Internet Powered Decline of Mass Culture

The mass market/mass culture is the corporate culture. In its final incarnation, it was really a creature of the media distribution networks of the 80s and 90s--FM radio, broadcast TV and cable TV--all of those technologies are ancient. They rely on a  broadcast medium and fixed format that allows for the mass production of receivers and players.

As a side effect of that, any program that was made for broadcast, or any song that was made for broadcast was aimed at a "mass audience" and had to cater to the lowest common denominator. National and international sports events are still properties of "broadcast" and cable outlets. In the United States the NFL still partners with owners of physical broadcast media like cable or satellite TV, for example.

Technologies like DVDs started to whittle away at the broadcast/mass audience before Internet streaming was really feasible. The mass market probably started to crack at the periphery in the 2000s, now it looks like its just about dissolved completely.

Corporate media is really corporations' PR firms that seek to shape the choices and opinions that people have. You can still see this today on the "start" pages of web browsers--even the really niche ones like Opera provide RSS feeds of corporate propaganda, like daily stories about Tesla even though that company produces a tiny fraction of the cars sold in the US.

The phenomenon of corporate media attacking alt media figures like Alex Jones to garner some clickbait views for their own web sites is more a sign of their precarious position than a sign the alt media (and the million-niche-market) is going to be destroyed. Who cares about CNN or for fuck's sake, who cares about a fucking newspaper from New York?

No mass media means no mass market. The "mass media" is now just another niche--one that caters to the middle-of-the-road average person.