Welcome to the era of hyper-abundance (it's not as nice as it sounds)

How do you sell to people who already have way too much?

Banquet Still Life, Adriaen van Utrecht

Don’t forget:

This Thursday 7th May
11am EST, 4pm UK

I’ll be holding a live discussion for paid subscribers on the end of competence, and how the strategic landscape has changed for all businesses in the past year.

There will also be an opportunity to ask me any questions you’d like. If you’d like to join, go here and subscribe / upgrade.

Now on with the show.

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In 1996, there were around 80,000 Ferraris on the road.

In 2026, there are more than 320,000.

I want you to stop and think about that stat for a second, because I’m not sure anyone has grasped what a big deal it is.

Now let’s add a few other thoughts.

• Every passing year, there are more songs and movies available than ever before. None of them vanish. None of them go anywhere. The pile is simply grown.

• If you want to buy a beautiful original painting for your wall, it will probably cost you around $2,000 from a gallery. And yet every year, more are being painted, and walls around the world are slowly filling.

• Every single house you see, pretty much, is fully furnished. Some of the furniture is disposable garbage that will fall apart after a few years. But a lot of it is durable, high quality - and due to its survival rates, its proportion of the stock is growing.

• Thousands of people are writing new business books right now, and yet most of their topics have been thoroughly addressed by classic texts written 30 or 40 years ago. It’s increasingly difficult to add valuable new knowledge to the pool.

What we see here is the tendency of non-perishable goods to multiply.

But what doesn’t multiply, is human capacity to use them. We still only have two eyes, two ears, four limbs, one house, 24 hours in a day, and maybe 80 years in a lifetime. The population, in most of the developed world, is no longe rising. In fact it’s falling.

And so where we find ourselves at a unique moment in human history, a moment we might call:

Hyper-abundance.

A multiplication of options, but without a corresponding multiplication of capacity.

The keen-eyed among you will notice that this is an extension of what I wrote about a couple of weeks ago related to content. There’s too much content, not enough eyeballs. Well, that phenomenon is just a specific example of the broader trend of hyper-abundance I’m writing about here.

Weirdly, I never see people talking about this. I think perhaps because we are only crossing the rubicon now, and the effects are yet to be fully seen. After all, Ferraris, at this precise moment in time, are still valuable and desirable. Nice paintings still cost a lot of money. And some people are still (just about) able to make a living as musicians. We’re clinging on.

But rest assured, this is an unfolding story, and it means something. And if we are in business, and we want people to buy our goods and services, then it really means something. Because unless you’re a farmer, the competitive landscape is about to get mighty crowded - not only with your current competitors, but with competition from all the accumulated assets and abundance of human history.

You my friend, are competing with the past. And your customers? They only have so much attention and bandwidth to spread around.

Here I’m going to lay out what I think the consequences of this are, and how we can - possibly - respond to it. And to understand the pattern, we’re going to look quickly at a domain where hyper-abundance has already started to bite.

Music.

The death of music

To understand how this all plays out, we actually don’t have to speculate.

Why?

Because in some industries, this abundance armageddon has already happened. Specifically movies, TV shows, and most of all, music.

It started with the advent of streaming platforms, which meant that every person in the Western world instantly had access to more movies and songs than they could ever consume in a lifetime. We were no longer restricted by “what CDs we had on our shelf”, or “what they are playing on the radio”, or “what videos were in Blockbusters” - instead we could basically access the complete back catalogue of humanity.

This gave us humans our first taste of extreme over-supply.

So, what did we do about it?

Well, it’s pretty obvious. We became overwhelmed, that’s what! We basically didn’t know what to watch and listen to with all these options at our fingertips. It’s not like a few years back when we’d have radio DJs, best seller charts, and theatres to curate options for us. Now the power was in our hands - and we didn’t like it.

Thus our reaction was predictable and telling. We retreated to the familiar. Rather than suffer the cognitive stress of somehow filtering all this stuff, we just decided to stick with what we already know and love. After all, there’s plenty of it, so we don’t really need all the newer unfamiliar stuff, do we?

And now just look at what’s happening. All that stuff on Netflix, and what’s the most watched show?

Friends.

All that new music being uploaded onto Spotify, and what’s happening to the proportion of new music being listened to?

It’s actually going down.

As the FT explained:

“‘Catalogue’ music [i.e. old music] is taking up a rising share of music consumption, especially in more developed western markets, as younger generations turn to older songs on streaming services — roughly half the top 200 tracks last year were older songs, against 24 per cent in 2020.”

Ted Gioia has also written about this extensively, sharing the below Chartmetric data detailing the progressive drop of current-year releases in the top 50:

Source: Chartmetric

Bear in mind this is the top 50 we’re talking about. That’s meant to be where new music lives, but it’s now consistently less than 50% new!

You could say all this is a tragedy, and it sort of is. But then on the other hand, there was so much good stuff produced between 1940 and 2010, with so much creative diversity, that frankly our music needs are kinda… met. If you were banned from ever listening to anything made outside of that time period, you’d be just fine.

Essentially the creative and money-making potential of the industry has been decimated, simply because it became complete.

Yes, this affects you too

Now you might be thinking that this is all very interesting, but it doesn’t affect you.

Perhaps you sell something that can only be consumed “new” - like a meal in a restaurant, say. It’s not like customers can be satisfied by meals that existed in the past. Or perhaps you are in some sort of B2B service. The “work still needs to be done”, you might think.

