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Joe Sipher's avatar

Isn't this just Econ 101 playing out in real time? We've gone from an oligopoly of MTV and record labels manufacturing scarcity to something approaching a perfect market where anyone can drop a track on Spotify.

Turns out when you remove the gatekeepers, the market satisfies a much wider spectrum of musical tastes instead of force-feeding us a few manufactured pop stars.

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Pleb Millennial's avatar

The top 100 is one of the first echo chambers: things are popular because they are deemed popular. As Derek Thompson pointed out (don't know how original source,and others have done the same) , Billboard changed its methodology in the '90s from store owners self-selecting stock they wanted to move to point of sales. The churn before then, in which there could be more stars, was artificially propped up. The increase in the last decade could be attributed to more flash in the pan popularity, or increasing options of new things.

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