The death of the long tail?
A few months ago, The Guardian ran a story reporting that most music didn’t sell a single copy in 2008:
According to his and Bud’s research, 80% of all revenue came from about 52,000 tracks – the “hits” that powered the music industry. Broken down by album, only 173,000 of the 1.23m available albums were ever purchased – leaving 85% without a single copy sold.
“I think people believed in a fat, fertile long tail because they wanted it to be true,” Mr Bud told the Times. “The statistical theories used to justify that theory were intelligent and plausible. But they turned out to be wrong.”
“The relative size of the dormant ‘zero sellers’ tail was truly jaw-dropping,” Page emphasised.
I couldn’t agree with that last sentence more, though I probably feel differently about it than the study’s co-author. When I read it, my first thought was “Holy crap, there are 1.23 million albums for sale”. The article doesn’t say when all of those albums were first released. I doubt they were all produced in 2008, so it’s entirely possible that they made some money in the past. It’s also safe to assume that scarcity is dead in more than one way.
It isn’t just that the business model of selling discrete units of music is dying, but also that there is more competition within the field of music than there used to be. Rather than seeing older works fall out of print to make room for newer artists, or having music labels farm a small crop of hit makers while more obscure artists languish, there is an increasingly flat and democratic (or anarchic) field for musicians.
Of course, this is pretty much the party line of copyright reformers everywhere. “Information wants to be free” and all that, but that isn’t my point. The point is that the long tail remains even when the money isn’t there.
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A brief aside on my history with music.
I love music like a teenager should. I honestly can’t help myself. I spend more on new music than a grown man is supposed to, but I’m making up for a lot of lost time.
I grew up in a religious family during a time when evangelical Christians viewed popular music as an evil influence, and even “Christian rock” was looked upon with suspicion. We didn’t listen to much recorded music in my home, and what we did listen to didn’t inspire me to seek out more. I didn’t really start exploring music seriously until my late twenties, when I got my first real job and could afford to take risks on new music.
But music still played a huge role in my life, except that it was the music of an older time. Baptist church music. Group hymn singing. Gospel quartets playing bluegrass standards with Christian lyrics.
Later, when I studied theatre in college, I developed a grudging respect, and then a secret love for, the songs and music from our stage productions.
Amateur music.
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In Defense of Amateurs
In one of his talks, copyright reformer Lawrence Lessig quotes this statement to Congress from John Philip Sousa:
These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country. When I was a boy…in front of every house in the summer evenings, you would find young people together singing the songs of the day or old songs. Today you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal cord left. The vocal cord will be eliminated by a process of evolution, as was the tail of man when he came from the ape.
Lessig makes the point that, beneath the hyperbole, Sousa’s prediction came true. Musical entertainment became a predominantly passive after the introduction of recorded music. Most people, I think, consider music something you listen to, but for me, was always something you made, or at the very least, participated in.
I love that.
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So what does it mean if scarcity is dead, but the long tail fails to generate the income needed to be a professional musician, or writer for that matter?
I’ve written before that amateurs should be celebrated rather than stigmatized. I think this development makes that change inevitable. The reality is that most artists have always needed supplemental income, but those artists rarely had a voice outside of their community. As more amateurs gain an audience, the distinction between amateur and professional should disappear.
Does that mean artists shouldn’t be paid? Of course not, but it does mean that most artists probably won’t be. As an artist, I have to be okay with that, or I have to stop being an artist.
