Unterhaltung wird lokaler
Economist:
Mega-events like the World Cup still seize global attention. But the bigger picture is that entertainment is fragmenting. From music to television to social media and gaming, audiences are tuning out of American content and embracing alternatives from closer to home. There is an emerging paradox: even as the world becomes more connected, people are choosing more local forms of fun. Even as billions tune in to a single show in North America, the American-led monoculture is fading.
This local turn is the opposite of what many predicted. Global entertainment platforms such as Spotify, Netflix, YouTube, and the Apple and Google mobile-app stores give people everywhere access to the same music, video and games. The biggest winners have been a lopsidedly American elite of megastars and brands—think Taylor Swift, MrBeast or Roblox—which have gone global as never before. The biggest sports leagues have soared in value along with them.
But below the top tier, entertainment is fragmenting. Sport has always been a reluctant globaliser, because people prefer to watch their local team. America’s National Football League, the world’s highest-earning sports property, earns 98% of its media-rights revenue at home. The English Premier League is the only football league in Europe that makes more in media rights abroad than it does at home. Every four years the world comes together for the World Cup and the Olympics. Otherwise, fans are mainly engrossed in domestic contests. New Yorkers are far less excited about the football than they are about the Knicks.
YouTube offers content from every country, but its users gravitate towards clips from close to home: three-quarters of its “trending” videos manage to trend in only one country.
Die Produktion wird immer billiger:
Cheaper production and distribution have caused a boom in the supply of local entertainment. In the age of CDs, cinemas and game cartridges, there were huge economies of scale in pushing popular acts or products to go global. Today, producing and distributing new entertainment—whether songs, videos or games—is cheap enough for it to be profitable to target much smaller niches.
Es gibt weniger Gatekeeper:
In one recent year, German songs made up only four of the 100 most-played tracks on national radio, but 44 of the country’s streaming top 100. People’s preferences have turned out to be more local than elite tastemakers thought.
America’s century of dominance over global popular culture is over. It still controls much of entertainment’s distribution, via platforms such as YouTube and the app stores, and thus much of the industry’s profit. But it has lost its grip on content, and with it the cultural tractor-beam that has recruited millions of listeners, viewers and players to American values and ideas over the years.