Culture industries are dominated by a few big corporations that prefer to keep flogging old stories instead of taking a risk on something new. Creative workers can still produce fresh ideas, but they’re snuffed out before they get a chance to breathe.
Are they? Disney has been around like, what, about a century? Popular media makes money. How exactly do you think these culture monopolies are temporary?
Are you claiming that Disney has been a monopoly for a century? That’s an interesting claim.
What I see happening is that the major media companies are producing a lot of garbage. Until relatively recently, they were able to get away with this because there were few alternatives and there was a kind of shared cultural knowledge of, for example, pop music or popular movies. These days, there’s too much media to consume from too many sources and some of it is free or incredibly cheap. It doesn’t take much for large swaths of the general public in any given country to abandon the traditional movie companies or the famous music companies.
Was it this article or another one that I read yesterday that remarked how the majority of people don’t know Taylor Swift’s music. She’s incredibly popular, world famous, but there are so many more people who just don’t know her music. And that’s a big contrast with the Beatles or Michael Jackson. If the media companies aren’t panicking, they should be.