The Long Tail

by Chris Anderson

  The rise of such powerful technologies of mass culture was not greeted with universal acclaim. In 1936, Marxist philosopher Walter Benjamin expressed his concern for the loss of “aura” (the transcendent qualities of art) in an age of mechanical reproduction. Emphasizing the examples of photography and film, along with recorded rather than performed music, Benjamin worried that “mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction of the masses toward art. The reactionary attitude toward a Picasso painting changes into the progressive reaction toward a Chaplin movie…. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.”

  But he hadn’t seen anything yet. The impending explosion of the broadcast mediums of radio and television would eventually change the game completely. The power of electromagnetic waves is that they spread in all directions essentially for free, a trait that made them as mind-blowing when they were first introduced as the Internet would be some fifty years later. The ability to reach everyone within dozens of miles for the price of a single broadcast was so economically compelling that broadcaster RCA even got into the radio-set manufacturing business in the early 1920s to subsidize and thus accelerate the adoption of receivers that could pick up its programming.

  But local and regional broadcasts still only reached local and regional audiences, which often weren’t big enough for national advertisers. Going national would require another technology. In 1922, AT&T’s long-distance and local Bell operating divisions developed technologies for transmitting voice-and music-grade audio on the then-new long-distance phone networks. New York’s WEAF station, which had long been a technology test bed, put together a regular schedule of programs and created some of the first broadcasts to incorporate commercial endorsements or sponsorships. They were redistributed to stations beyond New York on long-distance phone lines. This was an immediate success, and created links with other stations that could go both ways, taking national what was once local coverage of sports or political events.

  This was the beginning of what would become known first as “chain” or “network” broadcasting. It was also the start of a shared national culture, synchronized to the three-note NBC chimes, which were originally a system cue to network engineers to switch between the news and entertainment feeds.

  Between 1935 and the 1950s, the Golden Age of Radio led to the rise of national stars, from Edward R. Murrow to Bing Crosby. Then television took over, birthing the ultimate in lockstep culture. By 1954, an astounding 74 percent of TV households were watching I Love Lucy every Sunday night.

  The Golden Age of Television marked the peak of the so-called watercooler effect, the phrase describing the buzz in the office around a shared cultural event. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was a safe assumption that nearly everyone in your office had watched the same thing the previous night. Most folks had probably seen Walter Cronkite read the evening news, and then tuned in to whatever the top show was that night: The Beverly Hillbillies, Gunsmoke, or The Andy Griffith Show.

  Throughout the eighties, nineties, and even into the twenty-first century, television continued to be the great American unifier. Peak sewage usage was routinely measured at halftime of the Super Bowl. Telephone network capacity records were set for call-in voting during the first season of American Idol. Each year, TV advertising set a new record as companies paid more and more for prime time. And why not? TV defined the mainstream. Prime time may not have been the only time, but it was the only one that really mattered.

  But even as the nineties drew to a close, with the networks basking in their commercial success, the cultural ground was shifting beneath them. The first cracks were to appear in the usual battleground of youth rebellion: music.

  Although music was first made more than just performance by the phonograph, it was radio that created the pop idol. In the 1940s and ’50s, Your Hit Parade became a fixture of Saturday night, billing itself as “an accurate, authentic tabulation of America’s taste in popular music.” Then, with the rise and youth appeal of rock and roll and R&B, came personality-driven playlists and the celebrity radio DJ. In the 1950s, Alan Freed and Murray “the K” Kaufman helped turn radio into the most powerful hit-making machine the world had ever known.

  The machine hit its peak in the form of American Top 40, a syndicated weekly radio show started by Casey Kasem in 1970. It began as a three-hour program that counted down the top forty songs on Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart. By the early 1980s, the show was four hours long and could be heard every Sunday on more than 500 stations in the United States alone. For a generation of kids who grew up in the seventies and eighties, this was the carrier signal of pop culture. Every week millions of them synchronized themselves to the rest of the nation, obsessively tracking which bands were up and which were down in a list of songs that wouldn’t fill a single rack in a record store.

