Wretchard –

You’re touching on something I’ve thought about a lot. Which has been the decline of the mass culture somewhere around the late 1980′s. It was not driven really by technological changes (the LAT peaked in circulation in 1988 and declined every year after that).

Rather, deep demographic changes, a corrupt, insular, decadent, and protected from competition yuppie elite (aka Yuppie SWPL scum), and marketing fads for certain demographic sectors (mostly young women) drove pretty much MOST mass media into extinction and near extinction.

Let me give you an example. The LA County Metro Area (LA, Riverside, San Bernadino, Orange, Ventura, have a combined population of 17 million.

Now, 17 million may sound like a lot, but that population supports: exactly ONE Classical Music station, exactly ONE Jazz station, exactly ONE commercial Alternative Rock station. For a few years, “Indie 103.1″ competed with LA’s KROQ, with former Sex Pistol’s guitarist Steve Jones, DJs who used to front for the Vandals, and so on. The station was not commercially profitable because out of that 17 million people, there were only a few people interested in Alternative Rock. Most radio stations are Spanish Language because that is who lives in the Greater LA Metro area. Indie 103.1 went Spanish Language back in January. [The failure of LA to sustain a current, "hot" musical scene and cutting-edge acts who become national figures of interest is of course itself telling.]

The failure of Newspapers was to imagine that Mexicans read English language newspapers. They don’t. The failure of Television networks (which gave up Saturday nights, back in 1998, and now the CW will give up Sunday nights) was to imagine that Mexicans watch English language television. They don’t. [Nielson has handy stats broken out by Black/Hispanic/Everyone.] Both Television (Entertainment and News alike) and Newspapers alienated half or more of their natural readership (which was and is conservative), got stuck with a cost structure that only works for mass-delivery of content (paper, TV affiliate networks), and failed to understand the core reality:

DEMOGRAPHIC DECLINE.

IMHO Micropayments and other attempts to create what amounts to “Hillbilly Armor” for legacy media or new media for that matter to leverage the Itunes or Amazon model of “long tails” simply won’t work for one basic reason:

We are running out of people interested in that sort of thing. Which is mostly White Middle Class Americans.

Look at Rock Music. NOTHING interesting or exciting has been done in twenty years, because America ran out of enough young White people to make Rock music both competitive and well-paying. Heck the average NFL fan is over 50. CBS’s viewership is over 59 for the median age, and ABC, NBC, and Fox are not far behind.

America is older, greyer, and ever smaller every year for White/Middle class. Our young people are mostly Mexican, don’t care much one way or another about English language media, culture, music, food, books, or much of anything else to do with America, for that matter. Mexicans don’t read English language books, listen to White American Rock music, follow White American sports, or read/watch White American news sources. Why would they? Mexico is right over the border and has all they need culturally and linguistically.

The new media empires are already here. They’re just in Spanish, and oriented for Mexicans only. No Gringos alllowed.