Sterling Terrell

smart ideas from books

Available For Purchase

Available For Purchase

This is the hard part about competing in the art market.

And this applies if you are a musician, writer, painter, sculptor, or whatever.

Of all the art available for purchase, you are not only competing with everything that was made this year.

You must also compete with everyone’s back catalog.

I mean, if I have $30 to spend on a music album and a book, why should I buy what you sang or wrote?

I might very well prefer The Eagles Greatest Hits and a copy of To Kill A Mockingbird.

And that’s the obstacle.

Of the 13 million songs available for purchase in 2008, 52,000 made up 80 percent of the industry’s revenue. Ten million of those tracks failed to sell a single copy. Today, 77 percent of the profits in the music business are accumulated by 1 percent of the artists.

-John Seabrook, The Song Machine

The Unseen Majority Of Music

The Unseen Majority Of Music

The unseen majority of music is like the unseen majority of everything else.

For most musicians and most songs you have never heard of.

In this same way, most of Amazon’s sales are not even carried at big box stores.

And most watched movies and shows on Netflix were never carried at Blockbuster.

It is the same for blogging.

Do you want one post with 100,000 views per month? Or 1,000 posts with 100 views per month? Does it matter?

Understand: You can win with a grand-slam. Or you can win with a thousand base hits.

Record stores have limited shelf space, he explains, and records that move 10,000 units are more profitable to stock than records that move 10. But on the Internet, shelf space is infinite, and therefore record companies don’t need to focus so much of their business on making hits. They can make money from the long tail of the artistic middle class—artists with small but loyal followings who will never be heard on CHR. Collectively these fans comprise what Anderson calls an “unseen majority,” a “market that rivals the hits.”

-John Seabrook, The Song Machine