long tail

Why isn’t there a long tail of sheet music?

November 30, 2008 by krisis

Towards the end of last night’s fantastic drumming rehearsal in my living room we selected the cover artists for our next go, one of whom was The Strokes.

“Great,” I exclaimed,” I finally have an excuse to buy their sheet music books!”

Chaz eyed me with speculation. “Do you really need sheet music for those songs? Can’t you just figure them out?”

I plucked my Amnesiac book off of the music stand and waved it in his direction.

“Look, given enough time I can figure out anything, but then I can’t play whatever song strikes your fancy at a moment’s notice, and I won’t have something physical to put on the stand, and I can’t give you a starting note if you want to sing, and I certainly won’t know the harmony. Without this book there would have been no awesome version of ‘You and Whose Army.'”

That paragraph explains exactly why I believe all albums should have matching sheet music folios, and plainly illustrates my addiction to sheet music – because I want the ability to cover or arrange a song to be at my fingertips.

I have a sizable sheet music collection – over a hundred books. A significant portion of it is comprised of out-of-print books I hunted down two Christmases ago, including sheet music for every Madonna album and imported, out-of-print David Bowie books that contain the full scores to their corresponding albums.

Pop and rock sheet music is an interesting niche of publishing, not only because of its specialized audience of amateur and professional musicians, but because the sales of each book can be predicted by the sales of the corresponding album and the singles therein. Does every Mariah Carey album get a sheet music book? Of course – because they sell big, and the singles are huge – lots of people know the songs or want to hear them covered. Those are the books that are printed the most often. Similarly, any radio-ready rock band merits a book – like Foo Fighters, Radiohead, and even Paramore. Also, young artists with a breakthrough record often merit a first book to test the water – Anna Nalick got one on the strength of one single, and Sara Bareilles had one out when she was just touring behind “Love Song.”

The smaller or less-played the act, the less obvious the case is for a book. Get too obscureand you’re out of luck, unless you happen to be a Dresden Dolls fan – singer Amanda Palmer arranged and published two sheet music books on her own. Not coincidentally, they’re the two best-edited piano books I’ve ever purchased.

That makes me wonder – what’s the magical sales threshold that’s preventing us from seeing books from Guster or Rilo Kiley? Is it a flat number based on economies of scale in the print run … perhaps twenty or thirty thousand? Or, is it a function of album sales – a gold-shipped album might move two percent of its copies in sheet music – ten thousand units. There’s clearly a fixed, single-run print quantity for most books, because sheet music regularly falls out of print, and if the book wasn’t popular enough the first time around it never comes back.

Either way, any kind of threshold puts up a barrier between older and lesser-heard albums and the musicians that are clamoring to play them. Effectively, there can be no “long tail” of sheet music books. Yet, any DIY guitarist might argue that it’s okay, because of the internet. Why wait for a publishing company to spend production dollars arranging and laying out a book of sheet music that will cost you twenty bucks when you can crowd-source the task to guitar players in basements across American, who can tab out an entire album for free?

If the industry supported this solution I’d be all for it, but that relationship is tenuous at best. In the late 90s the Harry Fox Agency sued prominent guitar tab sites – primarily Harmony Central so they would remove all of their guitar tab archives – mostly on the argument that reprint of the lyrics without permission was illegal. It was a selfish, spiteful move on the part of the music publishing business – they shut down a venue for people around the world to play their artists’ songs, which is one of the best forms of word of mouth advertising an artist can have, yet they didn’t offer any commensurate response to the clear demand for a long tail of transcriptions.

I’ve been buying rock sheet music for the intervening decade, and I can tell you that the situation has not improved, except now Transcribed Score books are slightly more common – and they certainly represent increased value over internet tabs. Otherwise, if anything I’d say that in the 90s the threshold to print must have been lower – more niche artists got a short run of their own books. Today I don’t know that I’d be able to find my cherished book of Tracy Bonham’s The Burdens of Being Upright, or the tightly edited edition of Elastica’s self-titled disc.

The clear solution is a variation on Amanda Palmer’s Dresden Dolls model. Amanda, being just about the savviest indie artists I know of, made it a point not only to compile the best-edited sheet music possible, but to also turn her books into collectors items rife with stories and photos not available anywhere else. She sought to expand the audience for her product outside of musicians to more casual fans, which would increase her personal threshold for turning a profit on the endeavor in the long term.

