Happy Birthday, FallenPegasus!

Happy Birthday, FallenPegasus! You'll have to come over next week to get your gift, if the F#@#%*! shipper ever figures out how to use Paypal's shipping system (that's their current excuse).

Human Bandwidth and The Long Tail

There's something broken about the "long tail theory." The long tail theory is that with the rise of the Internet and access to the already digitized catalogs of many retailers and wholesalers, one can access the entire back catalog of obscure items tucked away in musty warehouses. I've taken advantage of this myself at times, ordering hard-to-get items of memorabilia or obscurity. When new items come out, demand for them is very high, but there's only one or two of those in any given week; a catalog always has a dozen or so reliable items that sell with mid-range volumes; and merchants have a "long tail" of hundreds of items in their warehouses for which there is no economically viable way of disposal or advertising, as catalog printing space costs money. But once you've automated your in-house catalog, automatically generated pages on your website are free. Hence, merchants are now finding that those hundreds of once unsaleable items can make upwards of a third of their business, thanks to Internet commerce.

Going on recommendations from friends and automated "If you liked that, you might like this" cross-reference engines, you may stumble across an artist you like. This happened to me recently with heavy metal; I came to like it late in life since, in my adolescence, my equally adolescent peers' taste in metal was childish and uninteresting. I always thought that bands with talent, like mid-career Iron Maiden, were so rare as to be unique. Since discovering that the lead singer of Maiden had gone back into the studio, I was led down a merry chase to find that metal had matured and bands like Flowing Tears, Vanden Plas and especially Dream Theater not only existed, but that they were both thoughtful and hard-rockin'.

The problem with the long tail becomes twofold. First, you may encounter a new band anywhere along the arc of its career, which means that your initial exposure to them will probably be of their finest work and everything else thereafter will be a disappointment.

Secondly, and this is the bigger problem, you may simply overwhelm yourself with the amount of material available. I've gone from having none of this stuff six months ago to having four Vaden Plas albums and fourteen Dream Theater albums. Gone are the days when one could look forward to a band's output with anticipation. Gone are the days when you could wait eagerly for months, even years for the next release, building with excitement, buying the album, and then spending a week or two getting used to it, listening to it, figuring out what the band was trying to do and how well they did, thrilling or bewailing any new turns and new sounds the band tried out, and so forth. Time and space helped to organize your experience, making it possible to enjoy an album as a cultural artifact.

That doesn't exist anymore. By the time you find something you enjoy, the odds are good that the band has either plateaued and produced album after album of exactly the same sound for twenty years (the Australian band The Church is like this for me), or has released their greatest hits album and mining their back catalog is an exercise more in archeology than in the thrill of finding something new that you can share with other like-minded fans. Nowadays it's entirely possible to overwhelm yourself with the size of an artists' catalog without having the time to join the fan-culture associated with it.

I've noticed this is true of anime, too. When I discovered anime, I discovered that there were only a few animes I really liked: Kannazuki No Miko, Maria-sama ga Miteru, and Mezzo Forte, for example. Once I'd drained the genre poll of available material, I kinda lost interest: given that so few interesting (to me) products had come out of the genre, I still watch season openers but this season, at least, the only thing I've bothered watching is Kashimashi, which feeds me with gratuitous lesbian kyootness but not much else.

I don't mean to argue that this is a bad thing. But access to the long tail has yet more price: the divorce of an artist from its experience, and the compression of experiencing an artist from a years-long process to something that can be accomplished in a week, leaving the experience much more shallow. And no amount of Wikipedia can help you round out that experience.

Long Tail, Part 2

I thought of a another problem with The Long Tail: It comes at the same time as the iPod. One of the other things that the technology of the 80's and before forced you do to was listen to the same album over and over and over: let's face it, you put a tape in your Walkman and you wandered around, listening to it, extracting every nuance you could. The temptation to change albums was tempered by the pain in the neck swapping physical media necessitated. That's not true anymore; the cost of moving from one album to another is no more significant than hitting fast forward.

I can't figure out if it's a good thing or a bad thing that I'm made inordinately happy by the immediate discovery that I already have a copy of Sakuranbo Kiss, the Japanese anime "homage" to the badness of all things Microsoft. It's such a goofy song.