The Wall Street Journal's Lee Gomes isn't buying the basic tenants of Chris Anderson's era-defining book The Long Tail, which is seen in some quarters as a guidebook for the digital music era. His latest piece about the book by the editor of Wired Magazine picks apart Anderson's arguments and shoots to bring down the "current popularity of Web utopian fantasies about the way sales of niche products can rival those of hits."

Though The Long Tail is heralded left and right as a defining book, Gomes points out many examples of how hits are still hits and consumers aren't giving any greater market power to small book publishers and record labels. One book publisher told him his company's sales to Amazon.com mimic its sales to brick-and-mortar stores. Netflix, he estimates, gets 30% of its rentals from just 0.8% of its titles. Indie songs accounted for 15% of Rhapsody streams, which is roughly the same as indies' share of the CD market. (That may not bode well for music recommendation services. There is a huge overestimate on the number of people who want to find new music. Most people want familiar music, not new music.)

Businesses, he continues, should be wary of expanding production in hopes of riding the long tail to greater sales. This makes perfect sense. To me, the long tail benefits aggregators and distributors, especially those who deal with digital goods, who have the scale to add titles at almost no incremental cost. The cost to a digital music store of adding one more song to the catalog is virtually zero. But what about content creators? The cost to create that song isn't as low as the cost of distribute -- and that's to say nothing about the cost of marketing. There are exceptions, such as if it's an old song that is seeing the digital world for the first time. (Even then there's a cost associated with converting from analog to digital and readying for sale.) For new songs the cost to bring to market is usually not as low. A distributor can afford to add songs and sell less of each, but creators shouldn't have the same goal.

Posted by Glenn at 12:54 PM | Link
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Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine, popularized the long tail, a new, digitally-enabled business model, with an article on the subject and for a couple of years has spent given speeches and proselytized about the new era of digital economics. Anderson just doesn't hit the technologist circuit. He recently spoke at the Alternative Distribution Alliance conference in Philadelphia.

Now Anderson's book, The Long Tail, is available...and doing well enough to be currently ranked #78 at Amazon.com. (Today at Wired.com there's an adaptation from The Long Tail that's titled "The Rise and Fall of the Hit.")

John Cassidy reviewed the book for The New Yorker and gave it a luke warm grade. While he complements Anderson for taking an established model (power-law distribution) and presenting a "readily graspable picture," Cassidy points out some flaws and ommissions. Part of what's missing has to do with consumer behavior that distribution alone doesn't take into account.

"A widening of choices doesn’t necessarily lead to cultural fragmentation and a defection from mainstream fare; sometimes it has the opposite effect, as befuddled consumers congregate around the same things. To be sure, some curious individuals will rent Japanese anime and science documentaries from Netflix, but far more people will turn up for the fifth 'Harry Potter' film and 'Shrek 3,' because they’ll want to see the movies that everybody’s talking about. Big-time movie releases aren’t merely stories and images on a screen; they’re news events—a fact that Hollywood studio executives have long recognized. Sony’s 'The Da Vinci Code' was a good illustration."

And later:

"A widening of choices doesn’t necessarily lead to cultural fragmentation and a defection from mainstream fare; sometimes it has the opposite effect, as befuddled consumers congregate around the same things."

One phenemenon of digital distribution was the center of an article at The Times Online last week, and it appears to conflict with the niche-creating theory of the long tail: Songs stay on the UK singles chart longer than before digital downloads were taken into account. Some songs, like The Verve's "Bittersweet Symphony" and Oasis's "Wonderwall," never leave the chart. And longevity has been affected. The typical hit stays on the UK singles chart for five weeks, up from three and a half weeks before digital sales counted. That doesn't jibe with Anderson's theory. In the Wired article, Anderson writes that "the number of weeks the average best-selling novel remains at the top of the list has fallen by half over the past decade." Shouldn't there more, not less, turnover on the music charts?

Continue reading "The Long Tail Book Arrives" »

Posted by Glenn at 2:10 PM | Link
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• Philly's music writers are as mean-spririted as their sports fans. ADA Distribution's annual conference will be held in Philly this weekend. Check out the grief their "indies only" showcase at the Trocadero is getting from a local music writer: The line-up -- Band of Horses, Yo La Tengo, The Stills, Matt Pond PA and Todd Barry -- "is reason enough to ignore the corporate ogre." (Philadelphia Weekly)

• Louis Armstrong memoribilia will be on display at the Godwin Ternbach Museum at Queens College in New York City from June 20th through August 20th. (Downbeat)

• Two new books explore the myths and music of the Laurel Canyon scene of the late '60s through the mid-'70s. (LA Weekly)

• This is news to me: Mark Ibold (ex-Pavement) is Sonic Youth's new bassist/guitarist. (Modestmicah)

Posted by Glenn at 5:35 PM | Link
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Sanctuary Publishing, an arm of the Sanctuary Group (Sanctuary Records is also part of the company), has a book coming out next month called "The Art of Downloading Music." The small, 287-page book covers the very basics of downloading music, from connecting to the Internet to a section titled "war on the Web: The Law of Downloading" (which, interestingly, doesn't actually mention any applicable laws).

