Glenn
03-07-2006, 08:49 AM
Where is the market for popular music heading?
It's an important question for those of us who would like to make a living from making this type of music.
You may have read about the idea of the "Long Tail". Basically it describes the demand curve for music or movies, where you have a few "blockbuster hits" that account for say, 80% of sales; and then you have all the rest of the music.
If you plot the demand on a graph, you get a big spiky curve where the "hits" form a first really tall spike, that rapidly drops off into a long, long curve that represents all the rest of the music.
Record stores carry the hits in the spike. Most people buy those, so that's what they carry.
But an online store has no problem with inventory space. They can carry LOTS of artists. The key is pointing people to the lesser-known artists who have yet to be "discovered".
Amazon does this brilliantly with books. They now make MORE money from the thousands and thousands of books that sell a few hundred copies than they do from the "blockbuster best sellers".
Amazon achieves this because of their recommendation system that points customers to other books that they might enjoy because they are similar to the blockbuster they just bought. And they have Customer Ratings for each title so you can see that other people liked these lesser-known books.
And then there is the Rhapsody music service. Did you know that out of their 1 million tracks...virtually ALL of them get played at least a few times every month? Again, Rhapsody has a recommendation ability that says, "You might like this other album if you like King Crimson, or Oasis, or whatever.
Investors are starting to talk about making money off the Long Tail.
And this means that we artists have a chance if we can make reasonably good music that at least some people will like once they hear it.
I have been researching this, and I think it will take another 3-4 years until it really gets rolling. But there is hope for we lesser known artists, I think!
It's an important question for those of us who would like to make a living from making this type of music.
You may have read about the idea of the "Long Tail". Basically it describes the demand curve for music or movies, where you have a few "blockbuster hits" that account for say, 80% of sales; and then you have all the rest of the music.
If you plot the demand on a graph, you get a big spiky curve where the "hits" form a first really tall spike, that rapidly drops off into a long, long curve that represents all the rest of the music.
Record stores carry the hits in the spike. Most people buy those, so that's what they carry.
But an online store has no problem with inventory space. They can carry LOTS of artists. The key is pointing people to the lesser-known artists who have yet to be "discovered".
Amazon does this brilliantly with books. They now make MORE money from the thousands and thousands of books that sell a few hundred copies than they do from the "blockbuster best sellers".
Amazon achieves this because of their recommendation system that points customers to other books that they might enjoy because they are similar to the blockbuster they just bought. And they have Customer Ratings for each title so you can see that other people liked these lesser-known books.
And then there is the Rhapsody music service. Did you know that out of their 1 million tracks...virtually ALL of them get played at least a few times every month? Again, Rhapsody has a recommendation ability that says, "You might like this other album if you like King Crimson, or Oasis, or whatever.
Investors are starting to talk about making money off the Long Tail.
And this means that we artists have a chance if we can make reasonably good music that at least some people will like once they hear it.
I have been researching this, and I think it will take another 3-4 years until it really gets rolling. But there is hope for we lesser known artists, I think!