  THE END OF THE HIT PARADE

  As the twenty-first century opened, the music industry—the ultimate hit machine—basked in its power. The resounding commercial success of teen pop—from Britney Spears to the Backstreet Boys—showed that the business had its finger firmly on the pulse of American youth culture. The labels had finally perfected the process of manufacturing blockbusters, and their marketing departments could now both predict and create demand with scientific precision.

  On March 21, 2000, Jive Records demonstrated that clout by releasing No Strings Attached, the second album by *NSYNC, the latest and greatest of the boy bands. *NSYNC had been developed at an even larger label, BMG, but on the advice of its marketing gurus had switched to the urban-oriented Jive to get more street cred (and counter a slightly fey image). It worked. The album sold 2.4 million copies in its first week, making it the fastest-selling album ever. It went on to top the charts for eight weeks, selling 11 million copies by the end of the year.

  The industry had cracked the commercial code. They had found the elusive formula to the hit, and in retrospect it was so obvious: Sell virile young men to young women. What worked for Elvis could now be replicated on an industrial scale. It was all about looks and scripted personalities. The music itself, which was outsourced to a small army of professionals (there are fifty-two people credited with creating No Strings Attached), hardly mattered.

  Labels had good reason for feeling confident. Fans were flocking to record stores. Between 1990 and 2000, album sales had doubled, the fastest growth rate in the industry’s history. The business trailed only Hollywood in the entertainment industry ranks.

  But even as *NSYNC was celebrating its huge launch, the ground was shifting beneath the industry. The Nasdaq had crashed the week before the album’s release, and continued to fall sickeningly the rest of the year as the dot.com bubble burst. No other albums that year set records, and total music sales fell, for only the third time in two decades.

  Over the next few years, even after the overall economy recovered, the economics of the music industry got worse. Something fundamental had changed in 2000. Sales fell 2.5 percent in 2001, 6.8 percent in 2002, and just kept dropping. By the end of 2005 (down another 7 percent), music sales in the United States had dwindled more than a quarter from their peak. Twenty of the all-time top 100 albums had come out in the five-year period between 1996 and 2000. The next five years produced only two—OutKast’s Speakerboxxx/The Love Below and Norah Jones’s Come Away with Me—rank 92 and 95, respectively.

  It’s altogether possible that *NSYNC’s first-week record will never be broken. Imagine if this boy band goes down in history not just for launching Justin Timberlake but also for marking the very peak of the hit bubble, the last bit of manufactured pop to use the twentieth century’s fine-tuned marketing machine to its fullest, before the gears were stripped and the wheels fell off.

  Here’s a chart of all the hit albums since 1958: gold (over 500,000 sold), platinum (1 to 2 million), multiplatinum (2 to 10 million), and diamond (10 million and up).

  Between 2001 and 2007, the music industry’s total sales fell by a quarter. Bu
t the number of hit albums fell by more than 60 percent. In 2000, the top five albums—including megahits from Britney Spears and Eminem—sold a combined 38 million copies. In 2005, the top five sold just half that; only 19.7 million copies. In other words, although the music industry is hurting, the hit-making side of it is hurting more. Customers have shifted to less mainstream fare, fragmenting to a thousand different subgenres. For music, at least, this looks like the end of the blockbuster era.

  WHO KILLED THE HIT ALBUM?

  What caused a generation of the industry’s best customers—fans in their teens and twenties—to abandon the record store? The industry’s answer was simply “piracy”: The combined effects of Napster and other online file trading and CD burning and trading gave rise to an underground economy of any song, anytime, for free. And there’s something to that. Despite countless record industry lawsuits, the traffic on the peer-to-peer (“P2P”) file-trading networks has continued to grow, with about 10 million users now sharing music files each day.

