A kung fu fighter in a disco

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)

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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?

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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

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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?

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boyofbadgers.livejournal.com

Yep, no sign of any actual EVIDENCE.

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i think in the end he's saying

"there are few things that we are all very passionate about"

which strikes me as trite.

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and i think the people getting grumpy up thread "bah how can he say pop can't be passionate" are getting the wrong end of his poorly explained stick.

SOME people CAN be both. but that the audience increases where there is reduced passion-level for entry.

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ms-bracken.livejournal.com

I thought that what he's saying is "if you are in luxury goods marketing don't try to be too popular and if you are making products for the mass market don't try to be too classy" - i.e. Cristal were justified in doing the "Jacob, we don't care" act to Jay-Z and Lidl should dial down the "premium own-brand" line (if they have them). I'm not sure if that's the right interpretation because it's very contorted once you start using music as a metaphor.

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yes i think so. other commenters have used an apple/dell example.

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haha well yes but that claim is sort of built-in to the definitions of luxury-goods and mass markets isn't it? the question is really -- maybe this is what you're saying? -- whether music can even be modelled via a "mass-markets vs luxury-goods" breakdown

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ms-bracken.livejournal.com

Yes, that's it - I don't think that music can be modelled in that way, because I think there can be broad agreement on what a 'luxury good' is, and what physical objects hold currency in mainstream culture, whereas what music holds currency depends very much on what kind of social group or scene you are in - there is no kind of standard, as there is with other products.

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He is broadly saying this but he's extending it from the two markets being defined by wealth to their being defined by taste, sensibility, appreciation (what he's calling "passion"). He's basically suggesting that crossover between minority and majority tastes is, if not doomed, at least very fraught.

(Obviously taste *is* defined very much by wealth but Godin's argument is flawed even before we open that can of luxury worms.)

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the history of pop of course being the history of minority tastes becoming the mainstream (and vice versa) (cf anythony's b&w minstrel show post)

i actually do find this kind of model useful in a how-not-to-think-abt-it kind of a way

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What's interesting I think is that if you DO think about it in this way, can it become a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy?

I also wonder if this isn't a better map of how consumers THINK they act than how they actually act.

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i think this is the cultural capital argument --

byebyepride to thread) -- where taste is considered to map onto accrued status within the relevant in-group

but even here the attempt to generalise about in-groups is a problem -- a map of pop is a map of historical specifics

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1 majority of a niche audience will leave you if you go for popularity
- this has the ring of truth in 'before they sold out' winges

2 majority of a wide-umbrella audience will leave you if you go for boutique
- ???

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Well there are a fair number of pop examples of #2 - Dazzle Ships for instance! - but of course the leaving in #2 is less permanent than in #1, usually.

The weirdest part of the curves as Godin presents them is the far right - who does he think goes here??

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