Sometimes, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Only two years ago, the buzz book of the media industry was “The Long Tail” by Chris Anderson (also visit The Long Tail Blog), which warned all of us old-fashioned music biz types that we were in the midst of a massive change (“Gee, you don’t say?”) and that even our most sacred tenet was about to be tossed to the wind. Suddenly, for the first time in its history, music was no longer going to be about “hits”! Crass commercialism, mass appeal, and Top Forty tastes were dead, killed off by the alternative environment of the Internet, which championed artists that appealed to more discerning, open-minded, niche-oriented audiences.
“We are turning from a mass market back into a niche nation” predicted Anderson, and hence, the future would be based on selling less units of more different kinds of product. Using the analogy of a long tail to illustrate how sales of music on the internet would now stretch further and further into little known and obscure product, Anderson made clear that this shift from a mass-market in which superstars sold millions of records into an environment where a million bands each sold a hundred records was a positive development for society overall. No longer would artists be enslaved by the need to cater to the lowest-common denominator in a quest for popular success.
Except that it didn’t happen. There’s a fascinating new analysis out now at coolfer.com by Glenn Peoples, that points out Four Key Points:
1. Consumers have not lost their taste for hits.
2. Heavy users delve into the long tail, but infrequent buyers tend to stick with mainstream fare.
3. Popular titles have grown disproportionately at the expense of niche titles.
4. Digital channels may be strengthening winners’ place in the market.
5. Don’t confuse availability for access.
Citing an important study from the July Harvard Business Review by Anita Elberse, People makes clear that most of “The Long Tail’s” predictions simply have not materialized. In fact, things have worked out almost the opposite. It appears that even in the world of digital sales, hits are taking a disproportionate amount of sales at the expense of niche titles. Elberse writes, “… although today’s hits may no longer reach the sales volumes typical of the pre-piracy era, an ever smaller set of top titles continues to account for a large chunk of the overall demand for music”.
While this may be news to visionaries like Chris Anderson, it is something that most music publishers have been aware of for the last several years. Whether one looks at traditional areas like record sales and radio airplay, or at major new developing markets like ringtones, the one constant is this: Hits rule. In fact, unlike ten years ago when a songwriter could make a very nice living penning album cuts for a few huge-selling albums, today’s songwriters and publishers are almost entirely dependent on hit singles to generate income. Hit songs are the ones that earn performance income from ASCAP or BMI, they’re the ones that get placed in major advertisements, they’re the ones that people purchase as ringtones. There is very little market for album cuts, and little in the way of significant income opportunities for obscure titles. Why?
Here are three suggestions of what Anderson may have left out of his “Long Tail” theory:
1. Hits are hits because people like them. Despite all the conspiracy theories against the mass media, the truth is that most songs that achieve huge popularity do not do so because of manipulative marketing campaigns, record company payola, or media brainwashing. Most songs at the top of the Hot 100 are there because they strike a common chord with a huge number of people, they capture a meaningful sentiment, a cultural moment, or a hot fashion. Hit songs are not cheap, easy formulaic songs. They’re songs that work– that reach listeners and provide four solid minutes of entertainment. Likewise, most songs that are in the “niche” world are simply ones that have a limited appeal.
2. More music availability does not encourage the general public to cultivate and expand their tastes. It actually confuses the heck out of them. The truth is, most people do not consider it one of their top priorities to seek out and discover incredible, new unknown music. Most people have jobs, friends, families, homes and other things to which they need to devote the majority of their time. They do not spend their days immersed in music blogs, sampling every new band on myspace or exploring the corners of Internet radio.
For people within the mass market (which is, by definition, the masses of people), music choices have to be presented in a relatively limited way. One of the greatest downfalls of the music industry within the old-fashioned bricks and mortar retail format has been to flood the market with far more product than the public can possibly absorb. Consequently, the consumer enters the store, is immediately overwhelmed and confused by albums from hundreds of acts that John Q. Public has never heard of, and leaves without purchasing anything. The Internet amplifies this dilemma ten-fold. Perhaps the greatest contribution the major label system has ever made to music is in limiting the choices that consumers were given. Confusion breeds despair.
3. There is a cost to everything. Much of the Long Tail argument was based on the idea that the internet allowed vast amounts of music to be made available at no significant cost– in the digital world, with no production or manufacturing costs and no storage space limitations, it was just as easy for a music store to make available 500,000 titles both known and obscure as to carry 500 top hit titles. Likewise, labels and publishers might as well seek to exploit their entire product, even the less popular acts, rather than just focusing on superstars. Unfortunately, what the industry quickly learned is that there is no free lunch.
Everything costs money. The truth is that there are administrative costs to everything, whether it’s the logistics of accounting to thousands of different acts, registering and collecting on hundreds of thousands of titles, or trying to establish some kind of brand identity within a market flooded by an endless amount of consumer choices. While the prospect of selling one unit each of a million different pieces of product may seem roughly equivalent to selling one million units of one piece of product, there is no comparison in the profitability between one and the other. For every player in the process, from the digital music store to the record company to the publishers to artists and writers themselves, it is far more efficient to sell large amounts of one song or album than to sell miniscule amounts of a million different titles. Administration and collection cost money, and it takes a certain level of sales to justify those costs.
So what does the snipping of the Long Tail mean to songwriters and bands? Is it a blow against diversity and creativity? Is it one more illustration that the general public is ignorant and lemming-like in its taste?
Not really. What it means is that some things don’t change, or at least not very fast. It means that one hit song will still go further in establishing your band, or advancing your career as a songwriter than a thousand “interesting” album cuts. It means that being obscure for obscurity’s sake may make you an underground favorite, but it won’t pay the bills. It means that a song that “communicates” and touches a listener will always be a better business venture than a song that merely “expresses” your own feelings. This is not new– it’s the reality that artists have been dealing with since the beginning of art itself. So far, it appears not even the Internet can alter that familiar tale.