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| Vol. 5 No. 1 |
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BOOK REVIEW Adrian Ellis The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More by Chris Anderson The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information by Richard A Lanham
Lanham, meanwhile, an English professor at U Cal, argues that because we live in an age in which there is a surfeit of cheap information, the attribute with real scarcity value attached to it is your attention span. And because everything – cities, cars, food, music – is essentially commodified and otherwise indistinct, it requires style and strong branding to move a commodity to the status of an object of desire. Intellectual property and cultural distinction will command a premium in the market place; real property and the replicable territory of science and technology will not. That's why – and this is book blurb and sounds like it "The new attention economy, therefore, will anoint a new set of moguls in the business world – not the CEOs or fund managers of yesteryear, but new masters of attention with grounding in the humanities and liberal arts." Richard Flordia's The Rise of the Creative Class and The Flight of the Creative Class appeared to be relevant to cultural organizations until you read them and realize that his creative class is defined with such breadth that his theses had little application to the preoccupations of most artists and arts administrators other than to reassure them — if it constitutes reassurance — that they are able provide some sort of atmospheric background noise to attract computer programmers and bio-technologists to locate or invest in cities like Austin or Seattle with a funky and attractive cultural life. These two books, on the other hand, have the merit of being genuinely relevant. They do not join up all the dots but the lines between them are fairly obvious. First, The Long Tail. The argument is that the decline in the block busters of pop culture – movies, books, pop songs – is being matched by the growth in niche sales in a highly segmented market, reached through distribution channels like Netflix, Amazon and Rhapsody. He also argues that we are entering a new age of producer-consumers in which amateurs can afford to make movies, host web sites, and mix sophisticated digital recordings. Individual creativity is being encouraged by the ability to create cheaply, as the general public has access to the same tools as professionals. The monolithic, vertically integrated entertainment and recording industries that have long been seen as the unfair competition to the small, undercapitalized nonprofits are being systematically undermined by digital piracy breaches of intellectual property law that cannot be policed and by the changing economics of technology. Smart nonprofits, embracing rather than fighting the reality of their niche-like core audiences, will learn how to exploit the opportunities of the long tail to burrow into those niches, abandoning the unrealizable aspirations of mass appeal. Even where they cannot distribute through electronic media – live performance for example – they can still market through it, and create virtual constituencies of support. The Long Tail is exceptionally well written for a business book. The arguments are articulated with precision and backed up with case studies and, glory be, data! The Economics of Attention, meanwhile, is a more discursive, slippery, ostentatiously erudite and polycentric book. In many ways it is simply another riff on the "weightless economy" theme explored by writers like Charles Leadbeater, and roundly criticized as naive new age puffery. But the core argument that everyone is straining for distinction in a late capitalist global economy jammed with commodities and information, and that culture and creativity are what affords the producer the possibility of distinction, is surely both correct and relevant to the cultural and creative sector. It explains the universal prevalence of shock tactics in both art and advertising; but it also offers insights into the changing role of the creative artist and the artist's sensibility in contemporary society, suggesting one that, far from being marginalized, is in fact more highly valued because of its capacity to individuate and discriminate. The phenomenal increase in the number of people describing themselves as "artists" in the past half-century, and the changing balance of power between the technical and the creative are attributable in large part to the inexorable logic of The Economics of Attention. Neither of these books are How To manuals for the cultural sector. Both, however, can help the strategic arts manager make sense of a rapidly changing world and plot organization's changing relationship to it. And both, importantly, provide grounds for optimism.
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These books have the same sort of feel as Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point, or Levitt and Dubners Freakonomics, both bestsellers, which seek to offer radical and broadly optimistic analysis of contemporary mass market societies. Gladwell uses epidemiology to show how rapid and unexpected changes in patterns of social behavior can occur in technologically inter-dependent societies; Levitt and Dubner use the application of economic logic to circumstances outside of the conventional market to provide counterintuitive explanations to otherwise anomalous behavior. Chris Anderson, expanding on a now famous article written in 2004 for Wired (for which Powell is Editor-in-Chief), seeks to show how revolutions in manufacturing, distribution, electronic fulfillment and, above all, filtering and search engines, mean that markets can be sliced and diced to the point at which the smallest, most obscure niche can be catered for in a profitable way. You like 1960s British jazz? I do, and there are enough other weird types dotted throughout the world to make it a viable proposition for a label to re-release and sell mid- twentieth century British jazz in small numbers over time, because they can, through the net, reach a global market cheaply, and through technology they can burn short runs of the CD's cheaply; and they can store music virtually in the mean time.