Catering to Everyone

Reading the Week Four texts, I became aware of how much is involved in sorting through content in order to show the public commodities that will be successful. I never realised that it took more money, effort and time to selectively publish, sell or broadcast than just showing it all. 

The passage entitled The Long Tail by Chris Anderson suggests that it is most beneficial to put content out there in the hope that someone (maybe just one) will take it up. This totally contradicts the traditional notion of selling to the masses. Not everyone will always like what is on offer then, and are more likely to consume something that appeals to them. 

I do not believe that this could have happened before the introduction of the internet into everyone’s homes. The issue of identity is often associated with the purchase of goods, especially clothing, music and viewing habits (videos, dvds, internet content etc.). Previously, some people would have been embarrassed to purchase certain content from stores, or play the music out loud on a music player without headphones. 

Of course it has been seen in the past, and is still, as money making. A lot of the time people will purchase a song or clothing because that is what is ‘in fashion’, whether they like the item or not. Anderson states “ For too long we've been suffering the tyranny of lowest-common-denominator fare, subjected to brain-dead summer blockbusters and manufactured pop. Why? Economics. Many of our assumptions about popular taste are actually artifacts of poor supply-and-demand matching - a market response to inefficient distribution.” According to trendwatching.com the focus is now shifting from mass produced items and now, it is about hyper individualization “where it is all about 'me' (for better or worse), where being special will lend consumers status, to be mass is now every consumer's nightmare.”

That is why Anderson refers to the distribution of all content in order to cater for niche markets, and indeed everyone at the same time. At trendwatching.com they have called it “NOUVEAU NICHE: the new riches will come from servicing the new niches!”. 

EXAMPLE from Chris Andersons “The Long Tail” 

As fast as Rhapsody adds tracks to its library, those songs find an audience, even if it's just a few people a month, somewhere in the country.

This is the Long Tail.

You can find everything out there on the Long Tail. There's the back catalog, older albums still fondly remembered by longtime fans or rediscovered by new ones. There are live tracks, B-sides, remixes, even (gasp) covers. There are niches by the thousands, genre within genre within genre: Imagine an entire Tower Records devoted to '80s hair bands or ambient dub. There are foreign bands, once priced out of reach in the Import aisle, and obscure bands on even more obscure labels, many of which don't have the distribution clout to get into Tower at all.

This is an interesting topic for me, as it seems that we can all have whatever we want, whenever we want it. Check out this article, and tell me, does this new call for catering to niche markets contribute to our Generation Y bratiness?