It’s a valid strategy, but it’s a gamble – the extra material drives the price of the book, and relies on non-musicians fans to snap up the book for that half to help subsidize the sheet music portion. It’s probably working just fine for Amanda, because her fans are amazing, and the books were a labor of love to begin with. But, what about all of the other niche and indie artists out there who want to spread their music to the masses?

I think the best model would be for artists to offer a PDF of an album’s sheet music for download – either for free or a small fee – and to also offer a physical book containing that music plus some additional content – more detailed song histories and performance notes. Similarly, publishing companies need to find a way to do the same for out of print sheet music. In either case, if certain books prove to be big-movers on the print-on-demand front then you know to go to an actual print-run. If not, you at least have all of your sheet music compiled and available, which will draw a steady stream of revenue as a long tail shopping solution, and you can easily release a “Greatest Hits” book at any time.

Once Arcati Crisis actually records an album (hopefully next year) I’ll be undertaking that endeavor – I’ve already arranged “Standing” and “Moscow, Idaho” as a test. I’m under no illusion that we have hoards of fans waiting to play our songs, but I want to prove my point. More importantly, I want to insert my idea into the marketplace – maybe the only way I’m going to get my long tail of sheet music is to grow the damn tail myself.

five years stuck on my eyes

December 23, 2006 by krisis

You don’t date a photographer for nearly five years without picking up something – a certain vernacular – but that something is entirely different when you finally have a camera of your own, and nearly unlimited space to store hundreds of indiscriminately snapped digital shots over the course of a day.

Two days into my spree of snapshots and I can’t decide if digital cameras accelerate a photographer’s novice phase or distend it. Sure, it helps to be able to bracket the same shot at every possible exposure and film speed to see the difference in action. Yet, it’s easy to slip into the habit of continuous clicking – shoot now, sort it out later.

I don’t know why I feel I have to master each little thing I lay my hands upon. Just when I was getting decent at theatre I started playing guitar, and I interrupted that to be the best at blogging, and in the middle at being the best at blogging I decided I needed to make a sporting try at singing. I just can’t pick something up with the goal of being mediocre.

Will I ever be as good a photographer as Elise? Will I ever be as good a songwriter as David Bowie? Both aspirations are irrelevant to the reality – the tools of producing pictures and songs and web essays have been democratized, and each tool is a weapon if you hold it right.

I have a new weapon in my arsenal. While I’m futzing with my Flickr account, here’s my favorites from my first forty-eight hours as a photographer.

Rabbit-Totems and Purple Dragons

November 27, 2006 by krisis

Even before I had the internet I was always interested in connecting to people who I could understand on some intrinsic level.

In my pre-internet age, one of my favorite comics was Sam Kieth’s The Maxx. Many issues of The Maxx had a pen pals page tucked into the back. The idea of it thrilled me – some equal yet opposite alterna-comic fan flung far across the country could trade significant thoughts with a distant speck of me.

I whined and begged my mother for permission to write to some pen pals or, even better, to send in my information to be listed (because, surely each pen pal was reaping hundreds if not thousands of letters from eager writers such as myself).

I was flatly rejected. Repeatedly. Because, as far as my mother was concerned, it was the goal of the entire population of America to seduce me into acquiescing to a quiet, tidy kidnapping. Who knew what kind of lunatic was lying in wait for impressionable young comic fans such as myself to engage them in witty adolescent banter, only to suss out the likeliest kidnappees and stealthily infiltrate their homes in the night.

I shortly and unsuccessfully agitated for a P.O. Box, and that was that.

(Why didn’t I just send in the damn letter with telling her? Who knows. That is how good of a kid i was.)

When I first started Crushing Krisis one of my favorite things was to not only find and link to a new blog, but to get into a longterm habit of reciprocal linking – carrying on a sort of turn-based dialog in a series of blog posts meant not just for each other, but for our entire audience(s). In a way it was like a comic-book crossover.

Sadly, in most cases only my side of the chat still exists – six years of blogging yields quite an attrition rate. Of my virtual pen pals even the most venerable and permanent-seeming blogs I exchanged links with are gone. All but one.

Wockerjabby was a strange creature – six years ago just a clean layout emblazoned with a purple dragon, talking about college and exercise and veganism and astrophysics. Rabi, pronounced just like “Robby” (cotton on?) was… a girl? A girl named Rabi living just a few miles from my apartment? An awesome, intelligent, health-conscious, blogging girl name Rabi going to college around the corner from my favorite malll?