It's an interesting project in that the book cover is a slightly-larger-than-life photo of an iPod and the author, producer Steve Levine, is a technical advisor to Apple. It's not as much an overview of downloading as a paean to Apple.

The Apple bias creates a few problems. One, the book comes off like $10 promotional pamphlet for iTunes and the iPod. The hard bias alone takes away credibility. Levine inserts just enough commentary on other music services and technologies to deflect such criticism, but anybody with even the slightest knowledge of digital music would know better. Which leads to the second problem: The book is for beginners, which is strange because iTunes and the iPod are so incredibly user friendly that they don't require an entire book. This is a topic that doesn't call for in-depth knowledge...just download and listen. It's not like the book's brief history of digital music and its overview of the iTunes interface is all that fascinating.

Lastly, there's a temporal issue here. By its very nature, the information in this book could be out of date by early next year. Today the information is current, but the landscape of digital music changes so frequently that a second edition of "The Art of Downloading Music" couldn't come fast enough.

Tech-minded people will learn nothing new from this book. Newbies and the less technologically inclined probably shouldn't make the investment of time and money. But it is a cute book cover, isn't it?

Posted by Glenn at 9:22 AM | Link | Comment (1)
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If you lived in or around LA's Silver Lake in the late '90s, you may have tuned in to KBLT, the pirate radio station based in the one-bedroom apartment of Sue Carpenter. By the time it was shut down by the FCC, KBLT ran 22 hours a day, had a weekly DJ spot by Mike Watt (Minutemen) and had hosted in-studio performances by the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Spritualized's Jason Pierce.

Sue's book on her pirate radio days, 40 Watts From Nowhere: A Journey Into Pirate Radio is a lighthearted but great story about her tranformation from a hobbyist to a leader of a legitimate underground cultural movement.

One passage, about when the transmitter broke, tells of Sue's dedication to her station:

"On $26,000 a year, I'm barely making ends meet, and that's before shelling out for all the station's expenses. Between the mailbox service, voice mail, headphones, turntable cartridges, CD holders, occasional equipment replacement, and miscellaneous stuff like electrical tape, extension cords, and record cleaner, I'm being nickled and dimed all the way to the poorhouse. I already buy all my clothes used. I bleach my own hair. I get my hair cut every other month at Supercuts. I rarely eat out. There aren't any more corners to cut."

Anybody who has persisted in a hobby or a craft out of sheer love of it will appreciate this book. The same goes for those who appreciate the voice that comes from outside the mainstream. Those against excessive corporate power and restrictive government regulations will find Sue's story to be encouraging and uplifting. The themes in the book are universal. It's a David vs. Goliath tale...only in this book, Goliath won. But for a few years, LA got an incredible and unique radio station.

Check out this LA Weekly article on "Paige Jarret" (Carpenter's fake KBLT name) and her radio station. Endless LA has pictures of a KBLT benefit concert held at the El Rey Theater in April of 1998.

The Onion gave 40 Watts From Nowhere a good review back in February.

Posted by Glenn at 7:54 PM | Link | Comment (2)
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"Rarely has so much attention been paid to a musician who has never quite succeeded commercially, or in his own mind, or in the minds of his oft-perplexed fans. But (Jeff) Tweedy is worth it, for his failures as much as his successes, for the cloudy clarity of his work."

Joe Klein wrote this in today's NY Times while reviewing Greg Kot's new book Wilco: Learning How To Die (Amazon sales rank: 130). Not only was Klein impressed as Tweedy in terms of a subject, but he was also impressed by Kot as a writer. He's an modest writer, wrote Klein, one that "actually does reporting."

Wilco's new album, A Ghost Is Born, is out on June 22nd.

Check the Random House page for Wilco: Learning How To Die, an interview with Greg at RockCritics.com and the Greg Kot biography at Sound Opinions.

Posted by Glenn at 7:46 PM | Link
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Coolfer is currently reading Steve Almond's collection of short stories titled My Life In Heavy Metal. Funny and engaging writing, regardless of the genre of music used as a backdrop. Fortunately, heavy metal makes for a funny backdrop.

In the first short story, Steve talks of being a music critic for a newspaper in El Paso, Texas.

"Because we were a morning paper, I had to bang out my copy by midnight. I operated on a template involving an initial bad pun, a lengthy playlist--adjective, adjective, song title--and a description of the lead singer's hair. The rest was your standard catalog of puking yayas, flying undies, poignant duets with the rhythm guitarist back from rehab. I loved the velocity of the process: an event witnessed and recorded overnight."

See also Chuck Kolsterman's Fargo Rock City.

Posted by Glenn at 8:22 AM | Link
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Today's New York Times has an article on the 50th birthday of City Lights, San Francisco's legendary bookstore that has been a haven for beats and the counterculture since its opening. Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, its founder, is pictured above.

Good quote from the article: "The most interesting writing now is coming out of third world authors and women," he said. "It takes hunger and passion to create great books."

Posted by Glenn at 10:12 AM | Link
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