Poll of the Day > Is Ariana Grande the new Britney Spears?

(+) Yeah! (+)

britney is old, ariana is gold
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Nah.

I'd say Taylor Swift is the new Britney Spears in regards to being Queen of Pop.

yes
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I think Ariana is the modern day Christina Agulara.

Miley Cyrus is more like Brittany.
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I'd say she's not nearly relevant enough compared to Britney's impact at her height, and I'd say that the nature of modern media distribution means she never will be (and that no musician will ever be as relevant or universal as musicians of the past).

But that might also just be looking at things from over here on the other side of 40. I'm not sure I'm allowed to have opinions about pop music anymore.


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^I don't think you're wrong. It's harder to be as impactful with how things are now.
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yeah no single artist will ever come as close to that popularity now that its so easy to slide into your niche these days, big catch all pop will never be the same
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TheCyborgNinja posted...

^I don't think you're wrong. It's harder to be as impactful with how things are now.

Yep.

It's similar to how a show like MASH drew more than 100 million viewers for its finale, in an environment where there were fewer channels (and no real alternatives). That is pretty much impossible now for anything that isn't the Super Bowl.

This is actually why some sociologists have theorized that we're basically in the dying stages of having "pop culture" at all - when the total population is so spread out across multiple competing platforms, it becomes harder and harder to have "shared" experiences that you can realistically expect a majority of people to remember and relate to.

Think about all of the various massively critically acclaimed shows currently out there (or recently concluded) - most of them don't draw more than a couple million viewers, and even "the most-watched shows on television" barely manage 6 million or so. Most of them draw even less than that. No matter how brilliant you thought Breaking Bad was, or how many people you've talked to who also loved it, consider that something like 98% of the overall US population have probably never watched it at all.

The same problem exists for the Internet. Even for someone like Pewdiepie, there are vast swaths of the overall global population who haven't got a clue who he is, or, if they're aware of who he is, still haven't really watched anything he did regularly enough to care all that much about it later. And most other YouTube "personalities" or shows are very narrow-cast to specific sort of audiences, making it much harder to result in anything resembling a shared cultural experience.

30 years from now, we may have a generation of people who can't relate to each other on a pop culture level at all, because they all grew up watching different streamers on Twitch or channels on YouTube, so hardly anyone knows what anyone else is talking about when they try and bring up old in-jokes or nostalgia from their own childhood.


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I'm sure they both bombed at least once in their lives.
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