Trying to piece together what culture looks like in 2025, and it's an unexpected journey. In short: it looks a lot different for marketers looking for colour pallets, and another for audiences living in the thick of it...
Full blog here: www.midiaresearch.com/blog/the-lif...
For every 100 of you there are now, Marketing Brad, there will be only one. And will it really be you, thought-leader posting on LinkedIn? Β―\_(γ)_/Β―
Every time someone posts on LI about "oh AI will just make the best humans stand out!" i remember this guy from Race Across the World who they run into in India and they ask why he doesn't automate his farm work and he goes:
"Machines kill labour. People need jobs." (icon)
What's also rogue: it's got almost no social media presence. But its streams are doing great. So we ask the big question: does a song need to be on social media to perform well?
Check out the full take in my #blog this week for @midiaresearch.bsky.social www.midiaresearch.com/blog/why-dra...
The song itself: not weird. It premiers halfway through a truly strange 40-minute episode of a YouTube series. You have no idea what's going on, and then, suddenly, there's a new song with Central Cee in it. I'm not a big Drake fan, so maybe I just don't get it?
www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqXf...
Every few months Drake goes out of his way to do something weird and a bit obscure, and I end up down the rabbit hole trying to puzzle out whether it matters and, if so, what it means www.bbc.com/news/article...
Consumers *like* ease and convenience. But it's the chase; the mystery; the time spent in anticipatory speculation, desperately craving the next episode or song or clue, that makes us really *care*
Sometimes building fandom requires the opposite of "innovating"
www.midiaresearch.com/blog/buildin...
"If creators, and the industries around them, want a long-term future, they should not take this change in perception lightly. Yesterday it was OpenAI denigrating the value of paying creators; today it is Budweiser." Who will it be tomorrow? www.midiaresearch.com/blog/budweis...
Despite the naysayers, live music is thriving β if you know where to find it. And increasingly it's rooted in places that are far more gate-kept than TikTok
www.midiaresearch.com/blog/live-is...
Bardcore. I meant to type bardcore
The future might be tabards, not space lasers: barcore raves point to a new underground that is the answer to the entertainment industry's cultural crisis.
www.midiaresearch.com/blog/culture...
"[AI] cannot reach toward the other and their otherness in order to affirm and nurture our own. And without that, there is no art β only the sterile echo of an absent maker serving vampiric billionaires consumed by a need for power in place of connection." www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
It'll be worse when they stop, and instead act with barefaced impunity
Uncertainty over time becomes a certainty. What Trump *can* tariff, and what companies will bend over backwards in the meantime to potentially avoid, are two very different things...
www.midiaresearch.com/blog/what-ma...
this may be a petty hill, and it's decidedly a tangent from the main issue, but WHY SEND the empty cargo ships? we're at risk of climate collapse and sending empty cargo ships halfway across the world for ..what purpose exactly
Read the full take for what this means long-term here
@midiaresearch.bsky.social
ππ
fin/π§΅
www.midiaresearch.com/blog/there-i...
Our sources of truth and authority are becoming ever more fallible as they cut budgets and incorporate chatbots. Our arbiters of reality are Reddit threads, Wikipedia links, and YouTube videos. The internet has always lied β but does it *ever* tell the truth anymore? (3/π§΅)
Anything from fantasy medical conditions (brought to life with AI images) to made-up historical events, complete with AI-gen news articles, are possible. Most won't even be malicious: a school project can be treated by the LLM as fact, with few β if any β practical tells. (2/π§΅)
Generative AI is improving, and its use is increasing. Here's the problem: AI makes it *so* easy for fans to bring ideas to life, it itself cannot actually tell the difference between fan fiction and reality.
Take Pirates of the Caribbean Six... π§΅π
but does this mean itβs destined to be a gallery of self-reflection, or can it truly take off?
Full post here π
www.midiaresearch.com/blog/what-do...
In this week's #blog for @midiaresearch.bsky.social, I answer my own question (lol). Building a social platform around what is, ultimately, a popular βcreatorβ tool, might actually make more sense in the creator economy than shoehorning those tools into existing social platformsβ¦
Everyone in tech wants to get in on AI βΒ especially social platforms, like X and Meta. So what does it mean when OpenAI decides it wants to get into social?? www.theverge.com/openai/64813...
hyped to have joined the White Lotus bandwagon just in time for season 3; terrified of spoilers because I haven't finished it yet.
TV's really lost the art of the cultural moment... except HBO, which seems to just hand out banger after banger
Have you noticed TikTok seems a bit... dead, recently?
Ban or no ban, the vibes are off, and user attention is drifting elsewhere.
TikTok was the central hub of online culture, in a way no other app can really stand in for. So what happens now?
www.midiaresearch.com/blog/if-the-...
OpenAI saying they value creativity, crying when DeepSeek comes out, and then launching an update with Studio Gibli's work is just... priceless.
It's play nice for the press and the courtroom, but when the doors are closed they build a resounding middle finger to creators youtu.be/4OiMOHRDs14?...
But this raises the question: what happens if DMs, like Stories and the Feed before it, becomes oversaturated too?
Read the full take on the @midiaresearch.bsky.social blog ππ
www.midiaresearch.com/blog/why-ads...
With our own lives shoved out of the front page, users are turning to the DMs, where they can share memes and Reels like penguins share pebbles (which is honestly very wholesome) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebbling
But WHY is this happening?
We know users are time & attention saturated, and big consumers of social video. Yet we also know the main reason they use Instagram is to keep up with their friends.
Somehow, in all the updates, this seems to become harder to do.
www.midiaresearch.com/reports/soci...
Users have been moving back from the front page into the DMs for years now, according to this interview with CEO Adam Mosseri. So, of course, Instagram is following them there
youtu.be/wuWivVqB2qo?...
There are loads of new features coming to Instagram's DMs, from Broadcast Channels (brands, rejoice) to themed chat backgrounds (the rest of us, rejoice). Why are they doing this, and what does it mean? ππ§΅
