The Age of the Hits - I Love Lucy watched by 74% of US households in 1954

The Church had one of the best distribution infrastructure and was the main mass cultural unifier in Western Europe, thanks also to the Guttenberg's press, which made the Bible the most mass produced media (pg 27).

The 'watercooler effect' where everyone talked about the same thing, had much to do with the power of media, as well as the limited content (ie TV shows) available during that era. Now with 100s of cable stations, 100s of thousands of DVDs, millions of tracks, etc, all becoming available to most homes, there's no longer a dependence on hits.

There will still be hits, e.g. Britney Spears, Disney's Pirates of the Carribean, Blizzard's World of Warcraft, but it won't have the same dominant impact on the market. *NSYNC, on 21 March 2000 sold 2.4m copies of No Strings Attached, its second album (pg 31). It went on to sell 11m copies in 2000. The US music industry had over 1,000 hit albums (ie platinum, multi-platinum, diamond) in 2002. This dropped to less than 600 in 2005 while the industry dropped 25% in sales that same period!


Hit-Driven Economy -- Hit-Driven Culture (pg 38)

Average cost of producing a Hollywood movie is $60m and costs another $60m to market. This explains why Hollywood is still stuck in hit-driven mode - "setting out to make a hit is not exactly the same thing as setting out to make a good movie." (pg 39).

Hollywood economics has also driven a hit-driven culture -- " we follow weekend box office results as we do professional sports...in our fixation of star power, we cheer the salary inflation of A-listers and follow their absurd public lives with an attention that far exceeds our interest in their own work." pg 39.

One only needs to search on Brad and Angelina duo to validate this observation. "from superstar athletes to celebrity CEOs, we ascribe disproportionate attention to the very top of the heap. We have been trained in other words, to see the world through a hit-colored lens."

It's all about allocating scarce resources to the most "deserving" which is to say, the most popular...the world of shelf space is a zero-sum game: One product displaces another....Economically, this is the same as saying, "If there can only be a few rich, let them at least be super-rich."

We are turning from a mass-market back into a niche nation, defined not by our geogrpahy, but by our interests. (pg 40)