Hooray for The Long Tail
The internet may have had a transformational effect on most areas of our lives: from the way we work to the way we socialise to the way we access information. Indeed, being a freelance science writer would be a whole lot more difficult without the internet. But aside from that, one of the greatest boons of the internet for me is the way it’s allowed me to get hold of obscure music.
Now, this is a prime example of what Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, has termed ‘The Long Tail’. This is the idea that the internet is increasingly allowing companies to make money from selling non-mainstream products. These products may take almost any form, but the concept of The Long Tail is best understood with things such as films, books and music.
Traditionally, producers and retailers of films, books and music have concentrated on hits, because that is where they have made their money. These producers and retailers tended to operate on the 80:20 rule: assuming that they derive 80% of their revenue from just 20% of their products. As a result, 20% of films, books and music have always been easy to find, whereas it has often been far more difficult to find the other 80%.
More mathematically, this is known as a power law distribution and can be represented by a curve that falls steeply at first (representing the high selling 20%) before gradually flattening out to form a long tail (representing the low selling 80%). This kind of distribution also describes such varied behaviours as the occurrence of words in a language and the intensity of earthquakes.
But the internet has changed all that. For a start, an internet store can stock far more DVDs, books and CDs than a high-street shop can put on its shelves. It will also have access to a potentially global audience, rather than simply those people living in the near vicinity, but should have lower overheads.
This means that internet companies are able to make money by purely selling a large range of non-mainstream products: selling less of more. This is what even major internet retailers such as Amazon tend to do, with research showing that a significant portion of Amazon’s sales come from obscure books that simply aren’t available in standard book shops.
A knock on effect of this is that artists now don’t have to be mainstream or particularly well-known to make a fairly decent living. The internet has made it much easier and cheaper for artists to produce, market and distribute their own work. For music, a whole raft of new record labels has sprung up to cater for more obscure tastes and, by keeping their costs down, these labels are able to make money by catering to a select audience.
And I am part of that audience. Just this morning I received in the post the debut album from The Pictish Trail, a singer-songwriter who forms part of the Fence Collective. This is a Fife-based collection of musicians that also includes slightly better known artists such as King Creosote and James Yorkston.
Unfortunately, you’re not going to find this album in your local supermarket and so I simply ordered it direct from Fence Records via the internet. In fact, I’m pretty sure it was The Pictish Trail himself who put the CD in the envelope and posted it to me. Now, you’re not likely to get that level of personal service from Coldplay.
So my music buying routine now consists of listening to BBC 6 Music, especially Stuart Maconie’s Freak Zone on Sunday evenings and Marc Riley’s show on weekday evenings. Then finding the myspace pages of any artists that caught my attention to listen to more of their songs, before usually going on to buy their albums from Amazon or direct from their record label.
In this way, I am now enjoying the work of whole range of wonderful but not particularly well-known musicians. These include folky artists such as Nancy Elizabeth, prog rock-influenced bands such as The Earlies, post-rock bands such as Flowers of Hell, electronica outfits such as Belbury Poly, and producers of modern classical music such as the North Sea Radio Orchestra.
I can heartily recommend them all.
