What Comes After the Blockbuster? The Nichebuster

I am at the Entertainment Gathering conference in LA and there is a lot of talk about the death of the blockbuster.  Wired editor Chris Anderson showed some nifty charts from his upcoming book on the Long Tail documenting the decline in hit albums, TV ratings, newspaper circulation, and the percentage of the movie industry's revenues contributed by the top-25 blockbusters.  The chart for the music industry is the most dramatic:

In the past five years, the number of gold and platinum albums have been cut in half.  Part of this no doubt has to do with the rise of illegal file sharing, but part also has to do with the greater variety of music now accessible in digital form, and the ease of searching and discovering that music.  Anderson suggests that the hit album may have peaked with the March 21, 2000 release of 'N Sync's "No Strings Attached," which sold more than 11 million copies.  Contrast that with Green Day's more recent "American Idiot," which sold less than 5 million.  As the Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg (another speaker here) puts it:

There is a continuing breakdown in the power of the people who package this stuff for us.

At least, that's the new conventional wisdom.  If people like Anderson are right that the long tail of content "collectively represents a market that rivals the hit-driven market we have known for a hundred years" and that "small is the new big," then where does that leave traditional media companies?  Is all media going to be replaced by stuff that appeals only to an audience of one or two?

I don't think so.  There is an opportunity here for media companies (as well as new professional-amateur entrants into the industry) to create content that appeals to targeted audiences of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands or even millions.  I think the best of this content will come to be known as nichebusters: movies, songs, and stories that become extremely popular within certain, large niche audiences. 

In other words, media companies will need to shift away from creating a few blockbusters every year, and instead try to create hundreds of nichebusters.  Admittedly, this will be a big challenge. But if they do it right, media companies could actually reach more people and create deeper connections to many different audiences than they do today.  Because for every blockbuster today there are at least three or four flops.  That's often what happens when you try to appeal to everyone with generic, mass-market drivel: you end up pleasing no one. 

Finely-tuned nichebusters might have a better chance of reaching smaller audiences.  We just need a lot more of them than we have today, and find a way to create them more cheaply than today's blockbusters.

If media consumption is fragmenting, then so must the media industry.

Comments

[Terry Mitchell]

Yes, I'd say they're all fragmenting very quickly.

[Jake Kaldenbaugh]

This is a great distillation of how the Internet has affected the traditional media establishment. However, like News Corp, I think you will see the old guard get pretty nimble, pretty quickly. Media niche miner models are already in full effect and I've noticed that the MSM is making acquisitions in this area (CMP > LightReading, News Corp > MySpace, AOL > Weblogs, etc...).
So, I guess the punch line is that the old media establishment has already begun to consolidate the new media world.
Meet the new boss; looks a lot like the old boss...

[Steve]

I guess the problem though is the market is getting more and more fragmented but the expense/quality we expect in our content is going up (faster than new tools are bringing it down).

So where is the compromise will he have to forgo quality to get things for each niche?

[penmachine]

I disagree on that last point. It may be true for movies--at least large scale ones--but it need not be true of music. If Moby and the Scissor Sisters can record hit albums in their apartments or basements, technology HAS brought the costs of producing quality down.

Even on an indie scale, a band I was in 13 years ago spent thousands of dollars to record, mix, master, and duplicate cassette copies of our album, using recording studios and other expensive facilities. I just released my own indie album, and I recorded it in my house and spent less than $1000 on the whole thing, including software, mastering, reproduction, and even shipping costs to get the CDs to my house.

Talent doesn't have a price, and if talented people can succeed in a niche, the tools are there for them to make a living at it. They just won't get fleets of tour buses and all the blow they can snort anymore. Which is for the good.

[Chris]

Ice-T and Robert Evans on NICHE programming. http://www.Jumpboxtv.com

A Brightcove Player with NICHE

[Jim]

All media and commerce is a dance of broad and niche. Walmart sells shoes and computers, but Nike Town and Apple Store do just fine. NBC, ABC and CBS are broadcasters, but Food Network, SyFy and HGTV are still rockin' as nichecasters. The same thing is happening in social media. Broad utilities (e.g. Facebook|general social networking and Twitter|general microblogging and others) will balkanize, or by virtue of their APIs and developer ecosystem will be balkanized by third parties. Utility-centric will give way to affinity-centric (passion, hobby, industry) and those general social utilities will be forced to chase into the space that directly competes with mags, cablenets, etc) already programming to passion-groups. The PlanetTagger "integrated social marketing" (http://spectrumdna.com) platform is a good example of how existing branded affinity group programmers (mags, cable nets, etc) can ensure they co-opt general social utilities instead of being co-opted by them and subjugated to them.