Eternity and Infinity
Back in 2008, when I was just getting the band together, we covered the song ‘All My Friends’ by LCD Soundsystem a few times. We played it at, I think, our first 2 or 3 shows. The great thing about Rockwood (and basically every club these days) is that they offer a recording option for bands to pull the shows right off the board. So I grabbed the recording, sent it off to Joe Lambert to spruce it up a bit and then sent it out to my fan club. Again, this was about 18 months ago.
Various things have happened since then. Originally, Lucas Jensen at Hypeful picked up on it and voted it #18 best cover of 2008. That was fun mainly because I hadn’t really promoted it that much. A few people here and there heard it. Then, months later, I noticed that someone in the comments section of the blog at The AudioMuffin had mentioned our version of the tune. So that was strange and fun and weird as well. Because somehow, even for an artist as small as lil ol me, these little rivulets of the internet had trickled into someone’s mind and I hadn’t really had to do anything or make anything.
Then, last week, I finally got off my ass and got the show from December 2009 mastered. I emailed Frank at The AudioMuffin to see if they wanted an exclusive on this new cover of ‘Someone Great’ that we’d done, also off of Sound of Silver. He jumped on it. And then posted a nice write-up that mentioned the other cover of ‘All My Friends’ and, because it’s the internet and these songs are in digital form and easily accessible and findable, he posted the other cover and a few other things about the band.
Long story long.
The point is that since Frank gave us that nice write-up there’s been this nice little mini-renaissance for this thing that I did nearly 2 years ago. A few people have posted it on their blogs, a few people have tweeted about it, it’s made some headway on the Hype Machine Twitter charts. And it’s not really anything new. It’s not something that I’ve just done. It’s just been this piece of content that’s been floating around the internet and the nature of digitality is that it’s remained exactly as it was 18 months ago.
The optionality of that infinite digital lifespan is something that is very interesting, very alluring. While the digital era has indeed commoditized the music industry it has also reduced the cost of maintaining an infinite catalogue to virtually nothing. There are no additional production costs, no additional distribution costs I had to undertake to get our cover of ‘All My Friends’ into a few more hands. The marginal cost was zero. A few more people wanted to hear the song and a few more people did.
If I was an accountant, I’d have trouble figuring out the right depreciation schedule for a song. Certainly, the head of the tail, the early part of the song’s existence is where the likelihood is greatest that you’ll be able to monetize something, be able to get somebody’s attention, be able to do something with it. But perhaps, like other things on the internet, the long part of the tail is a little fatter. Maybe there’s a little more space between 0 and the making something/anything out of your digital relic when you’re able to capture all that optionality at absolutely no cost.
Something about that fact gives me some kind of hope. It means that maybe the answer for an artist is to just keep adding to your catalogue. Keep creating content. Keep writing songs. Keep building. And building. And every time you build a little something and think it’s not worth anything you remind yourself you’re buying a call option on the future. On the possibility that this good thing that you’ve done will bounce around in eternity for a period of time and then surface to make you some money.
If you’re not an artist, but a company, it seems pretty clear that there’s something to be said for developing a huge catalogue of songs or videos or whatever, probably as cheaply as you can, and understand that each of these little grains of sands are little lottery tickets that might yield more than you thought they might originally.
That’s what the Internet creates. It creates infinity and eternity. Options into the distance.
