Perhaps the most significant shift in popular media is who decides what gets made. Historically, editors, studio heads, and music producers acted as curators. They had taste, bias, and, crucially, human limitation.
Now, the algorithm decides. Spotify’s Discover Weekly, Netflix’s recommendation engine, and TikTok’s "For You" page have replaced human curation with machine learning. These systems do not care about quality or artistic intent; they care about engagement and retention.
This has created a feedback loop. Entertainment content is increasingly designed to please the algorithm. That means:
The consequence is a homogenous flavor to what "pops." While algorithms excel at giving you what you already like, they are terrible at introducing you to what you might like but have never seen. The algorithm optimizes for the average, pushing popular media toward the middle of the bell curve.
If you look at the top 10 most-streamed films or series in any given week, you will notice a strange phenomenon: genre is dead. Or rather, genre has been liquefied.
The Last of Us is a post-apocalyptic horror drama that won awards for its tender character study. Barbie is a toy commercial that became a philosophical treatise on patriarchy and existential dread. Succession is a drama about media mergers that plays like a thriller.
Modern entertainment content thrives on subversion. Audiences have seen every trope a thousand times; the only way to surprise them is to mix the incongruous. Popular media now relies on "genre fluency"—the assumption that the audience has watched everything that came before. This allows writers to play meta-games, deconstruct tropes in real time, and jump between tones without whiplash.
We are in the age of the mashup. The algorithm rewards the weird, the hybrid, and the unclassifiable.
How does content become "popular"?
