At the Feng Shang Princess this evening (a not-so-authentic Chinese restaurant in an authentically Chinese fake boat sitting on the Grand Canal in Primrose), the wife pointed out that the blond, pregnant gal sitting at the next table was Gwen Stefani. Some time later in the evening she stated to her table-mates that it was no longer really possible to make a lot of money selling records, but that concerts did much better. But even that, she said, was more difficult these days as people have many more choices. She claimed also to have 19 million of her first record, and some X million of her most recent one (I didn’t hear the number), and that record companies were pretty much failing.
I would again point to Chris Anderson’s book, The Long Tail, and point to the Amazon phenomenon: Amazon sells far more books than any physical bookstore, but the bulk of its sales actually come from the ‘long tail’ of low volume choices, added together. In other words, it’s kind of a death of the popular in favor of micro-tastes.
The libertarian in me is tempted to think that some sort of mechanism will eventually emerge by which small-volume (or at least some of them) can get paid for what they do, but on the other hand there really is no law of the universe stating that this must be. Is it the death of the professional pop musician? Might the most popular pop musicsians of the future need to have a day job working at McDonalds?
I don’t actually believe that, however. My belief is that humanity secretly conspires to bubble up some ’spontaneous structure’ out of our collective unconscious that will allow pop musicians to do their stuff full time. I don’t think we know what that world looks like yet, but perhaps we will soon.