The Passion Pop Curve

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

This comes from the blog of marketing guru Seth Godin - the full post is here and here's the curve:



"The reason you need to care is that gap in the middle. Every day, millions of businesses get stuck in that gap. They either move to the right in search of the masses or move to the left in search of authenticity, but they compromise. And they get stuck with neither.

A delta blues guy who plays for tiny audiences in Memphis is in the sweet spot of the passionate. John Mayer is in the sweet spot of pop. Both are great guitarists, neither is too edgy or too trite. Both made a choice. But there are a thousand guitarists who are neither. They're afraid to embrace one curve or the other and end up with neither."

Presented (for now) without comment. Over to you!

Comments

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

eh? how is "obsessed" on the same continuum as "trite"? what does the x-axis actually measure?

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

The X Axis I think is measuring both accessibility of output and commitment of producer.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

those should certainly be on different axes!! (unless commitment means just "commitment to accessibility")

and this is only an interresting graph if (assuming the x-axis can be salvaged with the correct unit), you had a time z-axis observing how those bumps perhaps converge during some eras (mid-60s?) OR EVEN CROSS OVER

(i haven't looked at the piece yet -- perhaps he talks about this)

[boyofbadgers.livejournal.com]

I had it down as some sort of 'credibility-as-viewed-by-S.Godin' axis.
You can't really bundle accessibility to consumer and commitment of artist into a single variable unless you already have an ideological stance that automatically pits one against the other.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

I don't even get who the 'obsessed' bit refers to - the artist? the consumer?

also 'vapid' and 'trite' are both value judgments (and surely unquantifiable) whereas 'obsessed' and possibly 'edgy' (if it's measuring 'how cutting edge or fashionable something is') are definite measurable things? BUH?

also 'edgy' and 'obsessed' are two concepts which have nothing to do with each other!!!

[boyofbadgers.livejournal.com]

WTF is going on with that graph? Why are there two distinct curves?

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Because Godin is hypothesising that there are two distinct types of audience - people who respond to "passion" and people who respond to "pop".

[martinskidmore.livejournal.com]

It's a good thing no one has ever tried to make pop music with any passion, or his thesis would be complete bollocks.

[boyofbadgers.livejournal.com]

Oh, ok, that will teach me not to read the article. Still, it is poor design - if you sum the two curves, that middle dip doesn't look like such an awful place to be. Sure, you're not at the peaks, but it's a damn sight better than overreaching in either direction.

[martinskidmore.livejournal.com]

I think it's a fantastic graph! We need more with multiple curves and individual axes 'measuring' completely unconnected concepts!

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

OK there is NOTHING about that which makes any sense! I am not convinced he knows what any of the words he's using mean. or indeed if he's ever heard any music of any sort.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

or indeed if he's met any people who consume music!

[ms-bracken.livejournal.com]

This is how I feel every time I read anything by Seth Godin; I'm genuinely uncomfortable with the idea that he's some kind of marketing 'guru', because he just doesn't seem to think that people matter, or are different from each other, or not that different from him.

So this applies to his view of music* - I think it's pretty clear from his examples that he doesn't listen to a particularly wide variety of it - but it also applies to his view of how you market products, because I never get the impression that he cares about anything, particularly.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Incidentally, as a thought experiment I am also posting this link in a marketing/research forum to which I contribute. We'll see where that gets me.

[martinskidmore.livejournal.com]

His delta blues guy playing to tiny audiences appears to have half the audience numbers of John Mayer, whose last album went double platinum, wiki tells me. That's quite a big tiny audience.

Actually we should stop doing this, since we are basically picking holes in a badly made net that hasn't been finished yet, and see if we can find anything that makes sense.

[boyofbadgers.livejournal.com]

The y-scale could be logarithmic, I suppose.

does this salvage it?

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

if x measures "commitment", and you draw two curves, one of "commitment to the material" and the other of "commitment to the audience"?

you would probably get bell-ish curves (when don't you?) -- but the problem then is how do you line up the apples and oranges of the two species of commitment? they both (presumably) start at the origin (assumption = music made with no commitment to the audience OR the material has marketshare of 0), but how do you scale them?

what you could do is sketch the different topological possibilities (ie "graph" where bulges are switched; "graph" where bulge peak comes at same point on x-axis; "graph" where larger bulge is "passion" bulge) and than analyse these, as shapes manifested by different kinds of music?

(the non-passion bulge would be more an "audience-satisfaction" bulge then i guess)

Re: does this salvage it?

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

The problem is how would you define "maximum commitment to the audience" AND "maximum commitment to the material" and why would that not have a big market share (i.e. why are these curves bell shaped?)

Unless you're saying "well you can't be committed to both" (which Godin sort of it) but then where does the switch happen if 0 commitment + 0 commitment is possible but 100 commitment + 100 commitment isn't?

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

if you build in a max level of summed commitments you'd even more have scale the ratio of the types of commitment -- i think the only way you could explore this without evidence-free assertion is by modelling different kinds of scaling, and exploring what type of music (or audience) they could refer to

Re: does this salvage it?

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

i certainly think from readin the original post that X does roughly equal commitment

he has just made the curves up out of nowhere though. just his instinct, right?

follow up post on the blog

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/05/more-on-passion.html

[koganbot]

Question for poptimists: Why are there more posts on this thread than the Ashlee thread? Admittedly, I haven't clicked on the article, but has Mr. Godin said anything that hasn't been said before, given us a new wrinkle or insight into the type of bigotry he represents? Why are we wasting our time on this? And even if we take away the bigotry, just reduce his message to "Don't go for two audiences at once if one audience feels that its antithetical to the other" he drews his curves freehand so (as some of you point out upthread) there's no reason to assume that there actually is a gap, a nowhere's land between the audiences. The reason "sellout" is a potent term is that you sometimes do find sizable audiences in that supposed gap, sometimes a bigger audience there than on either side.

[koganbot]

its antithetical = it's antithetical

[justfanoe.livejournal.com]

Also, the Ashlee thread is about a particular album. People who haven't heard the album (like ME - but not for long hopefully) cannot participate. Anybody can participate in this thread.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I think if you add up the comments on all Ashlee threads so far they will easily outweigh this, which is likely to be Seth Godin's only appearance on Poptimists!

I started the discussion because Seth Godin is a fairly to very well respected figure in the world of marketing and this post seems to have been particularly well received. I found it interesting because he's using what he assumes to be a fairly well-understood truth about music and applying it to everything (his other example is dentistry!). But of course his fairly well-understood truth about music is nothing of the sort. What it may be is a fairly well-entrenched belief about music - certainly it seems to be so with Godin. And as I said downthread in a reply to Mark, what's interesting to me is whether people believe they themselves act like this.