What’s happened to music?

Actually, the question is, what’s happened to hit songs and albums and box-office blockbusters? Mass-audience hits turned into hits, then “pageviews” and “unique visitors” on (now uploads to) user-aggregating Web sites in zillions of niche interest communities. Consumers are aggregated by interest not geography, and the offerings are a la carte and all about exploration and sampling and – to the media companies – so very random. That’s the picture painted by Wired magazine in “The Rise and Fall of the Hit,” excerpted from a new book by Chris Anderson. “We are abandoning the tyranny of the top and becoming a niche nation again…. [We’re watching our teen social networkers and Web videographers lead the way as] we’re increasingly forming our own tribes…. The mass market is yielding to a million minimarkets… [and] credibility now rises from below.” This, in an odd way, is both scary (change is scary, the masses are “in control”) and comforting (power is more dispersed). “It will take decades for our entertainment industries to internalize the lessons of this shift,” the excerpt concludes, and we are watching the messy sorting out involving copyright law, intellectual property, and personal ethics. Meanwhile, the BBC reports, ownership of digital-music players has reached an all-time high. “One in five Americans over the age of 12 now owns a portable digital music device,” and 1 in 20 of those has more than one. one in 20 of those quizzed said they possessed more than one, a survey by market research Ipsos found.