If you haven’t read The Long Tail, well, don’t worry. I haven’t either.
But the concept is familiar to many of us. Instead most of us getting our stuff—our information, our products, our services—from a few providers, as in the “old days,” now we get a little bit of stuff from a lot of different providers.
In the old days, there was NBC, CBS, and ABC. Now, those networks’ news divisions are all hurting, and we have CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, CNBC, Fox Business, CNN Headline News—you get the idea.
Record companies are not just trying to deal with rampant piracy on the Internet; they’re also having to deal with the next true threat: the Long Tail of small-time-cum-big-time musicians on places like YouTube. The Pomplamooses and OK Go’s start out small, but then go viral. That’s the kind of thing that sells deodorant, if you’re marketing to the suits at the RIAA.
Places like WordPress allow tons of different people to publish their thoughts for the world to see. Bloggers routinely move up in the world nowadays, just based on viral spread (cf. Waiter Rant, Julie and Julia, Sleep Talkin’ Man). Places like Cafepress let, well, bloggers and many other resourceful folks print T-Shirts and coffee mugs and baby clothes for others to buy. Nickel and dime, for the most part. Which is the point.
We live in the Age of the Long Tail indeed.
And, if you’re on Audio Orchard, you’re part of it! You’re perhaps not a professional musician, but you hope to be. But you can not only publish your works on the site, you can also invite others to participate in yet unfinished songs. Lots of people doing what they like, and sharing it with lots of other people who like the immediacy and reality of music that’s not overproduced and not churned out of some pop music hook machine.
So if I can massacre a Shakespeare quote, “If lots of ‘small-time’ music be the food lots of us love, then play on.”
