Niche art vs. universal art.

Great music markets itself. The only reason why marketing considerations are so important these days is because product is so bad. It has by now become even impossible to write a hit. Our pop tradition is so weak that even a genius will struggle to shape something memorable and universal out of the refuse to which the public is currently attuned.

In their desperate attempts to create brand recognition, our mundane and anaemic artists/marketers are forced to think up increasingly absurd niches for themselves. On the Internet these wretches have discovered their natural home.

In his hair-raisingly cynical blog ‘The 20 Things You Must Know About Music Online’, Andrew Dubber matter-of-factly announces the death of the hit and encourages online businesses to sell less of more: since the Internet provides businesses with unlimited storage space, it makes more sense, he argues, to try and sell a few copies each of a large number of items, rather than waste time chasing one million-selling hit.

Thanks for that. Some hapless magazine editor, by the name of Chris Anderson, even wrote a book about it, called ‘The Long Tail’, in which this marketing tactic is identified as an Internet innovation. A neat little graph illustrates the phenomenon’s decadent ramifications:

The graph looks at items against number of sales. The further to the right you go on the item line, the fewer the sales. The green bit represents the hits, the stuff that sells well. The yellow bit represents the rubbish. There are vastly more rubbish items than hits.

(Before I continue with the argument I feel I need to mention that, on account of deteriorating standards, many sophisticates are developing an aversion to the mere term hit, and feel more confident of finding a nugget in the Long Tail. These people might be tempted to poke fun at my representation of the hit as a cultural peak. I would like to point out that, in my conception, Homer, Vergil, Shakespeare, Bach, Mozart etc were all hitmakers.)

Back in the modern age, mainstream outlets like Amazon already claim to sell fewer copies of their top one hundred bestsellers than of all their other titles together. Not that anyone is disputing it, but this state of affairs proves that our culture is in an advanced state of decay. A work of art (bestseller) is a celebration of the era in which it was made and, if it is good, is capable of communicating (selling) its cultural values to audiences that have yet to be born. The more a tradition is able to sell of less is an indication of its vibrancy. For heaven’s sake: the Iliad is still going strong. What a hit!

It is rather facile to blame the Internet: the slogan ‘sell less of more’ has been in slow, steady ascendence for the last couple of thousand years. The Internet is merely another symptom of our culture’s cascade into mediocrity. We find ourselves in our age so ill equipped to achieve greatness, that a framework to accommodate selling less of more was bound to emerge. They would not have known what to do with the Internet in the Renaissance. The emergence of the Internet in our times constitutes an admission: to create a hit is beyond our capability.

So now, rather than trying to score hits, we see an almost inconceivable number of bands and artists chasing the Long Tail: flooding the market with inane drones, the one entirely indistinguishable from the next, and yet shamelessly marketed as niche product.

If the Tail is Long, you cannot fail to catch it.

Personally, I hope they all swallow themselves. I would like to suggest an alternative title for Mr Dubber’s blog: ‘The 20 Things You Must Know About Music Online, If You Know Nothing About Music’