No one really cares about the long tail

Originally published on Tumblr.

It’s not about access to content, it’s about curation.

The idea of the long tail means different things to different people, and certainly means different things in different industries. I want to talk about the music long tail.

The idea that the digital delivery of goods, such as books and music, will give people access to obscure or fringe content, “the long tail”, seems obvious. Since the cost to store, reproduce, and distribute an item is very close to $0, why not keep and make available every piece of content created? That’s what was meant to happen, but it hasn’t worked out that way.

My tastes in music are, by most people’s standards, somewhat obscure, and fall almost completely within the scope of that long tail. Theoretically, I should be as happy as a pig in mud. But I’m not. Today I have access to less recorded music than at any other time in my life. How is that possible?

I used to think it had to do with distribution rights, and maybe that’s part of the problem. But the bigger problem is certainly lack of curation or, more precisely, lack of curation opportunity.

Music recordings have always primarily been made of music people knew, i.e., of content they were likely to buy. At first it was a lot of classical, dance hall, and jazz music. But eventually "pop music” left classical music in the dust. It had a larger audience and cost a lot less to produce. Recording a standard rock band is a lot cheaper than recording a 100 person orchestra. The industry’s cost structure allows it to profitably record rock music while losing money on the vast majority of classical music recordings. Pop subsidizes classical.

In the old days — during my early adulthood — we had cassette tapes. Their disappearance had a dramatic impact on the music I had access to.

I like opera. In opera houses throughout the world aficionados made pirate recordings of performances. These were copied and traded liberally on cassette tapes. Photocopied lists and face-to-face conversations were our search and recommendation engines. The curation process was intense, and often confrontational. No one made any money from this, except maybe a few singers who gained fans thanks to this underground exposure.

By some people’s standards I owned a lot of opera CDs, but I spent more time listening to pirate tapes. Today I have neither tapes nor CDs. In fact the only CD player I own came with my ten year old car. I now rely almost entirely on Spotify, a streaming music service.

Besides opera, I like cantorial and klezmer music. Very little of that music was ever recorded or distributed by the major labels. I don’t know where people found recordings before the Internet. Now, thanks to a few specialist sites, I can find relatively large catalogues of traditional Jewish music on CD. The rub, as I mentioned, is that I consume very few CDs at this point.

So how does Spotify satisfy my interests?

In classical music, very little. In klezmer and cantorial music, almost not at all.

If I search for a relatively popular Rossini opera, L’Italiana in Algeri for example, I find four album hits. From the titles I can’t tell if they’re the full opera, highlights, or if an aria or overture from the opera happens to be part of a compilation. Only two, it turns out, are recordings of the full opera. To figure that out I have to click on each, and look at the thumbnail of the CD cover. As any opera lover knows, the conductor, the orchestra, and the singers matter. Spotify doesn’t make that information available. If it happens to be legible on the album thumbnail, great, otherwise, we’re in the dark. The amount of curation involved from Spotify’s perspective is close to zero, and the amount of curation possible by third parties is extraordinarily limited.

It gets worse when it comes to my cantorial music interest. If I search for Sephardic Cantors for example, I find exactly one track.

As time passes it seems the long tail of music is shriveling up. Cassettes were something of a golden age for access to live opera recordings, and small Internet sites made more Jewish music available to me than ever before. Most people involved made no money. They did it because they loved the music.

Now that the physical distribution of music is disappearing, will any parts of this long tail transition to streaming services? I’m pessimistic.

Both passion and a certain disregard for economics seems to be required to keep long-tail music alive and accessible. Passionate individuals don’t currently have a way of contributing in that space. Playlists don’t help if the raw material isn’t available in the first place.

By definition, the number of people interested in long tail content doesn’t add up to much of a market, so I have trouble seeing how the current situation can get better. My optimistic self likes to believe that problems like these will eventually be solved by the right technology. I hope that’s true.