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All that talk about how filesharing is good for independent musicians and distributors of music, because it lets “the people” decide what they want to hear, free of corporate chains and puppet-string-pullers? Which is propelled by the idea that the “long tail” of cultural consumption not only exists, it’ll actually help artists who were previously ignored by The System find the audience they deserve? Yeah, well, it might be bunk–at least if a study of the downloading habits of filesharers that revealed the snowballing popularity of already-popular music is to be believed. (Please don’t have your world shattered by the notion that a theory touted within the esteemed pages of Wired might be a load of techno-utopianist tripe designed to get a megabucks book deal out of desperate business-book publishers.)
The study, carried out by Will Page, chief economist at the PRS, and Eric Garland, head of media tracking firm Big Champagne, looked at patterns of music usage among file-sharers.
It aimed to see if that pattern of use had any lessons for the way music is marketed and sold.
Many have claimed that the unprecedented amount of choice on the web would give rise to new models of music distribution.
This “Long Tail” argument, say the authors, claims: “If you offer people more choice, and help them make that choice, they will take that choice.”
If true, this could mean that music makers should focus attention away from a few popular acts towards the mass of bands with smaller, dedicated followings.
However, found the pair, usage on file-sharing sites closely mirrors that on legitimate music sites. There was no evidence of the Long Tail operating.
The authors wrote: “Much of the volume (sales or swaps) is concentrated amongst a small proportion of the available tracks.”
The reason for this, claim the authors, is that there is too much choice on file-sharing sites.
Of course, the “free” marketeers out there are going to say that the study is biased because it was in part funded by the British royalty-collecting outfit PRS, but even the most averse-to-paying consumer has to admit that feeling overwhelmed by a sheer glut of anything results in shortcuts being made–and in these cases, those shortcuts involve people paying attention to either “most popular” lists or the recommendations of their friends. I am sure that some readers of this site will say that it isn’t true and provide personal anecdotes to back up that claim, but all I’m going to say is that anyone reading a music blog–or, heck, even reading music news that isn’t just “so and so had a baby / got arrested / died” is a much more active consumer of music-related entertainment than people who are just tooling around for stuff to fill their iPods
Pirated pop helps keep stars popular [BBC; HT Alec Empire]
[Pic via The Master Shake Signal]
Also, most bands/albums suck.
What most of the Wired crew isn’t saying is that they themselves want to determine who gets downloaded. And their taste sucks.
Wait, what? Who died? Who got arrested? Who had a baby? Quit holding out on us Maura…
Tech people have no idea how to make money. And, yes, they have awful taste in music. All of them are gaga for Twitter. Yet, there’s no way to monetize it. (All of them will tell you it’s worth billions.) Look, these dudes all grow up alienated from culture and use their computer skills to subvert it. They feel empowered that they can have an effect on pop. So they write books about this complete nonsensical utopian capitalism. And some think they’re doing good because the file sharing site they created has an altruistic motive for breaking new artists. But the general public is not going to see it that way. They’re just going to take what they can for free. And that’s the songs they hear on television, radio, and in the movies. The conversation about free is tiring. Just because the product isn’t tangible doesn’t mean it has no monetary value. Why is it not Friday yet?
@brooklynradio: Tech people have no idea how to make money.
sure they do: it’s called ’snowing venture capitalists.’
this is not at all surprising if you’ve ever looked at torrent results for, say, the latest Kanye and compared them with something obscure, like Southern Culture on the Skids, or non-mainstream, like John Coltrane.
If there’s not a lot of interest, there won’t be enough seeds to support anything but the most painful of downloads. I don’t understand how new artists are supposed to be discovered over torrents, because unless they *already* have an audience, and a fairly large one at that, no one will (realistically) be able to download their music.
Just reposted on our (bigchampagne’s) news blog. Love it!
I wonder if torrents have much to do with this…
Bittorrent is a terrible way to steal music if you have taste. Sure, you can find anything you want to, but good luck waiting around to find someone who has similar taste to download it from you and improve your download/upload ratio.
Blogs (well, rapidshares/mediafires/whathaveyou) are better for finding less mainstream artists* but I suspect those downloads would not only be harder to track but the hosting companies are probably less willing (or able, since many uploaded albums are named in cryptic fashion) to participate in data collection.
I’m curious about the methodology of this study but I don’t doubt its conclusion.
* Aah, the good old days when Idolator would leak copyrighted material until someone asked them to stop.