A Low Pressure Air Mass…

If the power of mass culture is based on the ability to attract a mass audience, then perhaps it’s worth looking at the size of the mass.
Magazines: People magazine is solidly mass market. In 2006 it had a circulation of 3.8 million. Its rivals Us Weekly sold 1.8 million and In Style sold on average 1.7 million copies. Time magazine sold 4 million a week, Newsweek did 3.1 million, and US News came in at just over 2 million. Pretty decent numbers; all six are in the top 50 largest circulation magazines, and all are considered mass media.
But while circulations of all these magazines have eroded somewhat over the past decade (Time and US News both down 13 percent between 1988-2003), publications such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic and The Economist have experienced significant jumps in circulation in the same period. The Economist has more than doubled its circulation in the US since 1992 (to 400,000) and The New Yorker is up sharply to 1.1 million from 600,000 in 1992.
Okay – I realize you can make statistics mean almost anything you want them to. But why do we consider People and Time and Us mass culture when they sell to less than 1.5 percent of an audience in a country of more than 300 million? And The New Yorker, with its 1.1 million readers (granted, a smaller number, but not that much smaller when you consider a marketplace of 300 million) is considered niche?
Another example is radio: There used to be a time when a few (usually Top 40) stations dominated a local market. Now, a station is considered reasonably viable in most markets if it gets a 2 share of the audience. In some markets a 4 share is enough to be the most popular station. In Los Angeles, five of the top 12 stations are Spanish-language, including the top-rated station. The top station doesn’t even get five percent of the audience. How does any radio station lay claim to being mass culture? Nationally, the most-listened-to program is Rush Limbaugh, with 14 million listeners. But No. 2 is National Public Radio’s Morning Edition (13.5 million) and No. 3 is NPR’s All Things Considered (13 million). Large numbers, sure, but still less than 5 percent of the population.
Certainly among its listeners, NPR stands as a giant in radio, but out in the country as a whole, among the 85 percent who don’t listen to it, is NPR considered a mass culture medium? In many markets around the country, public radio stations are among the most popular in the ratings. But perceptually, public radio isn’t seen by most as the dominant radio presence. This despite the fact that NPR’s audience has doubled in the past ten years.
Whether you look at TV news (nightly network newscasts used to get 50 million in audience and now reach 25 million), TV entertainment (the final episode of M*A*S*H played to 104 million, which Friends final episode got 52 million), commercial music (the No. 1-selling recordings sell significantly fewer copies than they did a decade ago and sales overall are down more than 20 percent this year) the top-selling mass culture products are losing their mass.
Like I wrote earlier, you can make stats mean different things, juxtaposing them in different ways and drawing relationships where there may not be any. But if a definition of success of mass culture is the ability to pull audience, then maybe we need to reassess where the true mass culture is when video game sales beat movie sales, public radio beats the socks off the commercial version, and attendance at arts events outstrips the audience for professional sports.
Ah, the arts. We often talk about the arts as a category that shares some basic characteristics. Are those characteristics of content or of behavior? The Museum of Modern Art is big business and in some ways has more in common with Disney in the way it operates than it does the local museum in your town. Likewise, there are commercial-model arts (like jazz, like blue grass) that survive in a model more resembling the non-profit arts than the modern commercial music business. But more on the arts audience in a future post.