I was hooked from minute-one. And, just a few hours later, Rabi noticed my link and wrote me a nice email. And (nearly causing me to have a heart-attack in excitement) linked back.

Afterwards i started a (somewhat embarrassing, in retrospect) linking campaign professing my blog-love, and Rabi continued to reciprocate, carrying on merry conversations via email all the while.

If the story plateaued there – two bloggers trading links for six years – it wouldn’t be too remarkable.

It didn’t.

We decided to meet – Rabi was the first internet person i ever met. In the middle of a field, actually. Well, at a train station, and briefly in a grocery store, but predominantly in the middle of a field, where I sang songs and she read poetry.

We continued through Blogathonning and late night IM conversations discussing “Peter’s-Head Romantic Gravitational Units,” and a lengthy walk through night-time Philly, and somehow wound up flying together and then road-tripping together to Boston for concerts, followed by multiple iterations of walking the breadth of NYC and Philadelphia, eventually coming-of-age and enjoying martinis in both locations.

All of that from one link, six years ago yesterday. Not only a best internet friend, but a best friend.

Ever since Rabi’s link has always appeared on my link list. And, six years later, CK is still on hers.

It’s hard – still hard, even with blogs and MySpace – to thwart the natural tendency of our social circles towards homogeneity. Your friends will always have something in common with you, because if you have nothing in common the spark of friendship never catches, and a year later you’re left wondering why someone is still on your friends list. Because of the limits of the physical world, usually many of our friends wind up having the same things in common with us.

The allure of The Maxx pen pals and, later, the internet, is the offer of hundreds of different tangential contacts – small intersections of interest. The long tail of meeting people, the joy of which is following that connection to find even more connections.

In Rabi I have found the unique overlap of blogging, of loving music, of eating strange vegetarian foods, of remaining dedicated – even obsessed – with staying vibrant and real.

Probably way cooler than anyone i could have met from The Maxx.

(ps: Rabi, your Trio got usurped because i don’t know how to play two of the songs yet. Consider this your Trio IOU to be redeemed when i have more than a day to learn three songs.)

How the Long Tail Ruined Shopping

November 25, 2006 by krisis

Though I can’t say that I’ve ever been a tremendous fan of Black Friday, i readily admit that i had my moments of being a shopaholic. I delighted not only in the shopping, but in the browsing and discovering, and in immersing myself in a sea of other shoppers.

Recently this delight seems to have evaporated into thin air – heading out to a store is a chore, and more often than not i just do a quick browse before i’m ready to leave. I didn’t even contemplate heading out on Black Friday.

Why? Don’t i like to shop anymore? Have i outgrown it? Is my budget taking the fun out of it?

For months i couldn’t figure it out. Then, last month I read Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail (a book, though that link is for the author’s website). I realized that it wasn’t that i stopped liking shopping, but that the Long Tail ruined shopping for me, and maybe for you too.

Let me try to explain.

Think back five or ten years ago. A shopping trip wasn’t necessarily a buying trip – it was a voyage of discovery. Especially on Black Friday. You might know about a few tentpole items from television commercials or word of mouth, but you needed to walk the aisles to learn about everything that had been unveiled for the season. And, you needed to hit multiple stores before you could find the best deals on items from your wishlist(s). Shopping was a necessity to achieve your buying goals goals.

If you’re the least bit internet savvy, today much of that discovery process can be conducted virtually. In-store deals aren’t all that attractive… getting to Walmart at 5am on Black Friday might score you a few door-buster deals on their loss-leaders, but any price that they can afford to slash in a physical store is sure to be equally slashed somewhere on the infinite internet since websites don’t have to pay for employees and shelf space.

Stores are disappointing to me not only because i do a lot of discovery and deal-finding ahead of time, but because I find myself distrustful in physical stores – i see an interesting new widget, but without at least 10 user reviews i can’t possibly know if it’s worth buying.

As a result I’m just not excited by a brick and mortar shopping trip anymore. Now that you are thinking about it you might agree.

Furthermore, as our tastes splinter into ever-more distinct niches (as abetted by vast info on the internet) a physical store is less and less likely to even have what we want. Guitar stores hardly ever have the brand, model, or color that i’m looking for. I’m sure knitters feel the same way – after knitting for years will a Yarn Emporium have all of the special brands, blends, and colors that you want for your project? If not, while not just order all of it on the internet for a bulk discount?

There are still reasons to shop physically. Two primary reasons are expertise and hands-on experience. That’s why it’s so hard to eliminate clothing stores from our physical routine – we need help finding our size and we need to try things on to find out what looks good.

