THE TYRANNY OF THE NICHE

It is certainly no secret to those of us who love music - and are forced, due to economic and employment constraints, to choose our music title purchases carefully - that the face of the music industry is changing rapidly, in this new digital age…..

How we listen to our music, how and where we find our music, and even how we purchase our music, has undergone massive changes, and is continuing to change almost daily….

And whilst this is affecting us - the listening public, one should ponder the impact this ‘new age’ is having on the music industry, and, more importantly, on the musicians themselves….. Is it forcing change that is good - for us, allowing for fast and easy access to more music for less money – AND for the musician and his creation also?

If this is a topic that interests you, either as a music consumer, or creator, you should check out this interesting article entitled “THE LONG TAIL”, written by CHRIS ANDERSON.

“Forget squeezing millions from a few megahits at the top of the charts. The future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream,” says Chris.

For those of us who fully embrace (my so-called) ‘Headliners of the Niche’ – Adrian Belew and King Crimson – this comment comes as no surprise. We, as consumers, have been constrained by the ‘Niche’ for a long time. Fortunately for us, and millions of others in the same situation, this ‘new age’ of the internet and its world wide web, has enabled those more forward thinking musicians, artists, and bands to ‘set up shop’ - boldly shining their neon bright beacons through the ether-mists so that we might find them, and allow us to warm ourselves on their ‘availability to the common man and woman’ and then we enthusiastically spend our hard earned pay on their wares of mystery and intrigue…and continue to do so easily, when and wherever it suits us, and as many times as we like….

We have seen this trend growing in leaps and bounds in this ‘new age’, no need to look further than sites like MySpace - growing to enormous proportions, stuffed full with new, old and past musicians and bands all trying to spread the word to as many punters as they can. I’m sure many of us have read previous articles concerning the emerging ‘Artist 2.0’ – a direct result of sites like MySpace, where the record company is defunct, and the artist has immediate online availability to millions of listeners at the touch of his lap-top – who can listen to his latest creation, and purchase the download immediately….. Talk about artist in action….

But, back to the Long Tail….

Chris points to the fact that the “emerging digital entertainment economy is going to be radically different from today’s mass market. If the 20^th century entertainment industry was about hits, the 21^st will be equally about misses.”

Basically, due to economics, we’ve been blocked from having mass availability to ‘alternative’ or non-standard fare in our entertainment/music choices. Why? Because those who make the decisions about what to make available to us, are making those decisions based on the numbers of people who might choose/buy it, and the space available to display/hold it…..money. So, as has been reinforced over and over, the easy solution to this dilemma is simple - HITS… “Hits fill theatres, fly off shelves, and keep listeners and viewers from touching their dials and remotes”. Yes, it cannot be denied – “great songs, movies and books attract big, broad audiences”.

Now, there is nothing wrong with those great classic songs that move you – every body loves them, and musicians yearn to produce them….

But all this has the effect of pushing the ‘alternates’ to the fringes, and sometimes way out of the reach of many. But, as we know, there are many people out there who want way more than just HITS…. Most people’s musical taste will depart from the mainstream at some point, and I am sure that those who have spent any time on MySpace can attest to the reality that: once you start exploring the plethora of music and artists available, you get drawn further and further away from your starting point…. Ask yourself, how many bands/musicians/artists do you have on your MySpace friend list? How many have you actually purchased music from lately? And how many of those then put you on to other artists etc etc…. Ah, the ‘myspace wave’…. Ripples on and on into infinity, and beyond….

As we have seen, “hit-driven economics is a creation of an age without enough room to carry everything for everybody. This is a world of scarcity.”

But today, with the advent of the growing on-line music community, with its associated purchasing of immediate downloadable music, and on-line retail and distribution links, “we are now entering a world of abundance. And the differences are profound.”

If you should need evidence of this, consider such on-line media stores such as iTunes, Netflix and Amazon, just to name a few. What sort of percentage of their top 10,000 titles do you think they would rent or sell at least once a month? According to the Recording Industry Association of America, fewer than 10% of music releases are profitable. But, for iTunes et al, the figure is closer to 99%. Why?

Well, the entertainment industry is about hits, not sales. They’re stuck in a ‘hit-driven’ mindset, thus only hits deserve to exist, and only those will make money. What the on-line retailers have found, is that the ‘misses’ or the ‘non-hit’, will make money too. And when you consider that, for those of us in the market for a ‘non-hit’ - otherwise known as a non-mainstream artist/song - we have way less choice as to where we can purchase them from (as opposed to the ‘hits’ that you can find everywhere), suddenly we have a whole new availability opened up to us where “popularity no longer has a monopoly on profitability” and thus availability…. Yahoooooo……

And because there are so many of us out there, that quickly adds up to a huge new market in ‘misses’. With no shelf spaces to pay for, no distribution costs, and low manufacturing costs, a miss is as good as a hit…. Now, take a look at the subscription-based streaming music service called Rhapsody. According to Chris, it currently offers 735,000 tracks. If you could observe its monthly stats, you would see that, like any regular record store, the top tracks have the highest appeal, which tapers off quickly for the less popular tracks. But once you delve below the top 40,000 - which is generally the cut off point for albums carried that will eventually be sold in most regular retailers like Wal Mart, and anything below this will not be carried by the retailer at all - the Rhapsody demand for tracks in its Top 400,000 continues, with these being streamed at least once each month. “As fast as Rhapsody adds tracks to its library, those songs find an audience, even if it’s just a few people a month, somewhere in the country.”

This, Chris tells us, is the ‘Long Tail’. Within which is included a plethora of music: back catalogues, older albums being rediscovered by younger generations, live tracks, b-sides, remixes etc etc…. Niches by the thousands, genre within genre….. Today's on-line commerce is perfectly suited to take advantage of this huge niche market. And here is the rub….. The availability of this content drives the niche market purchasers (you and I) to on-line retailers and MySpace, and other artist sites such as DGMLive…… Artists/musicians/bands need to fully embrace this philosophy within their ‘marketing’ strategies, in order to maximize their ‘slice of the pie’ for themselves.

If I have piqued your interest in this ‘new’ industry for music, please go and read the full article HERE and read for yourself Chris’s very interesting thoughts on the ‘costs’ of making on-line music available, and just what should be the ‘standard price’ for a downloadable music track, what is the psychological value of convenience – the ‘not worth it’ moment where the wallet opens….. and should artists/musicians/bands be expected to give away their music for free?

So here’s a toast to “reversing the blanding effects of a century of distribution scarcity, and ending the tyranny of the hit” – Long Live the power of the Long Tail!


Since writing this article, Chris has expanded it into a book of the same name. Chris also has an ongoing blog, appropriately called 'The Long Tail Blog', where you can continue to follow his discussions concerning the theory of The Long Tail.