  But while technology was indeed behind the customer flight, it didn’t just allow fans to sidestep the cash register. It also offered massive, unprecedented choice in terms of what they could hear. The average file-trading network has more music than any music store. Given that choice, music fans took it. Today, not only have listeners stopped buying as many CDs, they’re also losing their taste for the blockbuster hits that used to make them throng those stores on release day. Given the option to pick a boy band or find something new, more and more people are opting for exploration, and are typically more satisfied with what they find.

  Peer-to-peer file trading is so massive that a small industry has now grown up around it to measure and learn from the experience. The leading such analyst is BigChampagne, which tracks all the files shared on the major peer-to-peer services. What it’s seeing in the data is nothing less than a culture shift from hits to niche artists.

  Today, music fans are trading more than 9 million unique tracks, almost all of them far outside the Billboard Hot 100. There is a thriving subculture that’s into “mashups” (playing a track from one artist over a track from another artist), and another that’s into music composed on the eight-bit chips once found in Nintendo video-game machines. Plus, a lot of indie rock of the sort that makes for great shows but no radio play. Notably, boy bands are not particularly popular.

  The rise of file-trading networks was not the only tectonic shift in the culture. In 2001 Apple released its first iPod, a simple-looking white MP3 player 4 inches long, 2.5 inches wide, and less than 1 inch thick. It was by no means the first MP3 player on the market, but thanks to its utter simplicity, elegant design, and Apple’s highly effective marketing campaign, the iPod became the first must-have portable digital music device. Soon, as people ditched their Walkmans and Discmans, the iPod’s white earbuds became ubiquitous and iconic.

  What was really disruptive about the iPod was its storage capacity of as much as sixty gigabytes. This allowed users to carry around entire libraries of music, up to ten thousand songs, an inventory equivalent to a small record store. Over the next few years, the iPod became a personal soundtrack for millions of people, as they walked down the street, while they worked, or as they rode public transportation.

  But filling an iPod with paid-for tracks is a multithousand-dollar proposition. Compared to that, free is an incredibly tough price to beat. The dorm-room-jukebox case for freely downloading digital songs from the Internet to a PC became an equally compelling case for filling an iPod. Same for ripping, burning, and trading CDs, just as Apple’s famous advertising campaign encouraged. The peer-to-peer networks exploded, populated by the combined music inventories of millions of users. The result: a lot of piracy, to be sure, but also massive, unbounded selection—hundreds of times as much variety as in any record store, and all available from basically any laptop.

  Of course, these revolutionary methods of acquiring music also provided unmatched ways to discover new music. While CD burning and trading between friends is “viral marketing” (buzz that passes from person to person) of the most powerful kind, playlist sharing is word of mouth taken to an industrial scale. And there are even dedicated recommendation services such as Pandora and hundreds of Internet radio stations, businesses that not only thrive on introducing fans to the coolest underground artists, but are also working to match personal tastes with increasing precision.

  What if there were 400 Top 40s, one for each narrow music niche? Or 40,000? Or 400,000? Suddenly the concept of the hit gives way to the micro-hit. The singular star is joined by a swarm of micro-stars, and a tiny number of mass-market elites become an unlimited number of niche demi-elites. The population of “hits” grows hugely, each one with smaller but presumably more engaged audiences.

  This is not a fantasy. It is the emerging state of music today. A good online music service such as Rhapsody will list at least 400 genres and subgenres (breaking genres into new, incredibly specific categories such as “electronica/dance>beats&breaks>cut&paste”), each of which has its own top ten list. This effectively creates 4,000 minihits, each far more meaningful for the fans of that genre than Casey Kasem’s national playlist ever was. Then there are the infinite number of top ten lists dynamically created for each customer based on his or her listening patterns and particular tastes, no matter how narrow they may be.

