THE LONG TAIL: MUSIC AND THE GIFT
Amanda Campbell is not exactly a household name, but the singer has a loyal following and many fans like her mellow bluesy rock style, marked by a strong and self-assured piano, driven by Susan Ferrari, who writes all the songs. Based in Santa Monica, Campbell is the lead singer of The Strands, who label themselves as “alternative” in the world of contemporary music. Alternative means “none of the above” and refers to a kind of music that is more of a hybrid, a home grown mix of many forms of American music strained through the larger filters of popular music, anything from Pop to Rock to Jazz to Blues to techno and beyond. Fifty years after Elvis left the building, music can no longer remain pure as it wanted to be and “alternative” is part of a particular branch of contemporary music that excludes hip hop and rap, or spoken word, but incorporates narrative and story in a compelling melody. But the music of The Strands, however eclectic it may be, is not for everyone.
Teenagers will not appreciate the adult line of thought that threads its way through the songs, and, missing a heavy back beat and the thud of drums, heavy metal fans will simply tune out. For all its inclusivity and exclusivity, alternative music is more than a mere word, it is a stretchy genre that allows artists like The Strands to find their own voice and to make the sort of music that becomes their collective sensibilities, an off beat mixture of jazz and the Philadelphia Sound. But most importantly, “alternative” also means and refers to an alternative means of distributing music. In other words, ten years ago, it would have been difficult if not impossible for a mature woman with a great voice to have any kind of career in music. And yet, here are The Strands, playing in clubs in Southern California, selling CDs and watching people download their songs—all accomplished independently as part of the vast democratization of music. It wasn’t always this way.
When David Bowie died, his passing was a reminder that the generation of musical artists of the 1960s are fading away. We have lost two Beatles already and Syd Barrett passed too soon. These creative musicians and songwriters were the last of their kind: they worked hard, played the game, and were among the few survivors of a very brutal corporate system that made and unmade “Stars.” In his famous essay, “Ten Thousand Hour Rule,” Malcolm Gladwell, painted a compelling picture of the Beatles “working and practicing,” as Bob Seger sang, in the raw clubs of Hamburg. It was there, under less than optimal conditions, that John, Paul, George and Ringo, honed their craft, found their voices and created their mop-headed distinctive look as “mods” who rocked in their black leather jacket. The point is that the Beatles and Pink Floyd and David Bowie all paid their dues, staying true to their vision of a new kind of music that had roots in rock and in the blues but that was also experimental and new. Bowie was booed when he introduced his unique sound in a club in Jersey in the sixties. In Jersey they judged music according to the American Bandstand standard: can you dance to it? But Bowie persevered and steered his career onto the new path of glitter rock, his invention. We are left to wonder, in passing, if his famous song “Let’s Dance” was based on the memory of being rejected in Jersey. It should be noted that “Let’s Dance” is not very danceable and that much of what Bowie recorded is experimental and strange and, even today, unfamiliar.
We know the Thin White Duke through his “hits” because this is how the system allowed us to become “fans” of “Bowie.” There is a difference between an artist and someone who makes music for popular consumption. Bowie was an artist who was fortunate enough to “break through” into public consciousness. But what about all those unheard voices, silenced songs, all those sounds we never heard? For Bowie, those songs are enshrined on his albums of the past and we are told that there are more to come, as the artist provided for us from the future. For those of who wept to Blackstar, we wait patiently for his last words. But the question of all those unheard voices, silenced songs, all soundless sounds can be asked another way—where did they all go, those aspiring artists? The opera singers not quite good enough for the Met or not ambitious enough for Julliard; the excellent pianists too proud to be Billy Joel; the cute guy who played guitar in a high school band; the young singer working her way through college, dreaming of being Linda Ronstadt? There is an entire lost generation, post Elvis, after Patti Page, that was silenced by a corporate system of extinction, dedicated to fitting musical artists onto a sales chart. Where did they go? Church choirs? The world of music teachers?
