A few years ago, Chris Anderson from Wired wrote an influential book called The Long Tail. Owen Kelly, from the The Indie Digest, put together this great chart showing the Long Tail concept and how it applies to your fans. I’m a sucker for cool graphics, especially ones that use typography in a fun way. My favorite part of this is how he uses each section to describe the fans and where they are in relation to you. The goal is to move everyone into the far left column, true fans. Unfortunately, this is more difficult than ever.
Chris Anderson recently released a book called Free, which explains how “free” works as an economic model. I’m still working my way through it on my iPhone version. I recently read a blog post on Union Square Ventures that stated value comes from scarcity. When information was scarce, it was more valuable. One example: encyclopedias used contain vast amounts of expert-based knowledge and were expensive, but Wikipedia allowed anyone to share their expertise and knowledge and everyone gets it all for free. So information is no longer scarce and, while still useful, it’s not as valuable. What is and always has been scarce is attention. We only have 24 hours in a day, so our attention is more precious and valuable than ever, which is what advertisers have always known and constantly vying for with an ever-increasing amount of annoyance.
Our challenge as artists is to make what we do valuable enough for people to spend some of their precious attention on us. The keys are truly simple: make good music, play it extremely well live, and connect with fans.
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