This show stresses me the hell out. I didn't even notice it until just now.

UNICORN SAUSAGE

The Bravo reality paradigm is, at its best, about watching how the sausage gets made. Talented people working with experts to create beautiful things. But sometimes that's depressing, because sausage mostly looks the same at the end of the sausage-making process. Especially with music, though, because I don't know if you've turned on the radio but there is a plutocracy in effect that only works for the lowest common denominator. And that's the market these people are playing for, obviously -- it's right there in the title -- so there's not really anything to bitch about, with these particular people, because simply walking into a room with Kidd or JR or even Keith is to say: I would like some unicorn sausage.

But there's also a longer con at play here, which is that the term "Information Economy" is a contradiction in terms. Music, TV, movies and print are all dying because we're in the middle of a movement away from physical objects, the scarcity and rarity of objects that you buy to own, and into the infinite abundance of information, because information wants to be free. If I give you a loaf of bread, I don't have one now and you do. But if I tell you a story, then we both have the story and nobody's lost anything. And once we went digital, that applies to all information.

So now you've got a temporary three-way split in the economy: The people who buy the object, the people who download the idea, and the people who steal it. (TV is a little different because that was always ad-supported, movies are a little different because we've fetishized them as physical objects, and books even moreso, but it's all the same thing, content, in this model.) And just like CBS kills in the ratings despite having no internet presence, just like country and R&B are the bestselling genres, you have a situation where the only things that matter are the things people are willing to pay for, and at this point that's only a scarcity of access. You're only measuring the people who can't figure out how to steal. (And of course the people who choose not to, because they appreciate art.)

But that's fine, if you're one of these industries, because these are the only people who are paying your rent. So the end result is that the industry itself gets smaller and smaller, funneling resources at every level toward the only things that will sell. Comic book movies, reboots of comic book movies, reboots of nostalgia-boner kid things are the only things that sell, so they become the only things that are offered for sale, so they continue to be the only things that sell.