A few days ago I went to a book-signing event for The Long Tail, Chris Anderson's long-awaited book.
In the Q&A I asked: In a world where the "bottlenecks of distribution" have completely gone--where, unlike today, you can watch any TV content you want, and not just what your TiVo recorded from the mere 500 channels you get--will the mainstream still exist, and, if yes, then what will it take to create a "hit"?
Anderson's reply, if I understood it correctly, was: trial and error. Because of cheap, targeted distribution you will be able to tweak your content until you find something that works, something that resonates with your audience and can make it to the top of the curve. And because certain types of good content will always be expensive to produce, in some genres supply will always be limited.
At that point I said thanks, and he moved to the next question. After some thought, though, I wish I had replied: Fine, but an implication of this is that success is a function of your content's quality, or at least of your content's attributes and how they relate to consumers' preferences, and not of how you sell it or who you are. So will marketing become obsolete?
This is not something Anderson says in his book. Quite the opposite: he
repeatedly says that the mainstream is here to stay, and he gives examples
of how hits can be created via managed word-of-mouth, without access to monopoly distribution.
Which is to say that selling will always play a role in the making of
hits, even when distribution is cheap and everything is findable.
But this acknowledgement is never really reconciled with the thrust of what Anderson said to me, which is also a pervasive theme in his book. Its inspiring image is one of consumers with preferences on one hand, and products with attributes on the other. With the advent of unlimited choice and cheap distribution, people will finally choose products according to their likes and dislikes and to what suits them best. Economists' vision of a perfect market with complete information will be realized, and the 'true' shape of demand will finally dominate.
The key to this tension boils down to two visions of the role of what Anderson calls 'filters' (and I have called aggregates): lists of links to content that guide your media experience:
- According to one vision, good filters act as a service: they help you find what you will like. They can do this by knowing about you, about content, and about what content other people who are like you are known to like.
- According to another vision, good filters act as an expressive form. Their aim is not necessarily to suggest that you will like something, but to state that I (the filter's author) find some content worth consuming (even if only to reject it); that by consuming it you will be joining me; and that, because aggregates are usually associated to consumption communities, consuming this content will bring you closer my community. This accounts DJ sets, course reading lists, news, fashion magazines, literary reviews, etc. Attributable authorship, even if massively shared and diffuse, is crucial here.
Of course, neither account excludes the other, and many filters are both services and expressive forms. But it is only the second form that accounts for how consumers' preferences are formed, without which the first would be impossible. Because consumers' preferences will never be a matter of indifference, expressive filters will always be a space of competition. Owning popular filters will always be key to creating hits and influencing the mainstream.
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