Passing references to “the long tail” on DubMC have garnered more reaction to date than anything else in the trade journal. Here DubMC founder/editor and global music publicist Dmitri Vietze applies to America’s global music market the research and theories of The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More, a recent book by Chris Anderson, editor of Wired Magazine.
The book, which elucidates an article that appeared in Wired in October 2004, references various cross-cultural genres--from reggaeton to Afro-Cuban--and has broad implications for our diverse scene as well as the overall economy. All professionals in the global music scene are advised to read this book as soon as possible to absorb the changes afoot. Part I outlines some of the basics of the Long Tail Concept. Part II explains “Why Global Music Has an Advantage in the Long Tail Economy.” And Part III addresses some of the challenges and opportunities of global music discovery in the digital realm.
Introduction
The so-called “world music” market may benefit more than any other music niche in the emerging era of digital discovery, largely because it is not a genre but a wide range of genres and hybrids that have not fit into the common methods of categorization at brick-and-mortar retail outlets. As music consumers uncover the new methods of music discovery, I argue that online sales (both physical recordings and digital ones, as well as formats yet to be seen/heard) of global music will grow significantly. Furthermore, I argue that global music (both music from “somewhere else” and music that draws upon multiple geographic and sub-cultural locations) may be one of the most significant case studies in how emerging technologies and discovery methods can develop and grow an extremely segmented music market.
Long Tail Basics
“The tracking of top-seller lists is a national obsession,” says Chris Anderson in his book, The Long Tail. “Our culture is a massive popularity contest. We are consumed by hits—making them, choosing them, talking about them, and following their rise and fall.” He goes on: “…although we still obsess over hits, they are not quite the economic force they once were. Where are those fickle consumers going instead? No single place. They are scattered to the winds as markets fragment into countless niches. The one big growth area is the Web, but it is an uncategorizable sea of a million destinations, each defying in is own way the conventional logic of media and marketing.”
With many compelling quantitative and anecdotal examples, Anderson goes on to show that in the emerging digital marketplace, shelf space is unlimited and that is drastically shifting the way in which retailers operate and music consumers behave. One of the reason hits were made was because of scarcity: there were only so many slots on the shelf, and retailers and record labels wanted to use those slots for maximum profit. In the digital world where the cost of hard drive and server space—the new shelf of retail—is minimal, retailers can sell an unlimited quantity of titles. Even with models like Amazon.com, EBay, and Netflix, physical products have fewer limits of shelf space since products are housed in warehouses (less-expensive than retail space), cottage-industry stores (as in Amazon’s Marketplace vendors), or in people’s attics/basements/car trunks (picture their daily transactions totaling $100 million and the diversity of locations that store these products). The whole world is a warehouse of goods waiting to be sold and the Internet is connecting dispersed buyers and sellers with bargains and specialty items like never before.
The Long Tail refers to a statistical curve with a steep head and a long flattened tail. In other words, if you have a Y axis representing number of CDs sold, and an X axis representing the rank order of titles sold, you would see that the first few thousand CD titles going left to right would make a steep curve down. In slightly oversimplified terms, limited shelf space meant that only certain titles were offered and major record labels sought to release products that were hits. Anything that was not a hit was taken off the shelves to make room for items that had higher sales.
When you start looking to the right of this chart, it gets especially interesting. There are countless numbers of titles clustering down by the Y axis getting closer to zero sales. This axis goes on so far before you hits zero sales that if you total the number of units to the right of the steep curve, where the curve starts to flatten, it still adds up to be a large number of sales, possibly rivaling the hit titles. In other words, if shelf space had little or no cost, a retailer would not care whether they sold one unit of a hit title versus one unit of an esoteric title. And that is precisely what the digital realm has to offer.
Most world music recordings, artists, and even genres exist on the long tail. For those of us in the field of promoting and selling a variety of this music, our products exist at multiple locations along the long tail: a wide variety of recordings (or even genres) that do not sell large quantities. But what will be the effect on the field and on individual artists/recordings when music fans begin to have new tools for accessing a larger quantity titles? Read Part II, “Why Global Music Has an Advantage in the Long Tail Economy.”
DubMC.com is the brainchild of Dmitri Vietze and is sponsored by rock paper scissors, inc., world music publicity firm.
