuable source material, powering blockbuster films and streaming franchises. In recent years, however, Marvel’s cultural dominance has begun to waver, undercut by the genre’s full absorption into the mainstream and subsequent commercial fatigue. As superhero films grew, they began courting the superhero-agnostic, myself included, and exhaustively mined their source material until the well ran dry.

In 2018, I watched Avengers: Infinity War and—after decades of superhero avoidance—became invested in Marvel’s Cinematic Universe (MCU). The film’s cliffhanger left me, and millions of others, excited to see how the saga would end. In hindsight, my fledgling interest in the MCU might have been an omen for the franchise: if these stories had finally reached a laggard like me, how much longer could they sustain their cultural dominance? Said differently, what happens to a thriving subculture when it’s been fully absorbed (and co-opted) by the mainstream?

This past year, I was struck by a similar sensation while watching—and thoroughly enjoying—Heated Rivalry. Here again was an adaptation of a beloved series drawn from source material with a devoted fanbase that had previously existed within its own silo (hockey smut!). Between the show’s success and the blockbuster performance of recent Colleen Hoover adaptations, it’s easy to see where the romance genre is headed: there will be an inevitable gold rush to capitalize on its popularity, followed—just as predictably—by commercial exhaustion and inevitable downstream consequences for the genre’s source material.

Like comic books, romance novels are hardly new. Many of the genre’s most popular works date back to the 19th century, including Wuthering Heights, which is set to receive a big-screen adaptation in the coming weeks. What is new is the genre’s mainstream ascension, driven by a series of sociocultural shifts that have pushed romance books far beyond their traditional audience. For anyone familiar with the culture industry’s cycles of discovery, overexposure, and eventual discard, this pattern is all too familiar.

Which brings us back to the earlier case of Alaskan-witch-romantasy copyright infringement. What initially reads as a farcical tale of imitation is, in fact, another signal of commercial saturation: a market so crowded that “unoriginal by accident” has become a plausible legal defense, with the genre’s overabundance weaponized in court.

There is no shortage of demand for romance, romantasy, and smut of all mystical creatures and professions. Whether the industry that produces and adapts these products will allow these stories to thrive remains an open question.

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Intro: Dump-uary

In 1992, The Silence of the Lambs swept the Academy Awards’ most prestigious categories, winning Best Picture, Director, Actor, and Actress. Somehow, a movie about a well-educated cannibal who speaks in riddles became a commercial smash and a critical darling. The Silence of the Lambs is one of just three films to have acheived the “Big Four” Oscar sweep. It’s also the only Best Picture winner in the past seven decades to have been released in January.

If that last sentence reads like a typo, I promise it isn’t. In 100 years of this glorified popularity contest, January—a month with a perfectly normal number of days—has been bizarrely underrepresented.

In fact, anyone who follows the movie release calendar knows that January has its own nickname within the film industry: Dump-uary. Traditionally, movies perceived as having lesser theatrical appeal are unceremoniously “dumped” into the first few weeks of the year, a convenient way for studios to unload low-confidence bets from their balance sheets.

Movie releases have always been governed by intense seasonality. From Dump-uary to summer blockbusters to prestige Oscar fare, conventional wisdom holds that different parts of the calendar are best suited to different kinds of films.

Hearing my favorite movie podcasters (once again) complain about this year’s Dump-uary slate got me thinking about two completely unrelated questions. First: Is this phenomenon quantifiable? And second: Does the same logic apply to the music industry? Are pop stars constrained by seasonal demand in the same way—or can musicians release albums whenever they want because nobody cares about the Grammys?

So today, we’ll explore the best months to release new movies and music, the strange seasonal rhythms of how music is consumed throughout the year, and how streaming has reshaped music’s role in our daily lives.

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When Are Movies and Music Typically Released?

Releases tend to be weighted toward the back half of the year for both film and music. Both industries see upticks in distribution in September and October, followed by a steep drop-off in November and, for albums, in December.

This data corroborates the Dump-uary phenomenon, with January consistently posting the fewest film releases. By volume alone, it’s a bad month for da’ movies.

Part of the fun of writing this newsletter is perpetual discovery. Despite producing ~150 artisanal essays on the facts and figures underlying popular culture, I am still consistently wrong (which, depending on how you look at it, is either sad, comforting, character-building, or a combination of all three). With most analyses, I have a directional sense of which way the results will go. But not with this one. My initial findings were nowhere near expectations. Why would summer see fewer movie premieres if that’s when all the blockbusters debut? Why are fewer albums dropped in December if that’s when people buy the most stuff?

To demystify these patterns, I first dissected the film industry’s fairly intuitive release schedule before digging into the wacky world of music distribution and consumption.

The Ups and Downs of the Movie Calendar

Seeing a movie requires free time. Between ever-lengthening trailers, a rogue Nicole Kidman AMC ad that is long past its cultural expiration date, and the simple fact that movies themselves keep getting longer—the time commitment is no joke. In practice, this means movie viewership, as measured by share of box office, is weighted toward the summer months and holidays when children and parents have ample time.

If audiences are more likely to buy tickets in the summer, why are fewer films released during this window? The answer, as is the case with all totally-awesome things in life, revolves around profit maximization. Periods with elevated total box office are also those with higher per-film grosses, as studios chase the elusive mega-billion-dollar hit.

As of this writing, Dune: Part Three and Avengers: Doomsday are scheduled to come out on the same day. Unless a Barbenheimer-esque crossover occurs, it’s likely that one of these studios will acquiesce and change release dates, allowing both movies greater runway to make lots of money. Yay money.

Blockbuster cultivation explains the drop in summertime releases, but what drives the uptick in October and November premieres? Why, the Oscars, of course! I have dedicated two articles to the Oscars, and, consequently, these are my two worst-performing pieces because most people do not care about the Oscars. Or do they?

