I love music and I listen to what I think is a wide variety of it. My iTunes library has over 17,000 tracks (individual songs). Some of them are for my wife and daughter and not to my taste, but the bulk of it is mine.
What have I got? Lots of blues and jazz, classical, opera, bluegrass rock and pop. There’s a long list of Broadway musicals and tons of movie soundtracks. There’s seasonal music, for Halloween and Christmas. There’s even ambient and new age stuff for those particularly mellow moods. The collection is wide and it’s deep.
I love the move to the electronic for two reasons: it’s portable and it’s so easy to find something to match my current mode.
But one thing that continually disappoints me is how shallow and narrow the selection of offerings that are available as music for sale. Got to Amazon or Apple’s iTunes Music Store and it becomes clear very quickly that their selections only scratches the surface of the vast library of recorded music.
For example, last night I was listening to one of the great jazz albums that Andre Previn released in the 1950’s, “Andre Previn & His Pals (Shelly Manne, Red Mitchell) Modern Jazz Performances Of Songs From Pal Joey.” It’s one of many albums he released based on popular Broadway musicals. It’s wonderful. But iTunes doesn’t have it. Amazon has the CD, but it’s not available for electronic purchase and download.*
I’ve run this experiment many times and it makes me wonder this: how much of recorded music is simply not available for purchase by any method? How much is sitting in record company vaults? And how much is lost?
I know music collectors who have extensive collections in a single genre. For example, I know a jazz record collector with thousands of LPs. I’m betting that more than 80% of what he has isn’t available anywhere. And I think you could select any genre outside of Rock and Pop and you’d find the same thing.
Music is the ideal Long Tail sales item. All these companies have to do is to convert the music to a digital format, offer them for sale, and someone, somewhere, will buy them. There’s untold billions of dollars of value locked up in vaults. Now think of the movies and TV shows that also sit gathering dust. Why drill for oil when you could make a fortune just selling over a hundred years of terrific content?
*Who does have the album that I was looking for online? eMusic does. I think that’s where I got it. Before the iTunes Music Store was released, eMusic used to offer an all-you-could-download membership and I used it to build up a good portion of my library. When they changed to a limited number of downloads, I dropped them and rarely hear them mentioned anymore. They have a very good collection and it’s a shame that they won’t just sell you individual tracks or albums.
