My father never associated a song with a particular performer, and that was typical for the ‘teens and ’20s. A new hit might be introduced by a star like Sophie Tucker, but it was sung and played by everybody. In the days when printed music was the lifeblood of the music business, this was vitally important, because if a song became so closely associated with a single performer that nobody else wanted to sing it, that would hurt the sheet music sales. In most cases, rather than getting a single big boost from a major star or a Broadway show, a song would be circulated by people hired by the publisher as song pluggers, and the idea was to get it sung and played by as many different artists and in as many different venues as possible.

Elijah Wald, How The Beatles Destroyed Rock And Roll

I’m not just posting this quote about viral marketing in the 1910s for “nothing new under the sun” reasons, though it does remind me a bit of the ‘Big Seed’ principle of virality: Duncan Watt’s idea that basically the most successful way of spreading a meme is to get it to as many unconnected people as possible as quickly as possible.

But of course a Broadway show is a good way of doing that - as indeed is broadcast media. So what’s interesting in the 1910s model is the idea Wald introduces of resistance to a single source: “if a song became so closely associated with a single performer that nobody else wanted to sing it”

Did this actually happen? Enough to make a difference? It’s an interesting idea but it may just be Wald’s conjecture. If true, are there similar mechanisms at work in the spread of memes?

As someone who’s spent a bit of time hanging out with boho early adopter types online - in the world of pop, at least - there’s definitely some truth, sometimes, to the cliche about stopping liking something when it becomes popular. Usually it’s not exactly “stopping liking”, more “stopping showing public interest”, but there’s something to it nonetheless.

That’s not quite what Wald’s on about either, though. The equivalent would be people not passing on a story because a top site - boingboing or kottke or wired - was the source. And obviously that doesn’t seem to be what happens. That isn’t to say it’s not a factor: writing for Pitchfork I’m aware that there are plenty of people who partly define themselves against a site and its priorities or recommendations. Of course, a pageview is a pageview is a pageview so it’s not like Pitchfork worries, but in terms of the transmission of content and what its transmitters do to it, you have to take this resistance and ‘anti-influence’ into account.

So what else might account for the successful strategy in the 1910s being multi-artist, multi-venue seeding? Probably it was simply that the differential between the audience reached by the big venues and the small wasn’t great enough to make the more difficult business of concentrating on the big venues worthwhile. Pre-radio the maximum audience size for a performance of a song was a great deal smaller, which was what made it difficult - or impossible - to establish a ‘definitive’ version, rather than any innate audience dislike of the idea.

(via blackbeardblog)

02/22/10 at 1:28pm
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