Culture is Communication

We’re losing our lazy Sunday afternoons on the couch.

The Economist throws more cold water on the Long Tail. Or at least makes the case that a little moderation should be used when proclaiming the death of anything. The blockbuster is alive and well. The Long Tail is thriving. But it certainly sucks to be left somewhere in that hazy middle.

The absolute hits on the billboard charts? Kicking ass. But number 300-400? Yeah, don’t worry about that.

100 million dollar movies continue to carry the studios while the mid-tier flicks receive less and less support.

The biggest hits of network TV have held much of their audience, along with a varied array of niche cable networks. But that middle? Not doing so well.

So Sunday afternoons – no longer a great time to catch up on episodes of The Munsters. (Unless you’re a fanatic for 60’s pop Franken-humor. Then maybe there’s a station for that. But if that were the case, the Munsters might then actually be prime-time. But I digress.) But by now, we’re far too full of things to fill up our attention to deal with stuff we only sort of want to read, hear or watch.

As Rob Faxon, head of EMI music publishing said, “People want to share the same culture.”

It’s rather interesting, we have this odd dichotomy of searching for shared experience while satisfying our own inclinations. We often use all this content like we use the weather, filling our empty spaces with valuable communication. But while we’re seeking out shareable things, we’re more and more indulgent in our individual preferences.

And maybe that’s what our media consumption is reflecting now. We’re collectively finding the balance between what is shared and what is ours. And that renders a big swath of culture, largely found in mid-day time slots on local channels, unnecessary now. We don’t need things that merely fill up personal space, we need things that bring us together or things that precisely fulfill what we want. Anything else is just wasting our time.

 An addendum to this:

This (from the same article) might get you thinking, as well

“Perhaps the best explanation of why this might be so was offered in 1963. In “Formal Theories of Mass Behaviour”, William McPhee noted that a disproportionate share of the audience for a hit was made up of people who consumed few products of that type. (Many other studies have since reached the same conclusion.) A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely composed of people who read a lot. That means the least popular books are judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are judged by people who literally do not know any better. An American who read just one book this year was disproportionately likely to have read “The Lost Symbol”, by Dan Brown. He almost certainly liked it.”

Which basically means that much of our system of targeting in the ad industry might need some rethinking. If we’re making ads for mass, but focusing towards the high purchase incident target – way may actually be designing ourselves into that unfortunate middle.

Oy.

Article via Noah. Photo via yyellowbird.