Franchises, reboots, crossovers, live-action remakes, interpolations… Why does the entertainment industry keep churning out cultural products that are derivative of something that came before, like Nicki Minaj rapping over “Barbie Girl” at the end of the Barbie movie on an endless loop?
According to Andrew DeWaard, a professor of media and popular culture at UC San Diego, it’s because of Wall Street. In his brain-expanding new book, Derivative Media: How Wall Street Devours Culture, Andrew pulls back the curtain on how popular culture has become derivative in a deeper, more insidious way: it’s private equity buying up entire song catalogs, activist hedge funds staging hostile takeovers of entertainment conglomerates, and the cultural industries getting consumed wholesale by the financial sector — actual derivatives trading included.
That wave of financialization is having an increasingly palpable effect on what we see and hear when we open up apps like Spotify and Netflix — not just in terms of the kinds of works that get funded, but increasingly, in the character of the works themselves, leading Andrew to posit that “the stock exchange has become embedded within the media text.”
Andrew joins us to talk about how finance-world strategies impact both the companies that fund the culture we consume and the labor of those who produce it — and how they result in an entertainment landscape that is increasingly inhospitable to taking big risks. And we get into how the logic of the derivative has become embedded in media products themselves, from Jay Z turning lyrical wordplay into a champagne empire, to the White Lotus casting K-pop star LISA.
Want to continue the conversation? For access to our member-only Discord (and all our bonus episodes), sign up for a paid subscription.
Order a copy of Derivative Media — or download an open-access PDF for free.
Read more by Andrew:
The Cinema of Steven Soderbergh: Indie Sex, Corporate Lies, and Digital Videotape (Columbia University Press)
“Independent Canadian Music in the Streaming Age: The Sound from above (Critical Political Economy) and below (Ethnography of Musicians)” (Popular Music and Society)
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe
Remember Everything You Learn from Podcasts