These lost names and lost music make us happy to hear the sounds of The Strands, signing freely on the internet, selling on their own behalf, their own songs, was they create their own audiences. For those of us who love music, who have grown up as rock ‘n’ rollers our entire lives, the sounds of the Supremes and the Beach Boys are part of the warp and woof of how our brains have been musically woven since childhood. The sounds of Led Zepplin and Fleetwood Mac are the music and lyrics of a certain time, and, for some of us, “the day the music died,” was not the plane crash that took Buddy Holly but the day Kurt Cobain picked up that shotgun. We think we have heard it all, we assume we have heard a lot of music: our iPods are loaded with an entire history of personal taste, we even cherish our outmoded vinyl and guard our old CDs; but for years we received only a fraction of the music that was being made. There was a time when The Strands would have been separate musicians, some of whom sang in the shower, their dreams of being heard beyond the glass door going down the drain, others would have played guitar with Guitar Hero. Songs would be written, composed on a piano but never sung in public. But The Strands are part of a new kind of music makers—artists who make music out of love, who sing and play instruments because there are songs that must be sung. In short, The Strands are redefining “indie” music as independent music–independent of contracts and constraints. Fame would be nice, but it is unlikely; fortune will probably never come. Today, no one pays for music; everyone expects songs to be free. Musicians like The Strands will keep their day jobs, practice at night, and play gigs on weekends. This is music served up with courage and conviction, with no expectations of praise or recognition. It is enough to make the gesture—to put the song out there, send it to the universe and hope that other ears will find this gift. It is strange to think, in what we consider to be a competitive capitalistic economy that there are so many people willing to give the gifts of their talents, the poet who publishes the proverbial slim volume of poems on Lulu and the fan writer who is busily creating a parallel literary universe for Star Wars movies. These are the gift givers and we are richer for them.
There was a time when these talented giving people would have been dismissed as amateurs or scorned for not being “under contract” for a record label, but now we think of the artistic and creative freedom that Amanda Campbell enjoys–a range of possibilities rarely accorded to musicians in the past. If Love and Mercy taught us anything, it was about the sheer joy of unfettered of artists making art, musicians playing music for the sheer pleasure of putting sounds together in new ways. And yet Brian Wilson ran into a rejection of his vision from those closest to him. Wilson’s struggles remind us that Pet Sounds, like Dark Side of the Moon and Sgt. Pepper, were unique accomplishments that could never have been made inside the system. What happened? What changes in the world of music making has allowed, has given permission to The Strands to form a band and to drop their songs, their gifts, into our lives? For decades, musical artists have been discussed from the standpoint of their creativity and their singing, songwriting, skill and verve with their instruments. The mode of production that made music possible and therefore public was taken for granted. Hiding beneath the Top Forty and the albums and the concerts was a very restrictive means of distribution, controlled for the many by the few. Part of having a “hit” is someone else experiencing a “miss,” just as one person’s success was another person’s failure. The Game was Zero Sum. Pareto Optimality. This was the way traditional top down monopolistic capitalism worked, and with all restrictive economies it was only a matter of time before the breaking point arrives. If there is one thing that cannot be controlled, it is the urge to sing.
The consumer simply began to rebel. The great music rebellion may have begun with Napster and the immediate counterattack by the music industry upon the sharing communities, revealed the extent to which the corporate model had ceased to function. But In 2004, writing between Napster and iTunes, Chris Anderson introduced a new perspective—that of an economic analysis of the music business. Anderson’s now famous article, “The Long Tail,” was published in Wired magazine and then expanded into a book of the same name. The concept of the Long Tail can be applied to any distribution model that uses the Internet, and Anderson, then editor in chief of Wired, analyzed the music industry and analyzed how a very narrow corporate model, was based on the concept of “hits” and “stars.” Notice that this corporate model is not based upon music itself, or upon innovation, or experimentation, or even upon anything new. The model is about sales and profit. The peak of the Long Tail chart is the pile-up of the “hits” carefully constructed, not by musicians, but by sales formulas driven by the conventional wisdom concerning the lowest common denominator of public taste. The models must be optimized for the widest sales within the genre. Therefore, the tall part of the Tail, or rearing head of the musical body, is also based upon exclusion and “failure” be conform to the all important notion of what would be purchased in record stores, such as the now extinct Tower Records. As Anderson pointed out, the crucial feature that was always missing was what music lovers wanted to hear. The conversation was strictly one-way: the consumers were given what corporate wanted them to consume. In explaining to the reader how to read The Long Tail chart, Anderson said,
The term refers specifically to the orange part of the sales chart above, which shows a standard demand curve that could apply to any industry, from entertainment to hard goods. The vertical axis is sales; the horizontal is products. The red part of the curve is the hits, which have dominated our markets and culture for most of the last century. The orange part is the non-hits, or niches, which is where the new growth is coming from now and in the future.