While fewer people tune in to the Oscar broadcast, curiosity about what gets recognized remains strong. An Oscar nomination still confers cultural legitimacy—and, crucially, delivers a measurable boost at the box office and on streaming platforms.

As a result, studios cluster their Oscar hopefuls into the back half of the calendar, ensuring these films are fresh in voters’ minds when awards season commences in early January.

The Oscars offer an economic lifeline to mid- and low-budget films, prompting a surge of prestige releases in the latter half of the year. These films are then kept in theaters deep into the new year to capitalize on awards buzz, crowding out space for new releases. The result: fewer January debuts, making Dump-uary even more dump-ier.

The Wacky World of Music Distribution and Streaming

Music consumption does not require ticket fees, parking, Nerds Gummy Clusters, or a Nicole Kidman promo. With a streaming subscription, accessing music is as simple as opening Spotify—or turning on your car.

As a result, streaming activity shows far less seasonality throughout the year, with only a modest decline beginning in the summer months.

I found the relative year-end dip in streaming particularly striking, given that this period coincides with an increase in album releases. If more music is being released, why is less of it being played? The answer, it turns out, has less to do with song supply and more to do with how people spend their time.

When we examine the days with the lowest streaming activity, we find a mix of major holidays and peak summer dates. People don’t listen to music during Christmas or on vacation because they’re too busy spending time with their family and going to the movies. How wholesome.

In fact, the single strongest predictor of when people listen to music is decidedly mundane: work.

On a week-to-week basis, listeners aged 30 to 70 spend more time on streaming platforms than younger and older cohorts.

How is this possible? Don’t tweens and teens spend hours discovering new music, while thirty-somethings slowly wither at their desks, intermittently checking Kalshi for real-time odds of an AI apocalypse?

The answer is yes—to all of the above. But the monotony of adult life introduces several situations in which streaming platforms like Spotify, Pandora, and AccuRadio become indispensable:

1. Commuting

2. Being bored at work

3. Drowning out loud coworkers

4. Long work bouts (coding, writing, strategizing, etc.)

5. Trying to inject joy into your day while doing activities 1, 2, 3, and 4, as well as all the time in between

Working-age groups (highlighted in blue) exhibit a higher proportion of their music consumption during work and commuting hours, whereas adolescents and retirees are more likely to stream at night.

Nothing screams adulthood like listening to Green Day’s “American Idiot” whilst prepping tax documents or forecasting Q3 revenue.

Music’s role in our lives shifts dramatically with age. It begins as a tool for identity formation and cultural exploration, then evolves into a practical aid for getting through the workday, before eventually returning to its purest role: entertainment.

So how do these age-specific listening patterns influence album release timing? The answer centers on the birth of a new phenomenon, which I will call Dump-cember.

Artists are far less likely to release new music in December, when overall listening declines and year-end attention is monopolized by Christmas classics. The September–October uptick in album drops appears to be a deliberate attempt to avoid the holidays—maximizing the odds that a new record gains traction without seasonal interference.

If Sabrina Carpenter or Bad Bunny drops an album in early December, they will be competing with Christmas staples from Bing Crosby (“White Christmas”) and Andy Williams (“It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year”), who have been dead for decades. The result is a thinner release calendar and a higher share of low-profile albums, which tend to receive weaker critical reception, as measured by Pitchfork scores.

This pattern reflects a mix of critical fatigue and strategic distribution: critics tend to dismiss trend-chasing holiday releases, while labels quietly slot their least promising projects into a low-attention window.

There is no “best” month to release new music—most months are interchangeable—with the exception of December. December is bad; everything else is the same. With that insight, I hope to cement my eternal online legacy as the person who quantified and coined the term Dump-cember. Dad, if you’re reading this—I hope you’re proud.

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Final Thoughts: Consider the Lightbulb

When I was a kid—and even later as a film student—I thought art simply existed, summoned at the whims of temperamental geniuses. I assumed artists only stopped working to chain-smoke cigarettes, decry the pitfalls of commercialism, and brood at their muses.

As an adult, I’ve learned that mass-disseminated art depends on capital investment, and its distribution is often shaped—quite bluntly—by return on investment. Through this lens, it’s easy to grow cynical about capitalism’s influence on culture, until you realize we live in an era where entertainment is endlessly accessible, perhaps even overwhelming in its abundance.

For most of human history, that abundance simply wasn’t possible. Before climate control, electricity, audio recording, film production, the internet, Napster, TiVo, Quibi, Hulu, and Tubi, one’s engagement with art was dictated by the seasons:

• In 5th-century Greece, cultural life was compressed into events like the City Dionysia, a spring festival held after the harvest that often premiered new plays.

• The Roman Empire’s Ludi Romani occurred in early September, blending gladiatorial games, musical celebration, and theatrical performance.

• Shakespeare’s plays largely ran in the summer months, when daylight was plentiful, and his shows were frequently interrupted by plague outbreaks.

Before temperature control and lightbulbs, there were predictable periods when art flourished and long stretches when it simply couldn’t.

Today, those constraints are gone. If anything, our most recent global pandemic demonstrated the opposite: media consumption surged as streaming filled newly found hours. Say what you want about Ted Sarandos (Netflix’s co-CEO), but the man gives us no shortage of content. Whether this content qualifies as art is a matter of opinion.

Having conquered the elements, the foremost determinant of entertainment consumption is free time. With less leisure time, you’re more likely to listen to music; with ample hours, you can commit to TV and movies.

In the modern era, every day is City Dionysia and Ludi Romani, with the exception of Dump-uary, and, of course, Dump-cember.

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