-Viral Dance Markets

-the Trade-Offs in intellectual property protection 

-Cultural bits 

I’m not a tik-tok user or a consumer of short form video. I can observe that for 10s of 

millions maybe 100s of millions it’s an important cultural bit.

I was fascinated to learn how these dances are created, how they go viral and the difficulty in gaining creative credit.

I typically think copyright is too long (and I’m mixed on patents, some patents could be longer (pharmaceutical), some shorter (some software) ) but I can see how the informal ways of sharing creative credit can also be tricky. Then again the lack of copyright over dance moves allows (perhaps) them to innovate and circulate faster. 

The 10 second dance of Renegade is noticeable to me for its moderate difficulty as well as the way it has gone viral.  Videos below.  

Still despite the difficulties it looks like the creator of Renegade (Jalaiah Harmon, 14) at least has managed to crystallise some value (maybe lots of value) from her dance so it is not a complete market failure. Dance creators instinctively seem to know that moves don’t achieve mass scaling without well-followed personalities copying them. (NYT article, link end) 

The under current of “dub smash” culture being subsumed by “suburban” I can partly see but it seems to me to be part of the “subculture” going “mainstream” tensions.  In the UK, grime music was big amongst many before it hit mainstream recognition. 

Still she created a dance which has been viewed by millions and copies by many, and understood by followers of dance cultural bits and maybe very few others. There’s a cultural richness there that she couldn’t have tapped into except quite recently. While standard bearers for historic and traditional purveyors of culture and often perplexed (cf Instagram poets) I think perhaps they’ve missed a part of how younger generations enjoy and access cultural bits. 

If anything, I think humanity is culturally richer the more thriving subcultures we have. Long live viral short form dance. 

H/T Ted Giaoa for influencing my thinking on music (and its radicalism and importance to culture). Check out his recent book on Music: A subversive history.

Tyler Cowen for seeing markets in everything. Also see his book Infovore on cultural bits (and autism).

Alex Bedward for discussion in size of Grime markets. 

NYT article here charting renegade: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/13/style/the-original-renegade.html

Insta-poets: short blog here.