Last Sunday’s Grammy‘s certainly have awarded some of the most popular artists. Coldplay, Daft Punk, Madonna and many others are certainly not bad artists, but don’t they get enough exposure anyway? What about all the little artists out there?
The long tail
There’s this theory out there, that the Internet will enable even the most unknown musician (or artist or “thing”, in general) to thrive. Because the economy of scale, even the smalles niche of the smallest niche, will get the exposure it deserves. This is called the long tail.
In contrast, to the big record companies, who put all their money in just a few artists, chosen because they will appeal to the most common denominator, the theory of the long tail claims that it will be just as economically viable to put a little money in hundreds of artists.
In fact, on the Internet the cost of distributing an artist’s music is close to zero, which would mean, that conceivably, you can offer any song by any artist up for digital download.
The long question
The elephant in the room is this one big question: there’s this huge long tail, millions of great songs. It’s out there. But how do you discover it? If you know the name of a band you’re interested in: no problem, just Google it. But how do you cruise trough that uncharted territory, that immense backcatalogue of undiscovered music. It’s not easy, you could list Amazon or iTunes least popular songs (I doubt they have that option, though), but the stuff that’s on there and that’s not popular, is usually unpopular for a reason.
There used to be Pandora, and for Americans, it’ still exists. You type in a song or artist you like and it will start playing stuff that sounds a bit like it. For a long time, we, Europeans and other rejects, didn’t have any resort to go on a journey of musical discovery.
But there is one outlet, often overlooked, but it has been building tremendous momentum. It’s called Last.fm. Started as a plugin for various mp3 players (remember Winamp?) to track you listening habits, it now uses that gigantic amount of information to make suggestions. Like something, open up the associated radio station and you’ll get tons of good stuff.
Some good starting points:
- John Coltrane radio
- Banco de Gaia radio
- Eat Static radio (probably not every one’s taste, but try it out for just a few tracks and see if you like it)
My main criticism is that Last.fm doesn’t include all the truly little guys, those slaving away at home, making brilliant music and offering it for free. They just aren’t popular enough to get into the Last.fm’s statistics. I’d love to see something similar with CC artists mixed in (also see those previous posts).
What artists do you like? How do you get your fix of unknown music?