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The Long Tail
Chris Anderson writes "I'm the editor of Wired Magazine and if you'll forgive the autohornblowing, I think you'll be interested in my piece in our latest issue. It argues, with a lot of new data, that the entertainment industry is shifting from an era of hit-driven economics to one of niche-driven economics. Content that was once relegated to the fringe, beneath the threshold of commercial viability, is now increasingly able to find a market in distributed audiences, marking a shift towards the previously-neglected Long Tail of the demand curve."
You could say the same of Frank Sinatra or Bobby Derren. Why does their music have impact and BS doesn't?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
but it would have been a lot more interesting if the author had provided us with some background information. He now makes a lot of statements, but where did he get all this information from?? the idea of the paper is nice though, now it is time to write something a bit more scientific about the subject?
http://www.virtualconcepts.nl/
I didn't pursue it past the two books I was given, it was a bit of a downer, too as the authors had a small group of characters to play with after killing off the entire human race and finding bugger all in space.
Uhm. You know there were 8 TV series (seasons) of Red Dwarf done by the BBC, along with a movie that's in production, right? The two books only cover a part of the first season. The first 4 series are on DVD now, so go hit your local library or DVD rental store and check it out.
It sounds great and I hope it is all true, but how can 'the tail' possibly pay for projects that cost hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars? Many movie, music, game etc depend on the hits to bring in cash to pay for the misses.
I guess we will see how things turn out. I'm not saying the article is wrong, I'm just saying 'the business' will have to change.
They again, were entertainers...no one really goes and studies the "music" of Sinatra like one would go and study up on Miles Davis or Bob Dylan or Jimmy Page....as in the art of music itself.
But there's certainly nothing wrong with Britney Spears if you're into her. It's what someone likes...and the "music" is really secondary to BS or others of her ilk. It's the entertainment that's the draw.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
However, the article did not need to be as long as it was. The same point was repeated over and over, and although there's nothing wrong with presenting evidence, I thought, "Ok, I get it." The article also had that high-school-position-paper feel to it. I would have preferred to see more facts and a little less dissertation.
My metric for this is "would this person be entertaining if you gave them a microphone and a couple of acoustic instruments to back them and sat them down on a stage?" And in the case of nonvocal music, it's a question of whether the music itself is sufficiently enjoyable to stand on its own merit. If neither of these metrics are met, then it may be entertainment but it's not really music. And some pop songs are decently catchy and enjoyable, in *spite of* the singer behind them - you can have a great songwriter or producer behind an otherwise mediocre talent and still come up with something that sounds pretty good. And I can appreciate those songs for what they are, but still dismiss the singer as worthless.
Ahh.. good old techno-snobbery. I have a technical background and I still enjoy Wired.
It seems as though Mr Anderson is describing two different effects here, though they both spring from one root cause: the advent of large Internet-based stores with low overheads which have an effectively national (or even global) market.
On the one hand, there is the 'long tail' of the curve, that is, the sale of many different items, each of which sells in low volume. These are the niche products which most people will never have heard of.
On the other hand, he describes the impact the new economy has had on bringing niche products into the mainstream, making them big hits.
His first example (the success of the book Touching the Void) is really of the second type. It's not an example of the long tail at all, but an instance where the new economy has thrust an obsure book into the mainstream. This is really not essentially different to the very familiar case in which an artist, scientist, etc. is only appreciated long after their original work is produced --- only after some comfortable context has been provided in which to situate the work.
Phoenix, Boston, Little Rock, see a pattern?
There is no American teen sound and hasn't been for years, and the music business model hasn't really changed since the days of American Bandstand. A musician who might do perfectly well on his own selling 10K records a year at $5/profit per record isn't helped by the industry to sell 20K or 50K, he's dumped by the label and out of the nusic business.
Remember heavy metal? It's fragmented into a number of subgenres as different as chalk and cheese.
I'm sure this is going on in lots of markets that I'm not even remotely familiar with.
How can gigantic entertainment monoliths get their ears into enough sub-markets to find the most profitable players? Well, automated analysis of P2P network downloads is one possibility, but they're paying for it while they are trying to make them illegal.
This is the content industry's ultimate long-tern problem, and if they don't solve it, no amount of DRM and anti-technology legislation can save them.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Wellll... I mean, from the link, it seems that the kids were asked, not subtly observed. Sometimes there is a serious disparity between what someone says and what someone does.
If it's become cool to say 'I don't do what other people do' (not to mention containing almost lethal levels of irony), kids might say that. And then go out and buy what their favorite star wears anyway. Maybe they don't think that's what they're doing, I'm sure there's all sorts of rationalizations in their head. But I'd like to see actual numbers showing that when pop star X stars wearing blue pants, sales of non-blue pants amongst fans actually goes up.
So yeah, that's kind of a tricky study to do, but still. Everyone claiming they're suddenly independent doesn't make me necessarily believe it.
But what he failed to see is that while new distribution channels are opening up which allow profits to be made in the "tail", as he puts it, there is a parallel phenomena surrounding the creation of media. The same laws surrounding big business' approach to 'hits' in distribution--that scarce distribution channels require them to focus on a few titles which have a potential for big profits--apply to the creation of the media in the first place. No film or record company is going to produce and market a title with the potential to only hit a small niche market, even if it will find that market spot on with the likes of iTunes or Netflix. At least, no media company that operates under a traditional model.
He states "That leaves the costs of finding, making, and marketing music. Keep them as they are, to ensure that the people on the creative and label side of the business make as much as they currently do.". But just as new technology is opening up new avanues for media distribution, it's giving us completely new ways to produce and market that media. A band can now cut an album and put it online using inexpensive equipment. A good band can now get promoted online through word of mouth. No need for expensive A&R men, no need for payola on the radio, no need for any of the services traditionally provided by the record companies. As technology gets better, the film industry is being changed too. A special effect CGI that cost millions to do just 15 years ago can now be accomplished on a desktop computer.
The point is, just as changes in technology are changing the economics of distribution, they are changing the economics of media manufacture and promotion. This is a great thing.
The Internet is generally stupid
before seeing this Personal Horn Tooting. I think the article does articulate a different business model that many people may just refuse to see. I believe that it was Tim O'Reilly who wrote an article saying that it was the Googles, Amazons etc. that were really creating the new killer software, not Sun or MS, and that part of the reason was that they gave more control to users. This theme is echoed in the book We The Media.
I've lived through 30+ years of overhyped predictions about the future, starting way back when with The Greening of America. But there's a big difference between a book/essay that's trying to shape the future by exhorting its readers to make the future that way and one that is slightly more objective and says that it thinks things are developing in such a way as to come to this predicted future. I mention all this just to say "I hope that I won't be fooled again."
And that I think what these various authors say is most likely true: there seems to be an inevitable democritization of media/commerce that allows for the Long Tail, whether it be in newspapers, bookstores, blogging, music stores or whatever. All seem to have the common thread of better too much than too little, better too all-inclusive than too exclusive. From what I've seen they are right and we might, I hope, all gain from it.
I just wish I could figure out how to make a good living from it.:-)