This is the first time (and very possibly the last) that I cross-post on my two blogs Fiberevolution and Musical Ramblings, but for once there was a topic that fit both at the same time, so why not ?
I have in the past written about the Long Tail, a trend in media consumption created by digitization of content. In a nutshell, the Long Tail is a representation of the proportion of non-hits vs. hits that people purchase. It used to be that 80% if music sales were done by roughly 20% of releases. With digitization that is no longer true, and increasingly people widen their cultural horizons.
From the point of view of the guy who sells the music, this can be good news (if, like Amazon he has very low logistics cost and a huge catalog or even better, like Rhapsody he has no logistics cost and a catalog limited only by the rights he can negotiate.) It is undoubtedly bad news for the retail shop who has huge logictics costs and a limited catalog since people looking for their particular taste in obscure stuff will never find what they want there. It's also bad news for a music industry whose only talent is to produce hits. Since these don't sell as much because a part of the sales transfer to more obscure stuff, they struggle to adapt to this new environment.
Anyway, this was all described in detail in Chris Anderson's excellent book The Long Tail, a recommended read for all who are interested in understanding these trends in media and content consumption. This book was released in 2006, but the reason I'm posting about this now, is that I found a reference to what may be a precursor of this phenomenon... in the 1950s!
Last week as I was flying to Barcelona I listened to the Folkways Collection Podcast, a series of 24 one-hour long podcasts that retrace the story of the Folkways music label and delve deep into its archive. The Folkways label was founded in the late 40s by Moses Asch, recording all sorts of music, folk, blues, jazz and what would now be called world music, but also political commentary, children stories and educational material. More relevant to this post, it was run like no other music labels. Let me quote a few sentences from the podcast to explain this:
"So he developed the business practice of service small previously neglected markets, and developed a production practice that would enable him to press small numbers of records at a time and then repress them also in very small batches when the demand came in. He had agreements with pressing plants so he could press as few as fifty copies of a given title."
This is a key enabler of the Long Tail phenomenon in that it lowers down the logistics cost to next to nothing. Of course, in Moe Asch's case, it wasn't nothing, as digitization has now allowed, but it was very close to that, basically producing to demand and reducing logistic and warehousing costs to the maximum.
Another characteristic of Moe Asch's operation is that he never deleted a master or got rid of back catalog the way traditional record firms would. When Moe Asch passed away in 1985, Folkways, a one man operation for over 35 years, had over 2000 references in catalog, all alive. This is another crucial component of the long tail: for it to work, you need to have enough material that you are addressing multiple niche markets. By today's standards, 2000+ references sounds puny (although it's still way more than the average supermarket or local record store carry) but on the scale of the operation and back in those days, it was no mean feat.
Finally, let me quote again the one paragraph that made me realise how close this was to an early Long Tail operation:
"The practical problem with the star system, the big hit system is that you have to put out so much money into the recording, into the product before it hits the market and it’s such a big guess, that you could really be stuck if it didn’t work. And if you didn’t have the product there in Cleveland on the very day that they needed it to sell it, it would no longer be a hit because the next thing would come along and would replace it. He said, look at Folkways differently: take all of my recordings and add up all their sales, and all of them together equal one hit. And that’s the way you have to think about Folkways."
And this is the crux of the Long Tail success: you don't have hits, you have a little bit of sales on a multitude of titles, and an occasional mini-hit, and that's what makes it work financially. Modern examples of the Long Tail abound in the digital world, but who would have thought that, by sheer business instinct, someone was doing it in the early 50s? Moe Asch didn't dy a rich man, but he died the proud owner of a 30 year old music label that had recorded hundreds of artists, talented yet obscure, and he left a legacy in culture that is unique and magnificent.
Go listen to these Folkways Podcasts, they are literally a journey in 20th century musical history. Superb stuff. And while you're at it, check out the Long Tail Blog for a full multimedia experience!
I just got back from Barcelona where I was spending the week for the Mobile World Congress. Wednesday night, however, I was lucky enough to be invited to a select party hosted by 
