TheCapitalClinic

[Note: this blog was revised on January 30 at 7:30 am to expand upon the importance of "heads within tails" in the Long Tail era and on January 31 at 9:00 to incorporate and link to Chris Molla's excellent points in rebuttal]

There is a Sunday kinda Op-Ed written by David Brooks in the NY Times on Music and The Segmented Society] which I think represents a challenge to Fuzz and the Fuzz community of artists and passionate believers in the power of music. Here are some quick take-aways quoted below [emphasis added by me]:

1. “[For many musicians like Van Zandt, on] Feb. 9, 1964, [when] the Beatles played on “The Ed Sullivan Show. ‘it was the beginning of .. life.’…[They] fell for the Beatles and discovered the blues and early rock music that inspired them…The 1970s were a great moment for musical integration. Artists like the Rolling Stones and Springsteen drew on a range of musical influences and produced songs that might be country-influenced, soul-influenced, blues-influenced or a combination of all three.

[2.]…cultural history has pivot moments, and at some point toward the end of the 1970s or the early 1980s, the era of integration gave way to the era of fragmentation. There are now dozens of niche musical genres where there used to be this thing called rock…music [is] in splinters…year after year, the segmentation builds…indie rock is now almost completely white, lacking even the motifs of African-American popular music…indie rock’s real wall is social; it’s the genre for the liberal-arts-college upper-middle class.

[3.] Technology drives some of the fragmentation…other causes flow from the temper of the times...musical culture…has lost touch with its common roots.

[4.] people are anxious about fragmentation and longing for cohesion. This is the driving fear behind the inequality and immigration debates, behind worries of polarization and behind the entire Obama candidacy.

[5.] we really are in the era of the long tail… companies are dividing the marketplace into narrower and more segmented lifestyle niches…technological and commercial momentum drives fragmentation.

[6.] It’s going to be necessary to set up countervailing forces — institutions that span social, class and ethnic lines.

Music used to do this. Not so much anymore.”

Question is: are you up to the challenge? It is my hope that the answer is yes - otherwise, why bother.

It is now commonly accepted that we live in the era of the long tail and that there are “tails within the tails” as we move deeper into segmented niches. I largely accept the long tail premise as a valid conceptual framing exercise [there are others]. However, in my view, the key insight from the long tail perspective lies in looking at the flip-side: if there are tails within tails, there must also be “heads within heads”[this is the diminishing domain of the Superstars] and, more significantly, "heads within tails"[this is your space and it is up to you to become the master of your own domain].

I argue that musicians and their astute business partners can break out of the downward spiral of fragmentation of music and, correlatively, the increasingly segmented society that David Brooks describes and laments, based upon that insight. If Brooks is correct, as musicians descend, rather than ascend, to increasingly fragmented niches, you are in effect creating the conditions for your eventual demise [at least in economic terms]. I hope that we can reverse this process by collectively developing what “heads within tails” means in practical terms for individual artists at our nightschool for entrepreneurs. The balancing act for musicians walking the tightrope of artistic excellence is fraught with peril and frustration. How do you create “critical mass” rather than dissipate it?

Chris Molla's blog about the same op-ed piece of David Brooks which should be read as a companion piece, makes some telling points as well. Rather than lament the passing of an era, CM [who could have been, in my view, a great arbitrageur if he were in finance] sees the flip-side and the opportunity of the new era.

Link:
A Chris Molla Rebuttal

[NB: a note to readers of blogs, comments, and reviews at thecapitalclinic: the text of all of my commentary at this site will be an organic "moveable feast" and, thus, evolve; and I hope yours will as well. Our contributions to the "knowledge-space" of the web [such as they are] should not be frozen in time. We should use the power of real-time, web-based music discovery to generate "wiki-[capital]." In this way, the time we spend here will be value-added building-blocks in our quest to advance capital formation, individually and collectively.]