The people most interested in bestsellers are those doing the selling. No surprise, then, that a new list of the top-selling entertainment products in the UK last year was compiled by the Entertainment Retailers Association, a trade organisation representing vendors of music, video and video games, who have a vested interest in arranging their physical and digital shop windows. For the rest of us, the list provides an intriguing snapshot of the spire-tip of the cultural zeitgeist. Intriguing, that is, if it weren’t all quite so familiar. So recognisable are the names (or more precisely, the brands, as the late-capitalist machine refers to artists once they’ve been passed though its cultural sausage-maker) that your eyes slide, unsnagged, down from Ed Sheeran in the top spot, past the annual, incrementally tweaked update to the Fifa soccer video game series, and on through Star Wars and Harry Potter to trip only on the final rung, the soul singer with the voice of an archangel and the hunch of a doorman at a 24-hour Greggs: Rag’n’Bone Man.
If the list is superficially dispiriting it’s not because of a lack of craft. Many bright eyes and minds – the writers, producers, musicians, script-editors, 3D modellers and games designers – are represented in the top 10. Besides, there is a particular kind of vanity in automatically dismissing that which is popular in favour of that which is niche. As the 19th-century critic William Hazlitt put it: “What is popular is not necessarily vulgar.” (Moreover, he added, in a hipster-skewering aside, “That which we try to rescue from fatal obscurity had in general much better remain where it is.”) But aside from the relative novelty of Moana, this cavalcade of remakes, sequels, and cover versions is tear-jerkingly routine.
Where did it all go wrong, when it comes to the nation’s stagnated palate? Well, if the most popular dish at a hamburger restaurant is a hamburger, who is to blame: customer, chef, marketer, owner or investor? It’s difficult to learn much about the shifting winds of culture from bestseller lists, even medium-straddling ones such as this. Low art – that is, anything that is made to be sold – exists because someone, somewhere wants to make money. Today, blockbuster films and video games usually cost many times more to create than in previous decades, and therefore carry greater risks for their backers. It follows that the most widely produced and heavily marketed films and games are sequels to established hits. If the diet seems predictable, it’s because capitalism favours the predictable – until, of course, an unexpected hit comes along, and the rules change again.
The second and third spots in the chart belong to the video games Fifa 18, with 2.69m sales, and Call of Duty: WWII, with 2.44m. But today the most popular games are given away as free downloads in an effort to amass as many players as quickly as possible (profit is made through the sale of tiny digital costumes for their on-screen avatars. Scoff all you like, but the makers of League of Legends reportedly made $1.7bn in 2015 from these in-game purchases). In February, Fortnite, a free-to-play game based on the premise of the Japanese cult film Battle Royale, had 3.4 million players concurrently online. Every day scores of popular YouTube streamers upload videos of their Fortnite matches, many of which secure millions of views within 24 hours.
Money helps quantify the unquantifiable qualities of art and entertainment, but in this era of streaming, it’s an increasingly anachronistic way to measure not only cultural success, but also, counterintuitively, commercial success. Some 1.48 million people paid to watch Beauty and the Beast, making it, according to the Entertainment Retailers Association, the fourth best-selling piece of entertainment in 2017. But 2.83 million British people watched the Game of Thrones season premiere, many of whom paid for a NowTV pass specifically to do so. Which had the greater impact?
Among the under-20s the dominant cultural artefacts have not only switched medium, but also shape-shifted into formats unrecognisable to previous generations and unquantifiable by traditional charts. Bestseller lists are struggling to incorporate changing viewing, playing and reading habits into their increasingly arcane calculations. But while the way in which we access entertainment is changing, that which we find appealing remains reassuringly, humanly resolute. Ed Sheeran sings songs about one-night stands and broken hearts. Fifa 18 and Call of Duty are arenas for competitive showboating and name-calling as old as the football field and chess board. Beauty and the Beast gives men hope that a beautiful woman may one day see the good in them, and women a flash of frisson as they wonder what it would be like to have sex with a monster. Don’t be too hard on yourself, Rag’n’Bone Man comforts: we are only human, after all. The traditional notion of a bestseller may be crumbling, but the themes that draw a crowd stand resolute.
• Simon Parkin is the author of Death by Video Game
