Pop Culture Pulse: February 2024

Social Media & Internet Culture: TikTok’s Long-Form Pivot Contends with YouTube

TikTok is leveraging its advantage among younger audiences to challenge YouTube’s market leadership in long-form video. By rewarding its creators for longer videos and horizontal formats, TikTok is now looking to claim the moment when audiences’ topical attention becomes long-term interest, and also to own deep-dive content.

Gaming: Palworld’s Genre Blend Unifies Player Needs

Palworld, by Japanese developer Pocket Pair, has become the buzziest title in gaming, captivating more than 19 million players in under a month since its release. A canny pastiche of popular game genres, like survival and monster-taming, Palworld blends and bends popular modes of play into one genre-defying multiplayer mash-up to appeal to the largest possible audience.

Music & Sound: Spotify’s Chaotic Daylists Enable Shameless Sharing

In Spotify’s latest push for personalisation, users’ home pages now feature Daylists, artificial intelligence (AI)-curated playlists that are updated (and retitled) multiple times a day. Created to capture and celebrate users’ shifting moods via their listening habits, Daylist titles have taken over social media, as people share being called out for having, for example, a “Corporate Flannel Tuesday Morning”.

Entertainment: Netflix & WWE Forge Scripted Sports Alliance

Netflix has inked a major $5bn deal for the rights to live broadcast professional wrestling’s most popular weekly show, WWE Raw. Straddling the line between sport and storytelling, WWE commands a deeply engaged fandom: its streaming buy-in is set to open up a huge new audience and advertising opportunities for Netflix.

One to Watch: PI.FYI: Celebrates Human Curation

Growing out of a sceney pandemic newsletter for personal recommendations, PI.FYI is a new social platform connecting users through casually shared personal recommendations. The latest in the movement towards resurfacing social discovery instead of algorithmic curation, PI.FYI drives slow but steady peer-to-peer interactions.