A fascinating article in the current issue of the Harvard Business Review calls into question some of the now-accepted wisdom about the long tail.
I've been very satisfied with this relatively obscure compilation of Ethiopan jazz tunes (mostly by Mulatu Astatke). But I've had far more conversations about blockbuster recordings from the likes of U2, and those conversations are valuable to me in their own right.
A quick refresher: the long tail theory, popularized by Wired editor Chris Anderson, says that as digital distribution drives distribution costs to zero, businesses will be able to profit by stocking enormous numbers of obscure titles. These titles, which may only sell one or two copies a year, are the tail of the traditional demand curve--the "long tail."
The HBR study, by Anita Elberse, analyzes data from online music and video stores and suggests that digital distribution has actually had the opposite effect: while more titles are available than ever before, consumers are flocking in ever-greater numbers to the handful of very popular titles at the head of the demand curve.
Interestingly, consumers who buy both types of titles actually find the blockbuster titles to be more satisfying.
Why is that? Is it because the cream rises to the top, meaning that the most popular titles are necessarily some of the best? Tastemakers in the music industry would have you believe so, and at least one company, HSS, claims it can analyze songs with software to predict whether they'll be hits or not.
But I prefer an alternate theory: most people are sheep. (Not me, of course. Or you.) But seriously: a Columbia University study that I've cited before suggests that there's very little link between the objective "quality" of a song (as measured in a control group where none of the listeners could see other participants' ratings) and its popularity--the more popular a song appears to be in a particular subgroup, the more popular it becomes. The popular songs in one group had no relationship to the popular songs in another group.
Here's a nicer way of putting it: objective quality is impossible to measure, and people are driven by social inclusion--the desire to be accepted as part of a larger group, which defines itself partially by the media it consumes. This is why every indie rock fan between the ages of 25 and 35 in Seattle was listening to and talking about Outkast's "Hey Ya" when it came out. That song was unusual because it crossed over to lots of subgroups, paving the way for a humungous national blockbuster album. But in Seattle, the same thing happened for The Postal Service and the first Arcade Fire album, too. All of that music was good--there's a certain quality baseline below which something just won't become popular. But social inclusion is a huge reason why those songs and bands rose above dozens of others that were of more or less equal quality.
Given the tendency of people to flock to the big hits, Elberse recommends that producers do not change their business models to cater to the long tail. For the music industry, that means labels should continue to bet on a few releases each year, and market the heck out of any that show a glimmer of popularity. They may not sell 10 million records like they did a few years ago, but a few million-sellers per year can still support a hits-driven business, making it capable of taking chances on hundreds of smaller artists. At the same time, she recommends that retailers who want to appeal to hardcore customers--the ones who spend the most money--should stock the obscure stuff (I'd call that the Amoeba Records model), but keep costs for it as low as possible, and assume that the big hits will still draw most people into the store.
If you see a lot of live music in small clubs, you've probably had the experience of being blown away by a band that hardly anybody else knows about. Once in a great while, your instincts are validated by the masses--the band becomes popular and you get to brag about how you knew them back when. But more often than not, the law of averages kicks in, and the band continues to toil in obscurity for a few years before breaking up because the bass player's pregnant or the keyboardist got a high-paying corporate advertising gig. You ask yourself, "How come they get no love at all when [insert no-talent star band here] are famous? Is it all just luck?"
Yes, in fact. Duncan Watts proved it.
I don't care if anybody likes it, I just want to be popular!
(Credit: MusicLab)He's a former network theory researcher at Columbia University who now works for Yahoo. An article about Watts in the February issue of Fast Company is getting some attention because he strongly disputes the theory, put forth by Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point and beloved by marketers, that a select group of so-called "Influencers" are the main force behind fast-moving trends. But to me, the most interesting part of the article is when he discusses an experiment he set up at Columbia in 2006, and which he wrote about last April in The New York Times Magazine. In this experiment, he set up a site featuring downloadable music from unsigned or otherwise obscure acts. 16,000 participants signed up and downloaded all the songs. He divided them into several groups. The control group was asked to rate the songs with no input from the other members. Seven other groups were also asked to rate the songs, but were allowed to see how other members of their group voted.
Two findings emerged. First, the variation in popularity in the control group was much smaller than in the other groups. In the groups where they could see their peers' opinions, people voted for the same acts that other people voted for, suggesting that popularity breeds more popularity, which should be no surprise to anybody who's been through high school.
The more interesting finding was the complete randomness of the songs that became popular in each group. There was almost no connection between "objective quality" (as measured by the control group) and popularity--the song "Lockdown" was ranked number 26 in terms of quality, but its popularity in the other groups ranged from number 1 to number 40. True, the very bad songs almost never finished near the top, and the best songs seldom finished near the bottom. But overall, finishing in the top five in quality only guaranteed a 50% chance of finishing in the top five in popularity in any given group.
Record company executives and marketers hated the study because it seemed to invalidate their genius at picking hits. But it's great solace for the countless talented songwriters and musicians who've received little reward apart from the music itself.
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