Is Originality Dead?
Thoughts on content consumption
I recently looked up a list of the highest-grossing movies since 2020. I was curious what they might have in common, other than being cash cows. Here are the top 10, according to Wikipedia:
Avatar: The Way of Water
Ne Zha 2
Spider-Man: No Way Home
Inside Out 2
Top Gun: Maverick
Barbie
The Super Mario Bros. Movie
Deadpool & Wolverine
Moana 2
Lilo & Stitch
What do you notice?
It’s hard to miss the fact that everything on this list is either a continuation of a franchise or based on pre-existing source material, and in some cases, both (e.g., Spider-Man, Deadpool). There is almost no original content. And it’s not just movies.
Feeding the Machine
Listen to the most-played pop songs on Spotify any given week, and you’ll hear identical trap-style drum beats or the same 80s-inspired synth sounds applied from one track to the next. Everyone—from the most in-demand professional producer to the hobbyist home recorder—uses virtually the same digital recording technology, with the same easy-to-plug-in library of sounds and samples available at the click of a mouse. If you want your song to sound a little (or a lot) more like a popular artist, it’s relatively easy to achieve. And streaming services like Spotify reward this sameness by algorithmically grouping songs that sound alike together on featured playlists. In others words, sounding more like Taylor Swift or The Weeknd gives you a better chance of being featured on a playlist with the likes of Taylor Swift or The Weeknd.
One of the knocks on Taylor Swift—and I think a justifiable one at this point—is that much of her stuff sounds the same. She (and when I say she, I mean her team) knows exactly what sells—the lyrical content, song structures, and production style her fans respond to—and as any corporate juggernaut would, she’ll repeat that formula all the way to the bank until the market forces her to pivot (which there is no sign will ever occur). At their core, her songs tell simple stories about boy/girl relationships and navigating the world as a young woman that resonate with a huge audience of mainly girls, young women, and gay men, as far as I can tell (basically, everyone but straight men). Her master stroke was working thinly-veiled narratives about her relationships with famous men into the mix. It gave her songs a tabloid-y soap opera-like storyline for her already fiercely devoted fan base to follow from one album to the next.
An Instagram Story
I recently saw an Instagram video of a young musician in hysterics because to her ear, a song on Taylor Swift’s latest album sounded exactly like one of hers. She stopped short of claiming Swift had ripped her off, but she was genuinely shocked by the perceived similarity. Based on a side-by-side listening to the two songs, I understood where she was coming from. The songs’ arrangements, the transitions between verse, chorus, and bridge, the sounds and instruments used, the effects employed to process the vocals, and the reverb and compression levels applied were eerily similar. Swap out the voices, and her song could easily have been a track on Swift’s album. But aside from being simple verse-chorus-verse folk songs, the two songs bore no further resemblance. There were no notable similarities in melody, lyrical content, or chord structure—certainly nothing that would hold up in a copyright infringement lawsuit. The fact is that both songs were simply fed through the same audio processing machine. Her song was going to end up sounding like Taylor Swift (or vice versa) whether she intended it to or not.
So what’s going on? Why are people drawn in such large numbers to repackaged versions of media they’ve already experienced?
It’s a combination of human nature and technological influence.
Give Me Proof
First, there’s the bandwagon effect. Research shows that people’s media consumption choices move in the direction of social proof. In short, if that many people are doing it (whatever it is doesn’t seem to matter), then I should probably be doing it too. It’s the reason people are so much more likely to follow a YouTube channel with 100,000 subscribers than a similar channel with 30 subscribers, regardless of the quality of either channel’s content.
It’s the same psychology (in addition to morbid curiosity) that leads to rubbernecking on the highway. Everyone else is slowing down and looking, so I’d better do the same. Ideally though, witnessing a car wreck causes you to think critically about what to avoid (e.g., tailgating, looking at your phone) so you don’t end up crashing too. I’m not sure people are applying that same critical thinking to their social media and streaming choices.
Feed Me
On the technology side, media company algorithms are built to maximize the bandwagon effect by (1) pushing the most popular content to the top of your feed and (2) continuously feeding you more of the same. It’s why the first thing you see when you log in to Netflix is a top ten most-played list featuring yet another dark Nordic thriller or the latest in a seemingly endless supply of true crime docudramas. More of the same = astronomical profit = more of the same. This sheds further light on the insane streaming numbers Taylor Swift commands. She doesn’t need Spotify to push her to the top of anyone’s feed. She’s already at the top of the mountain. But for a little extra push, and just because she can, she takes advantage of the algorithm to keep pulling in new listeners (and more cash). She’s like a human algorithm operating inside a computer algorithm.
I didn’t start writing this with the intention of talking so much about Taylor Swift. It’s just that her extreme success illustrates my point so well. Pushing all of our entertainment onto the internet (movies out of theaters, music away from physical media like records and CDs, etc.) has made us far too likely to simply swallow what the media companies serve us. Instead of making an effort to seek exciting new art that is truly worth our time, we’re much too focused on consuming more and more of the same.