The corporate model mirrored that of radio and television pre-Web—it was one way: we talk, you listen; we sell, you buy; our game, you play. With the Internet, conversation becomes two-way or multi-vocal, and Anderson spends most of his book on ends of the Long Tail itself. There are, he pointed out, many books written, many songs sung, many poems penned, but, until the Internet, these artistic efforts were hidden from the public because they were unavailable to consumers. Bands who did local concerts or singers in neighborhood clubs were forced to spend hard earned money to “make records” and then expend enormous amounts of time, trying to attract the favorable attention of a record producer. Some groups succeeded in being noticed; others devolved into obscurity. The old corporate system was one of pure chance, based, from the artist’s perspective, upon “getting discovered.” Considering the amount of money involved, the inefficiency of the music business is, in retrospect, astounding. What we heard on the radio was not necessarily the “best,” only the most randomly found. “Found Music”—incredibly that was the (hidden and unacknowledged) name of the game. Once “found,” all artistic control was lost to the creators, as the musicians and singers entered into the corporate maw.
As Pink Floyd echoed, “We’re going to ride the gravy train” and “By the way, which one’s ‘Pink?’” In one sentence out of Welcome to the Machine, Roger Waters summed up not only the absurdity but also the mismatch between a corporation and a creator. Pink Floyd was both stubborn and lucky but it was rare for a band to maintain control over its work product as the Beach Boys did for Pet Sounds. The music industry carved out a definite career path, you started out young and dumb, desperate and malleable. Under this model many a group was quickly used up and cast aside, victims of their own naïveté. And this was the likely fate of the supposedly tough rockers, all of whom were male. Outside of Berry Gordy and his “girl groups,” woman had little chance to break through this male wall. It should also be added that people of color were cordoned off in the African-American realm of the blues and jazz, increasingly restricted, now that whites had appropriated rock ‘n’ roll. In the recent film, Get on Up, Mick Jagger and the Stones are shown raptly watching James Brown’s stage show, and learning all of his moves. But women faced a double problem, race and gender.
The reason why women faced extreme difficulties in being heard in the music business, post Carol King, was the post-rock business model, which as Anderson pointed out can be exemplified by the “boy band,” NSYNC. Young female fans, full of dimly recognized sexual yearning, could project their erotic needs upon cute male singers, like Justin Timberlake. This fan based business model is the way Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley built their careers, and the mobs of young women hysterically greeting the Beatles when they landed in America in 1964 bewildered the Fab Four. Conversely, the idea of a mob of young men screaming in excitement at the sight of a female singer is, quite frankly, terrifying for any woman. And it is well known, in any creative genre, from the fine arts to the movies, that women will go to films about men but men will not purchase a painting done by a woman. Given that the music business was built by men for men, as entertainers and as consumers, the post-Elvis scene for women was quite simply brutal. Female musical stars were actually contradictions in terms or the exceptions that proved the rules—no girls allowed, even if she is Janis Joplin.
Chris Anderson does not directly discus the importance of the Internet for women in music. The music industry is typical in its reflexive rejection of all things women, refusing them meaningful roles beyond being consumers of objects provided for them by men. For women who sang, role models were few and far between after Diana Ross. Given the prejudice against women in the arts and the obstacles faced by any woman who wanted a career in music, the achievements of Joan Jett and the Blackhearts and Heart were truly extraordinary. The phrase “women” and “rock ‘n’ roll” was an oxymoron unless, of course, it referred to groupies. Drummers, guitar players, lead singers—all roles reserved for men. Guitar heroes, such as Keith Richards and Pete Townsend, needed lead singers, playing off their macho attacks on the stringed instrument, like the pretty Roger Daltrey and the prancing pouting Mick Jagger. Ann Wilson sang and Nancy Wilson played—hard—and somehow “Heart” invaded the male precincts. Like Joan Jet’s “Cherry Bomb,” “Crazy on You” really rocked, in other words, these were women working a male genre. The best place for women, however, was outside of the hyper-masculine precincts of rock ‘n’ roll: that place called “pop,” the residence of female singing stars, such as Beyoncé. Although the music business, such as it is today, continues to be segregated, according to race and gender and genre, is still as rigidly divided into categories as it was fifty years ago, it is possible, thanks to iTunes U and YouTube, for musical artists–even women–to span styles and to break arbitrary boundaries.