  BROADCAST BLUES

  The troubles in the music industry are not confined to CD sales. Rock radio, long the favored marketing vehicle for the labels, is suffering just as badly. In 1993, Americans spent an average of twenty-three hours and fifteen minutes per week tuned in to the radio. As of spring 2004, that figure had dropped to nineteen hours and forty-five minutes. Listenership is now at a twenty-seven-year low, and it is rock music programming that seems to be suffering the most. In 2005, an average of one U.S. rock radio station went out of business each week. Typically, those stations switched to talk radio or Latin formats, which are more “sticky” (they keep audiences listening longer) than rock and pop, which is only as appealing as the current song it’s playing. American Top 40 just doesn’t have the pull it once had; Casey Kasem is resting comfortably in retirement.

  Experts argue about the primary cause, but here are the main candidates:

  The rise of the iPod phenomenon: With the ultimate personal radio, who needs FM?

  The cell phone: Commuters stuck in traffic were the salvation of radio in the eighties. Today we’re still stuck in traffic, but now we’re chatting on the phone.

  The 1996 Telecommunications Act: Adding a thousand FM stations to the dial, this legislation increased competition and depressed the economics of the incumbents. The act also relaxed the limits of ownership in each market, leading to…

  Clear Channel: Often blamed for radio’s woes, this corporate media giant is as much a symptom of the industry’s brutal economics as it is a cause. As the Telecommunications Act undercut the business of local radio in the late 1990s, Clear Channel was able to do a roll-up of distressed stations. The company now owns more than 1,200 of them, or one out of every ten. Its plan was to lower dramatically the costs of radio by implementing centralized programming and computer-driven local station programming. The result was bland homogenization.

  The FCC’s obscenity crackdown: It’s always been part of the FCC’s mandate to police what’s said on the airwaves, but it’s rarely exercised its duty with as much vigor as in the past five years. The main target was Howard Stern, an earthy radio personality with a taste for the outrageous. After incurring unprecedented fines, Stern finally gave up on terrestrial broadcast. At the end of 2005 he departed for satellite’s Sirius Radio, where he debuted—mostly uncensored—to an audience of subscribers in January 2006. Today, broadcasters have more reason to fear that what they say or play could cost them not only money, but also their jobs. The result: further homogenization.

  The result of this rock radio meltdown is that the Top 40 era is drawing to a close. Music itself hasn’t gone
out of favor—just the opposite. It’s never been a better time to be an artist or a fan. But it’s the Internet that has become the ultimate discovery vehicle for new music. The traditional model of marketing, selling, and distributing music has gone out of favor. The major label and retail distribution system that grew to titanic size on the back of radio’s hit-making machine found itself with a business model dependent on huge, platinum hits—and today there are not nearly enough of those. We’re witnessing the end of an era.

  Everyone with those white earbuds is listening to what amounts to his or her own commercial-free radio station. Culture has shifted from following the crowd up to the top of the charts to finding your own style and exploring far out beyond the broadcast mainstream, into both relative obscurity and back through time to the classics.

  In a 2005 speech, News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch showed that he was among the first of the media moguls to grasp the magnitude of today’s elite versus amateur divide: “Young people don’t want to rely on a Godlike figure from above to tell them what’s important,” he said. “They want control over their media, instead of being controlled by it.”

  What’s happening in music is paralleled in practically every other sector of mass media and entertainment. Consider these statistics from 2005:

  Hollywood box office fell 7 percent, continuing a decline in attendance that started in 2001 and appears to be accelerating.

  Newspaper readership, which peaked in 1987, fell by 3 percent (its largest single-year drop) and is now at levels not seen since the sixties.

  Magazine newsstand sales are at their lowest level since statistics have been kept, a period of more than thirty years.

  Network TV ratings continue to fall as viewers scatter to cable channels; since 1985, the networks’ share of the TV audience has fallen from three-quarters to less than half.

  The watercooler effect is losing its power. In 2005, the top-rated TV series, CSI, was watched by just 15 percent of TV households. Those kinds of numbers wouldn’t have put it in the top ten in the seventies. In fact, all but one of the top-rated TV shows of all time are from the late seventies and early eighties (the one newer one is the 1994 Winter Olympics, still more than a decade ago). Collectively, the hundreds of cable-only channels have now passed the networks in total viewership. No single one dominates.