The interesting afterlife of a bad TV show

    About a year ago, Frontline did a documentary called "The Way the Music Died". Apparently it wasn't very good, but it remains notable for two things:

1. An insight into the collapsing channel of the traditional music business (rock radio is evaporating, MTV doesn't play much music anymore, and retailers are carrying fewer and fewer CDs).
   
2. A fantastic example of Long Tail TV.

    Although the documentary's moment on broadcast is gone, it lives on as a website that not only offers the entire documentary in streaming format, but also has the full transcripts of all the interviews, lots of background info and, amazingly, excerpts from some of the most withering press reviews I've read. Example:

"The venerable PBS documentary series Frontline makes a rare -- and, unfortunately, entirely unintentional -- foray into comedy tonight with The Way the Music Died, a ludicrous look at the recording industry."

    Wow. Once upon a time, that would have been the end of it. I'd read the review, wouldn't watch the show, and it would be gone. But because PBS decided to let it have an afterlife on the web, things got interesting.

    I found the documentary because someone linked to some statistics quoted by David Gottlieb, former head of RCA music marketing, that are relevant to the Long Tail:

"The year after I started working at the record label, as an industry, we put out 6,000 releases. I think last year it was about 35,000. So in 12, 14 years, it expanded 600 percent."

"For the big stores -- the Best Buys, the Targets, the Wal-Marts -- who are the bulk of our business -- those three accounts alone are 50 percent of our sales -- we're nothing to them. There's a great stat that music is one-tenth of 1 percent of all of Wal-Mart's gross revenues. So we're the smallest tadpole in the Wal-Mart pond, yet they're the most important thing in the world to us. And Best Buy is not much different. I think we're 3 to 5 percent of their overall revenue. So if music disappeared out of some of these stores, they're not really going to feel it. But if we disappeared out of their stores, we would feel it."

"The music section at Wal-Mart is, you know, a third of the size of this office, maybe half the size of this office. It's tiny. Out of the 30,000 records that get released every year, they probably have 750 titles."

    Had this been just another TV show, I never would had seen that. The website includes interview material that didn't make the final cut, so even if Google or Yahoo video searches (which scan the closed-caption text) were to eventually get all of Frontline, which they haven't yet, they wouldn't have found it. Instead, by bundling the show, the promotion around the show, press coverage and overmatter into a well-designed website and leaving it there indefinitely for the search engines to find, Frontline reached an audience it never would have had before. 

    PBS may be struggling, but you've got to hand them this: they're making the most of their archive. Along with the music documentary, PBS has more than 50 other full-length Frontline shows, along with web-only supporting material, online. Many are on DVD, too. I don't see much of a future for PBS on broadcast in competition with 400 commercial channels, but it continues to be a pathblazer in Long Tail television. Someday all TV networks will do things this way.

Comments

[e]

I actually watched this episode when it aired, and although I agree with the critics that it was a tad incomplete, I didn't think it was bad. I do agree that Frontline's archives are amazing. You can find their episode on WalMart (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/walmart/) or prescription drugs (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/other/).

[Paul]

Chris...you're absolutely right, and maybe someday all newspapers and print media will do the same thing as well. It's frustrating to find that most newspapers "archive" their news articles so quickly after publication to a paid service, even for daily subscribers.

[Paul]

Chris...you're absolutely right, and maybe someday all newspapers and print media will do the same thing as well. It's frustrating to find that most newspapers "archive" their news articles so quickly after publication to a paid service, even for daily subscribers.

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