ms_bracken (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} ms_bracken) wrote,@ 2007-07-18 12:58:00 |
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my lunch hour
I'm currently reading The Long Tail, which is proving to be quite frustrating. This might be partly because much is made, at the start of the book, of the fact that more or less everything was discussed extensively in the author's blog. Whilst this is relevant to the central (and interesting) point of the book, it is also very easy to blame the writing style on the fact that it was argued online first - every point that's made seems to be made four or five times, every time something generic is mentioned at least two sub-examples are given. I'm on page 100 and, by this point, neither I, anyone else on page 100, nor anyone who is functionally internet-literate, need to be told that iTunes is an example of an online music store.
That's also symptomatic of a wider problem that I have with it - it seems to talk about the internet in slightly more starry-eyed terms than is entirely necessary. Maybe that's because I'm (just) of a generation that takes all of this for granted, but the relentless "sights! sounds! subcultures!" tone does get wearing extremely quickly.
There is also a lot less in the way of working through implications than I'd like -as I've obviously not finished it, I don't know if this is the case throughout but it has been so far. As an example, the section I've just read is about how getting (your / the artists on your label's) music listened to works online, an aside to which was a label looking at demographics (specifically age/gender) of the listeners of one of their artists, and adjusting their marketing accordingly. This was quite interesting, but it seemed inconsistent -after almost half a book of argument about how everyone is a niche audience on their own (these kids! with their iPod MP3 players, made by Apple! and their BitTorrent, a peer-to-peer file sharing communications protocol!) - to go on to talk about dividing a market up like that as though the changing ways in which media are consumed has had no effect at all on how the marketing does or should work. I'm aware that it's meant to be an book on economics rather than marketing, but there is also a really interesting point to be made about what happens when people who would not formerly have communicated with each other, do, and what that does to traditional ideas of market segmentation and the efficacy of such.
I'm currently reading The Long Tail, which is proving to be quite frustrating. This might be partly because much is made, at the start of the book, of the fact that more or less everything was discussed extensively in the author's blog. Whilst this is relevant to the central (and interesting) point of the book, it is also very easy to blame the writing style on the fact that it was argued online first - every point that's made seems to be made four or five times, every time something generic is mentioned at least two sub-examples are given. I'm on page 100 and, by this point, neither I, anyone else on page 100, nor anyone who is functionally internet-literate, need to be told that iTunes is an example of an online music store.
That's also symptomatic of a wider problem that I have with it - it seems to talk about the internet in slightly more starry-eyed terms than is entirely necessary. Maybe that's because I'm (just) of a generation that takes all of this for granted, but the relentless "sights! sounds! subcultures!" tone does get wearing extremely quickly.
There is also a lot less in the way of working through implications than I'd like -as I've obviously not finished it, I don't know if this is the case throughout but it has been so far. As an example, the section I've just read is about how getting (your / the artists on your label's) music listened to works online, an aside to which was a label looking at demographics (specifically age/gender) of the listeners of one of their artists, and adjusting their marketing accordingly. This was quite interesting, but it seemed inconsistent -after almost half a book of argument about how everyone is a niche audience on their own (these kids! with their iPod MP3 players, made by Apple! and their BitTorrent, a peer-to-peer file sharing communications protocol!) - to go on to talk about dividing a market up like that as though the changing ways in which media are consumed has had no effect at all on how the marketing does or should work. I'm aware that it's meant to be an book on economics rather than marketing, but there is also a really interesting point to be made about what happens when people who would not formerly have communicated with each other, do, and what that does to traditional ideas of market segmentation and the efficacy of such.
