The 2000s music market shrank as sales fell and fragmented into niches.

Evidence

With the rise of iPods and file-sharing services, music sales plummeted throughout the 2000s, bottoming out in 2014. Teens were still listening to music, but fewer were paying for it. As the Neptunes and Kanye West expanded musical boundaries, Top 40 radio’s core audience became increasingly apathetic. In this shrinking market, niche artists could dominate specific segments without achieving widespread fame. The country singer Gretchen Wilson claimed a bestselling album with little footprint beyond her devoted fans. Poptimism oddly arrived at a moment right as pop music was losing its dominance over youth culture. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 138

Categorization

• XREF: This is Marx’s mechanism of internet-collapsed distribution fragmenting culture — direct grist for the omnivore monoculture thesis the reader wants to trace and rebut.