Frank starts out wondering if digital technology will allow just a few artists to take all the spoils \u2013 this is the pessimistic, winner-take-all view. The optimistic view is that we live in a \u201clong tail\u201d world, a golden age of culture in which small-batch everything finds its audience, and its creators are rewarded accordingly. Frank considers both possibilities.<\/p>\n
In practice, however, winner-take-all effects still appear to dominate. Long-tail proponents predict that the least-popular offerings should be capturing market share from the most popular. But as Anita Elberse, a professor at the Harvard Business School, recounts in her 2013 book \u201c<\/i>Blockbusters<\/i><\/a>,\u201d the entertainment industry\u2019s experience has been the reverse. Digital song titles selling more than one million copies, for example, accounted for 15 percent of sales in 2011, up from 7 percent in 2007. The publishing and film industries experienced similar trends.<\/i><\/i><\/p>\n Frank (whose two sons are indie-rock musicians) wants to believe that things are better than this. His writing is unsentimental, nuanced, and often hopeful \u2013 I recommend not only his journalism but his lucid books like Falling Behind<\/em> and The Winner-Take-All Society<\/em>, written with Philip Cook.<\/p>\n The relationship of winner-take-all economics to the blockbuster culture is crucial to anyone trying to make a living in the arts or entertainment. It\u2019s also one of the key topics of my forthcoming book. Stay tuned on this stuff.<\/p>\n ALSO: A few days ago I was lucky enough to moderate a panel on California fiction with novelists Charles Yu and Edan Lepucki. Yu has a new essay that is as funny and insightful as his novel, How To Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe<\/em>. Yu\u2019s piece<\/a> is vaguely inspired by the Spike Jonze film Her<\/em>, whose protagonist falls in love with the female voice in his operating system. Digital technology works very hard to become personal, seductive, appealing. And yes, says Yu, \u201cThe sexier our high-tech stuff gets, the less I am able to feel anything about it. I can\u2019t fall in love anymore.\u201d He flashes back:<\/p>\n I once loved technology, deeply. My first real crush was on my family\u2019s <\/i>Commodore 64<\/i><\/a>. It was 1983, and I was 7 years old. <\/i><\/p>\n I\u2019ll let readers pick it up from there. Yu gets at both the pros and cons of the digital age: His fiction has some resemblance to Douglas Adams\u2019 Hitchhiker book and he\u2019s clearly taken Kurt Vonnegut\u2019s writing on technology seriously as well. A young writer to watch.<\/p>\n![\"220px-Her2013Poster\"](\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/220px-Her2013Poster-202x300.jpg\")
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