True, Amanda Campbell, the lead singer, and the rest of the band, the Strands, driven by Susan Ferrari, may reside on the far end of The Long Tail, but the group is there, on the Tail, making itself heard. Chris Anderson made a very important point about the Long Tail, and this insight explains both iTunes U and YouTube: ..the potential aggregate size of the many small markets in goods that don’t individually sell well enough for traditional retail and broadcast distribution may someday rival that of the existing large market in goods that do cross that economic bar. In other words, the skinny end of the Long Tail is indeed “long” and extends infinitely and indefinitely and its accumulated possibilities exceed what the music industry envisioned. There is a reason why the long (tail) title of the book is The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. True traditional economic theory has difficult accounting for Anderson’s concept, but traditional economic theories are based on nineteenth century models and are notoriously reluctant to take into account the passage of time or the changes in human behavior. Business models have difficulty making sense of The Strands; for them, the group does not exist in a statistically significant way.
But if you are an artist, The Strands, as determined artists, are your role model. As Anderson wrote, “Mass culture will not fall, it will simply get less mass. And niche culture will get less obscure.” We may have had an inkling of the possibilities of “making your own kind of music,” when we painstakingly made our own tapes or our own CDs, combining our self-crafted “mixtapes.” Thirty years ago, in our clumsy fashion, we made our own kind of music and stuck our songs into our tape or CD decks in our cars and drove along, singing along. And now The Strands can take the songs in their voice, on the strings of their guitar, under the keys of the piano and place it on the Long Tail, carefully set their songs in their own niche, where we find it. The gift of The Strands, of their music and their sounds, does not evaporate into the ethers of the Internet. Instead the gift, the don of Marcel Mauss, enters into the collectivity, marking out a cluster of a particular social collective, pausing at that precise point on the Tail and becoming what Michel Serres called the “luminous tracer.” This shining gift makes nonsense of the corporate capitalistic models of the music industry. The gift is why applying the idea of Pareto efficiency to creative people and their unique “economy” will never work, and the gift is why a Pareto analysis, which is based on the old fashioned idea that the ultimate efficiency is to allow one person to succeed without harming another person. But while efficiency may be optimal, Vilfredo Pareto died one hundred years ago, his model was based upon an assumption of constrictions and limited options. We are now living in an open economy that has broken the historical limits; we survive thanks to the “gig economy” and we leave our bright traces in the “gift economy,” all based upon a local or niche location that is both rooted and, thanks to the Internet, boundless. Rather than consume things, we now share each other.
The only and the best way to understand The Strands is to hear them, to listen to them, never as money makers but as gift-givers. It is with Serres, following in the footsteps of Mauss, who established the concept of the Gift in society in 1925, that we can find powerful and relevant observations about creative gifting. In 1997, in The Troubadour of Knowledge, arguably the best book written on creativity, Serres insightfully wrote,
Creation invents news by recounting today what it didn’t know yesterday—my vocation consists in writing and saying not what I know, boring, dead and past, more than perfect, pluperfect, but, on the contrary, what I don’t know and will astonish me—and the patron would run a dawn to the news, not towards the news that shouts every day at our broken ears of other murders that are really the same ones, of other scandals, wars, catastrophes, seizures of power, still and always the same, old monotonous repetitions of a world given over to iterative domination, but precisely towards the unforeseen of the artist, the unexpected and, strictly, the improbable.
The improbable, defined as the act of unexpected creation–this is what an artist does, create and present—a gift. We have come full technological circle: we are all traveling orators (bloggers) and wandering bards (websites) and traveling troubadours: The Strands of the Long Tail.
If you have found this material useful, please give credit to
Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.
Thank you.