Don’t be complacent.

This still effects you for two reasons:

1. You are competing for time and attention. The question isn’t whether there is an equivalent to your service which competes with you from the past. The question is whether there are other completely unrelated things which people could spend their time and money on instead. Everyone knows the effect that streaming culture has had on pubs, and this is just one example of the abundance of the past dissolving economic opportunity in the present. Hyper-abundance makes people incredibly distracted, and always gives them something diverting and cheap to which they can turn their attention. So the fact that your service might not be abundant doesn’t incubate you.

2. AI creates hyper-abundance of knowledge. In the B2B world, it’s useful to think of AI as a sort of “Spotify of knowledge”. Just like the back catalogue of music, AI has gathered together the back catalogue of business books, techniques, and know-how, and has arranged it in a searchable manner. So just as a person might choose between listening to The Rolling Stones on Spotify, or going to a live gig of a new artist, a business might choose between surfacing the wisdom of Peter Drucker via AI, or working with you. B2B services are no more safe than musicians, rest assured!

If I had to think of areas where hyper-abundance doesn’t apply quite so much, it would be basically with perishable or non-abundant life essentials such as:

• Food

• Healthcare

• Housing

…and yet even within them many sub-categories are also effected.

The bottom line is that you can’t escape the fundamental reality that digital technology has captured and catalogued more fruits of human labour than can ever be consumed. And many classes of goods are produced faster than they perish.

Damn. So what do we do?

I mean unless we just unplug the internet, this cannot be solved. We are destined to live out this paradox, where an idea like “hyper-abundance” actually continues to reduce economic opportunity as more and more value is captured by the various digital repositories of the past, and the value of new goods declines as their volume increases.

But there are ways to buck the trend.

We need to return to the first principles demonstrated by the example of music, and consider how we can channel the strategy of classic records to our own ends. Here are three methods to consider.

1. Discoverability is the new gold

The first and most obvious lesson to take from music, is that in conditions of abundance, whatever is discoverable wins. People still listen to Micheal Jackson because they’ve heard of Micheal Jackson. To use business-speak, he has high mental and physical availability, so people will just listen to him rather than take a chance on something random they’ve never heard of before.

By the same token, in every industry we must dedicate a colossal amount of energy to being discoverable.

How can we be one of the first two or three options anyone in our market comes across when they start shopping? Because you can be sure that with all the noise out there, they ain’t gonna be digging much further.

Some examples of discoverable behaviours, related to different fields, include:

• Personal fame

• Algorithmic preference

• Intense IRL networking

• Local geography domination

• SEO / AEO (hard game to win, I wouldn’t rely on it)

• Institutional credibility / affiliation

• Exclusivity deals

• Etc.

I want to stress that it is perfectly legitimate to have a business whose strategic leverage is all about discoverability. High discoverability is its own form of value creation, because it makes life easier for the customer. If you have a generic offer, but you are the first one anyone comes across in a buying moment, then this is a great business. But it’s very rare to accomplish that, which is why you also need…

2. Charisma

As I’ve written about before, and will again, I believe that good strategy in the modern era must be charismatic - by which I mean magnetic, attention grabbing, and narrative driven.

This is primarily because in the era of hyper-abundance, if we can’t own the means of distribution to be the most discoverable, then instead we must be the most noticeable. We need to be the one that catches people’s eye, that people talk about, that people love.

Drawing the music analogy, if you take modern success stories like Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish, they both succeeded by doing things in a highly differentiated, highly narrativised, highly charismatic way - hence allowing them to compete effectively with historic back catalogue. They aren’t just “good musicians” (those are ten-a-penny), they are strategic disruptors.

To be charismatic essentially comes down to:

• Actually having a unique value strategy (subject of my book)

• Constructing a mythic narrative out of it

• Creatively overdelivering on execution

Think Apple. Think Patagonia. Think Liquid Death. Think all the well-worn case studies, which are well-worn precisely because of their charismatic approach to strategy.

3. In some cases, a return to quality

Despite using Ferrari as my opening example, I do think there is one bracket of human experience which is somewhat immune to this, and that is luxury.

The human desire for status, and being ahead of the other guy, will never be vanquished. So even if we reach a point where there are enough vintage Louis Vuitton handbags for every person on the planet to have one, people will still be buying new ones just to show that they can.

For this reason, luxury, as always, is a good market to be in.

Connected to this is the broader issue of quality. In the past I have raged against quality as an effective strategic lever, on the basis that “everything is quality now”. But weirdly, I think this is starting to slip. Lots of things are becoming, legitimately, shit. And so a return to doing things “well”, in some domains, now actually contains huge strategic power. A textbook example of this is the way that Octopus have come to dominate the UK energy market by simply having what in the past would have been “adequate” customer service.

I would anticipate AI to have broad enshittifying influence over all sorts of industries, and so more opportunities will open to be the “luxury” (or even just “decent”) option.

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I suppose that what it all comes down to in the end, is retreating to the safe harbour of human psychology. No matter what further carnage digital tech manages to wreak on our lives, nothing is going to budge the basics like:

• Our desire to be led

• Our attraction to novelty

• Our aim to raise our status

• Our search for meaning

Charismatic strategy is the way of leveraging these forces, at a time where more instrumental and rational strategies are increasingly neutered by the sheer volume of competition.

Next week, for paid subscribers only, I’m going to be breaking down the component parts of a charismatic strategy in detail, so sign up if you want to check that out.