Nobody goes there anymore--it's too crowded

In the continuing battle against crimes of "hitism", let me take a gentle swipe at an otherwise excellent piece on the cultural implications of the peer production age by music critic John Pareles in today's NYT. He writes:

"The open question is whether those new, quirky, homemade filters will find better art than the old, crassly commercial ones. The most-played songs from unsigned bands on MySpace — some played two million or three million times — tend to be as sappy as anything on the radio; the most-viewed videos on YouTube are novelty bits, and proudly dorky. Mouse-clicking individuals can be as tasteless, in the aggregate, as entertainment professionals.

The key word there is "aggregate". Popularity is simply a place where many roads--each one a single consumer's path through culture--intersect. Each road is different, but for a brief moment many crossed that point. Hits are products that reflect the coincidence of our collective tastes, and the reality is that most of the things that we agree on are relatively banal (that's why they call it the lowest common denominator).

Individually we may have excellent taste, but collectively we're as low-brow as they come. This is simply an artifact of the statistics of the Long Tail--when demand is spread over a huge number of products, most things won't be popular. And the things that are popular won't necessarily define their consumers.

T'was ever thus: Yogi Berra's quote in the title reflects the reality of minority taste. We're as likely to avoid doing what everyone else is doing as were are to join them. For the discriminating, popularity is often a curse, even if it was their early embrace that kick-started that popularity in the first place.

Once the most popular fare defined our culture. Now a million niches define our culture and the few blockbusters are the exceptions that define none of us, even through many of us brush by them. 

David Foster Wallace, writing about television, said it best:

"TV is not vulgar and prurient and dumb because the people who compose the audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests."

(Image taken from our photo shoot this month for our cover story on LonelyGirl15, an example used in the NYT.)

Comments

[Peter Kohan]

One thing I've encountered in thinking about the "Long Tail" theory is that even in this age where musical content ought to be readily available to consumers in a variety of formats certain gatekeepers still have a lock and key over distribution of that content. This affects both the consumers' ability to access that content and the content owners' ability to reap the maximum profit from those copyrights. They are unable to reap the "long tail" revenues that will come from a wider variety of licensing channels.

We may not be at the End of the CD Era, but we have definitely passed the Beginning of the End of the CD Era. I have made my living the past few years working for various record companies developing custom CD compilations. While I have been impressed that many prominent artists have been more open to licensing their tracks via this channel in recent years it amazes me how this stream of revenue has not even come close to maximizing its potential despite a hoard of customers clamoring for content. Why is that?

On one level, the record companies themselves would rather reap the income through the sale of frontline or catalog releases; they are definitely a more profitable vehicle per se. The labels, many times in conjunction with artist management, deem that Track X should only be licensed out for these purposes for, let's say 50,000 unit guarantees or higher for such compilations. Some artists even have contractual language stating as such, but even when a label has the right to license a particular artist's repertoire without needing the permission of artist management or an artist's estate they often set these artificial barriers up to not cannibalize their main channels of distribution per se or to try and milk higher guarantees from their customers. At least that's the theory... but those high guarantees are harder and harder to find these days.

Artist representatives and the artists themselves often ignore this revenue stream altogether, or are very restrictive, for a variety of reasons: A) "I made my career making amazing music and if someone wants to buy my hits they can buy the original album or my greatst hits package," B) "Individually, these projects don't contribute significantly to either the bottom line or the artist's significance in the way a big TV or Film synch licensing deal does," C) "My albums stand as artistic testaments and licensing in and of itself would be tantamount to selling out," D) "I don't want to be the artist 'carrying the package' amongst the other 'lesser' artists," or E) "either I as an artist or my representatives haven't taken enough time to realize there are means to get me recouped faster in the life of a given album project or are just insane to deal with on a day-to-day basis."

The way the music industry operates, not only is there a "long tail" for entire catalogs of music, but tracks in and of themselves have "long tails." A master owner with a hit track (or obscure oddity) can earn money on the track in various ways: album sales, digital download sales, ringtone sales, Film & TV licensing revenue, online streaming of audio/video tracks from certain sites, soundtrack licensing, ringtone and other mobile licensing, and "special markets" compilations (the fact that publishers reap money for radio airplay while labels do not is one of the great record industry strategic blunders of all time). Let me address the comments above with regard to this latter stream of revenue.

Record companies are faced with many harsh realities right now: 1) illegal downloading, 2) the shuttering of many stand-alone record chains such as Tower Records, 3) market saturation of single-artist compilations, 4) big box accounts giving less and less shelf space to CDs in favor of more profitable and quicker turning merchandise, 5) the inability to get product into non-traditional channels due to operations and cost issues confronted at various chains, and 6) adult consumers have finite time on their hands and can't always take the time to look for the hot new or reissued record of the moment (especially given the paltry marketing $$$ most labels are working with these days). The big picture issue is that record company catalog operations have less and less presence at retail, which means less content is available to the consumer, and there are fewer opportunities to exploit repertoire in the physical form of the CD.

Now some might see that as a completely glum picture. But it isn't. There are plenty of customers lining up belly to the bar to access the labels' content; many of them have been fueling the special markets business for decades: Time-Life, Razor & Tie, Compass, Reader's Digest, etc... But for all their consistent business and faith in music as a sales driver for their companies the labels can't give these companies what they need to survive - key content. For some or all of the reasons stated above labels and particular artist managers and/or estates have shut down access to content. Doing a 60s rock package and want to license The Doors,The Who or Jimi Hendrix? Good luck; you must be tripping. Want to do a definitive disco set and need ABBA or The Bee Gees? You'd have better luck mastering "the hustle." 90s music? Nirvana or Notorious BIG? Not in this lifetime. These are but a few examples of how the labels and artists are sabotaging themselves as they strain to keep the record business alive.

The major labels, for all their desire to "hit the numbers" now that they are all (for now) public companies and deliver returns to their shareholders have not adopted the strategies to sustain and grow their catalog businesses to the benefit of their artists, eployees, or those shareholders. Want to see EMI post some hot numbers? Have them get The Beatles to license their catalog for a Time-Life series, or do a "Beatles Love Songs" package for Hallmark for a million units. Where are the innovative Business Affairs strategies with key artists to get them to loosen their hold on their catalogs? Buy out their artist consent clauses and deliver the content to the people!!!

Let's face it; consumers are strapped for time and cash. They want to find the music they love where THEY want to find it, not where labels and artists tell them to find it, both digitally and physically. If that be an 80s rock various artists compilation, then Aerosmith be damned!; give the fan an Aerosmith track! Frankly, record retail has been doing abysmal business of late on CDs, but that doesn't mean most everybody doesn't have access to a CD player in their life, and the CD has been a fairly solid technology (I can't speak for everyone, but IMO other than the occassional scratched CD my music collection is safe and sound on CD).

By the way... there aren't many artists these days who still don't yearn for the major label recording contract because they want to live the dream of being the "rock star," not just the "working, performing musician." While places like MySpace and YouTube and blogs can certainly make people stars it is stardom of the "15 minutes of fame" variety for the most part.

[John Blossom]

Great post, Chris. Your emphasis on licensing & royalty issues and their relationship to the tyranny of quarterly reports is spot on.

Many thanks,
John

[curcuma]

I’ve enjoyed following this conversation, most of which is beyond me–I’m from the era of rotary telephones and three black and white TV channels. But is all this evolving technology bringing us closer together in any fundamentally meaningful way? The CB radio of the 21st century? It all seems so– superficial. Maybe nothing further is required of it.