House Music and The Long Tail

Chris Anderson explains niche culture very well with an example which is the birth of house music in Chicago.
"In the early 1980s, in a club called the Warehouse in Chicago, the resident DJ, Frankie Knuckles, was doing soemthing new. He was remixing, mashing up different genres of music into something brand new. Knuckles took old disco classics, new Eurobeat pop ans synthesized beats, including those produced with then-new drum machines, and turned them into a frantic, high-energy amalgamation of recycled soul. Taking its name form the club, this new sound became known as house music.
DJs and clubs created a music a music industry that was radically different from pop music. Clubbing is really about the surfing the Long Tail of dance music, and this ecosystem has seen the evolution of new models of innovation around.
Here, we see the democratization of the tools of production which is one of the three forces of Long Tail. Cheap production technology reduced the cost of studio time; and cheap mastering technology made it possible for hundreds of small indie record labels to econimically press and market records.
As production and mastering costs continued to drop, house music exploded and fragmented into hyperspecialized genres such as deep house, funky house, and dub house.
The remixes are usually hyperspecialized for different microgenres, so they are complements to the original track. As the number of complements increases, the value of the platform track snowballs. This snowball effect is an other mechanism by which DJs-as-aggregators can efficiently navigate the long Tail of music, quickly and easily discovering which tracks are snowballs within their respective niches." (Anderson, 2006)*
After reading this book, I understood better, why everybody belongs to an underground culture or even they feel this way, and why the streets are full of emo guys, why the number of independent movie viewers is increased in the past 3 years. Blogs, users comments, Ebay, Amazon, Netflix, and of course Internet affect each other on a rotative basis.
* Anderson, C. (2006), The Long Tail, Hyperion, NY

THE LONG TAIL

I finished reading The Long Tail which was a phrase before turning to a book, first coined by Chris Anderson in 2004 Wired Magazine. Anderson argues that products that are in low demand or have low sales volume can collectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters, if the store or distribution channel is large enough. With The Long Tail concept, he explains Google's strategic thinking, websites similar to Amazon.com and future business models which is related to consumers in digital age and niches not hits.

There are three forces of The Long Tail;
1.Democratize the tools of production. It means more stuff, which lengthens the Tail.
2.Democratize the tools of distribution. It means more access to niches, which fattens the Tail.
3.Connect supply and demand means driving business from hits to niches.

You can see the famous The Long Tail graph above.

Online Journalism Symposium

Last weekend I attended to 8th International Symposium on Online Journalism at the University of Texas.
The discussions were about the impact of the Digital Revolution on journalism. How audiences are moving from their old, passive attitude into the new, active role that affects even the production of the news.
We heard from journalist from such as USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and The Washington Post. Also, there were important research papers, which you can read from here.