Thoughts On Niches and the Long Tail

Nowadays, it’s taken for granted that we live in an era of “niche.” We have several-hundred cable channels, YouTube, websites to appeal to anyone’s deepest interests and literally an infinite amount of entertainment and information options at our disposal. And we are told that reaching a broad audience is now just about impossible. It’s all part of the Chris Anderson’s “Long Tail” thesis; in the future, entertainment products will sell less of more – meaning that there will be fewer blockbusters but more things will sell over time – and it’s been taken for granted, especially by techies, to be true. (Not all of them.)

But is this theory true and does it effect how art is made? Once upon a time, popular art was designed to be, well, popular. Up until the late 70’s, movies and music, even if substantive and complex, were intended to reach as broad an audience as possible. From the 30’s to the 60’s, the biggest Hollywood films were written to reach everyone. In popular music, be it rock or r&b, just about everything was made with a mass audience in mind. Even the godfathers of punk – the Velvet Underground, Iggy and the Stooges and the MC5 - had designs to hit the top. Back then, it was the only game in town.

In left-of center rock, that hasn’t been the case for almost three decades. The failure of 70’s punk to break commercially in the U.S. spawned a self-sustaining alternative music economy where music from the fringe could emerge and thrive, which obviated the need to try to please the mainstream. And in the face of the failure of punk to reach a broad audience, an attitude emerged from the punk and post-punk world that just about any commercial music was to be looked upon with suspicion at best, and utter and complete derision at worst. (That was an attitude fostered in self-defense; the Ramones were devastated when they realized they weren’t going to be an enormous band.) In the post-punk world, just like the folk world of the early 60’s, selling a lot of anything usually inspires cries of “selling out.” (The history of jazz post be-bop is similar – the avant-garde took over the vanguard of the music, its popularity declined, and it ceased to be truly popular music.)

In the R&B world it is, of course, different. In the R&B and Hip-Hop game, you’re either huge, or you haven’t made it. (There are a few exceptions to this – but the alternative hip-hop scene has no real cache in the urban areas where the music comes from.) Dr. Dre and Jay Z brag about being great businessmen. (No revered indie-rocker would ever call himself a businessman.) Black music is still a blockbuster game, no matter what anyone says. While it is true that those blockbusters sell less than they used to, there's no popular black music scene that exists powerfully on the margins the way indie rock does in the rock world. (There's no Pitchfork for black music.) Big hits are venerated in black music. One can't say that about Radiohead or Wilco.

So in the black music game, the Long Tail has no real resonance, but in the world of indie rock and post punk, it does. Why is that? I would assert that it’s because due primarily to cultural differences – i.e., attitudes about the worthiness of the pursuit of popular and mass success, money and rebellion, rather than a fundamental truth about how technology is affecting our consumption of media. The Long Tail is a theory that exists in theory, not reality, and in the veneration of the theory, it has accumulated resonance, and people have begun to work within its confines. So instead of believing that they can reach a big and broad audience, artists who work within the limited vision that they see as possible and "appropriate" for their music. For years, I've seen many talented left-leaning rock artists making insular music designed to reach a narrow audience. And as a result, they make insular and small music with little lasting resonance. And this had been happening way before records stopped selling.

In June, I attended a conference at the Advertising Age convention in New York. At one of the panels I attended, the panelists touted the fashionable wisdom that the “Grateful Dead Model” (where you give your music away and make your money touring) was the way for artists to go. A nice theory, but it ignored the fact that the Dead only made more money on the road because on their best nights, they were transcendent live, and they were pretty crappy record makers. (It also ignored the fact that they never really gave their music away, but that’s another matter.) Not to slag them (they were all smart guys), but I bet they couldn’t name ten Grateful Dead songs between the five of them.

I only bring up the point to remind music lovers that most tech people who come up with these theories don’t really know much about music or art. They see the world through the prism of their world – technology. All the theories in the world about technology and its interaction music can be made irrelevant by one epochal song. Here’s hoping that song comes soon. Niches may be a fact of life, but it is the role of great create art to tear up and expose as folly assumed truths about what’s possible - in both music and in life. And it's fun when great stuff is popular, too.