Tom Wainwright

speaker

67 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 16 Jun

Tom Wainwright’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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The Intelligence from The Economist · Local, an aesthetic: the deglobalisation of fun · 16 Jun 2026 podcast

Streaming services like Spotify seem on the one hand to be making the biggest stars bigger.

So people like Taylor Swift have got a deeper global reach than they ever would have done in the pre streaming era.

But at the same time it's making the long tail of smaller musicians longer.

It's making it much easier for smaller acts to produce music and to distribute it.

And so

So what we see is that although these big acts are getting bigger, the fact that it's easier for smaller acts to get published and to get distributed means that there's been this explosion in local music which has seen charts from Europe to Latin America and Asia fill up with a greater share of locally produced songs.

Well yes, they are, in the sense that it's seen more expensive to make a T V series than it is to make a song.

But we're seeing something similar going on here as well.

Hollywood's share of all global streaming commissions is falling.

And we're seeing streamers like Netflix, for example, pushing hyperlocal series like for instance there's one called Sixteen Seventy, which is a sort of Monty Python-esque comedy set in seventeenth century Poland.

And it's not just Netflix.

Amazon has made some big bets in regions like Latin America, for example.

What we're seeing is that as streamers push deeper into foreign markets, they're commissioning local shows to help them reach subscribers beyond the elites who might previously have been happy just with American series.

Making television abroad is cheaper than making it in the States.

We know that Hollywood is grappling with inflation at the moment.

And what TV executives seem to be finding is that local

Hits really work because they have this real sense of place.

And so things like, for example, Adolescence, which was this smash hit series set in Britain, wasn't really tailored for a global audience.

It's a very British show, but it seemed that that essential Britishness of it was part of its appeal to people all over the world.

And we see this as well on new video platforms like YouTube.

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