Groceries are another excellent example – when you have an indeterminate goal the physical act of browsing often yields the best results. Unless you have a specific meal in mind, grocery shopping is about options and ideas. Shopping for home decor falls into the same category. Since i don’t travel much, preparing for a vacation also fits – I spent hours shopping for Bonnaroo, looking for little items that might increase my chances of survival.

Yet, even these experience are being intruded on by the internet, with similarity-searches and tagging making the virtual experience more and more like scanning a shelf.

The Long Tail is not just a matter of quantity of choices, but of quality of information. As I become more and more accustomed to both I find that I am unsatisfied by a trip through a big box store that carries only the most popular (not necessarily best) items. Every trip is a disappointment – i can never find exactly what i need for the price that i want.

Reading The Long Tail changed my perspective on a lot more than just shopping through the utter obviousness of its conclusions. I have some more to say about that – hopefully before NaBloPoMo has ended.

The Long Tail of Things I Enjoy Doing

October 10, 2006 by krisis

I’ve recently been reading The Long Tail, which I was originally turned on to completely separately by the original Wired article and via author Chris Anderson’s brainstorming blog (still ongoing).

I haven’t formed a complete opinion on the book yet (I should probably finish it before doing that, eh?), but something I have enjoyed so far is that certain passages have made me put the book down to do my own research, or to start my own discussion. A good book should do that!

It isn’t really necessary to understand what “The Long Tail” means to appreciate the rest of my post, but if you’re interested Wikipedia can tell you, or you can just trust me to summarize it as follows:

The Long Tail is essentially a model (not necessarily of business) where end users have an tremendously huge number of choices – a number typically impossible to amass in any kind of bricks and mortar establishment (think of Amazon’s book and CD selection vs that of Borders or the currently liquidating Tower).

Given this huge number of choices, it turns out that significant user demand for choices continues far past the initial popular choices – ranging even beyond the choices typically offered in a more limited format such as a bricks and mortar store. For an eBusiness such as Amazon or Netflix that incurs relatively low cost to keep these seemingly infinite choices in stock, a significant portion of their profit will be generated by those more obscure choices that a physical storefront would never offer – in effect, the “long tail” of the choices being offered.

Anyhow, back onto my topic.

One passage that had an extremely visceral impact on me as a read was this one: Labor – forced, unspontaneous and waged work – would be superseded by self-activity. [Eventually] nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes … to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.

It isn’t author Anderson’s writing – it’s a quote from The Pro-Am[ateur] Revolution: how enthusiasts are changing our economy and society by Charles Leadbeater and Paul Miller (DL it here), who are in turn quoting Karl Marx’s writing from between 1845 and 1847. And, though Marx’s meaning is diluted when taken out of context, the quote resonated with me.

(Marx’s point is that Communism will ultimately find success in the many crafts of its people, as society will “regulate the general production” through the varied skills of its members. For more on the idea of crafting, visit Craft Research)

The quote resonated with me because of a certain conversation I had towards the end of high school. I was talking about potential college majors to my good friend Robert (who I owe a call), and he said something akin to, “Peter, I want to be a jack of all trades, and a master of none.”

Now, I was familiar with the phrase, but I had never thought of its practical application to a person. Why would anyone want to be halfway good at everything and perfect at nothing? It seemed unfullfilling to me at the time.

Robert’s words reverberate in my head from time to time as I take up yet another new hobby – piano-playing and MYSQL, as of late. I don’t know that I have a hope of mastering either skill, but it hasn’t stopped me from pouring time and energy into either. So, am I a jack of all trades, and in the process have I mastered nothing?

Marx’s quote resonates because it gives Robert’s some perspective. According to him – and I agree – none of us are meant to function solely in a single dimension of production. Yes, most of us have a proverbial “day job,” but our passion carries us to work just as feverishly at acting, or mountaineering, or homebrewing, or any of the other interests of my many friends, and we shouldn’t necessarily despoil that passion by attempting to thrust that work into focus in our lives by majoring in it or making it our business.

I love communications as much as everything, and it’s a perfect thing to take up my 9-to-5 because I would never contrive quite so much communications to work on in my free time. What if I do spend my weekends struggling to debug my own code or master a new instrument? It doesn’t mean I have to get my degree in IT or Performance – if I did I might not like either as much.

That’s just one instance of the trains of thought departing from The Long Tail station; even if it’s not a superior book, it’s a superior catalyst.