Hipsters and Long Tails

I just read Professor Burton's post about long tails, and it fascinated me in a lot of different ways. I guess I have never thought about how prominent this idea is in Internet culture. The one that immediately entered my head while reading through the post was hipsters. I don't know if a lot of people came to that same conclusion, but all I could think of while Professor Burton was talking about going through the iTunes store and going deeper in deeper is how useful this must be to hipsters and others who like to listen to really obscure, unknown music.

For the sake of clarity, a hipster is someone who likes things that nobody else likes. The idea is that if people like it, then it must be bad, and the more obscure something is then the better it is. This goes right along with the long tail idea, because they go for the things that are "never hit." A few years ago, this would be impossible. If a song didn't get on the charts, it stopped circulating, stopped being produced and might as well have disappeared forever. Now, however, people can go deeper and deeper into a song library to find more and more interesting songs. Some of them are real gems too. Of course, this also means that the deeper you go the more likely you are to accidentally make something that was obscure become really unknown. This is what I like to call the bane of the hipster.

The Long Tail can work in both directions. It can help people find really obscure things and enjoy them while nobody else does, or it can help something that might have never been discovered make it really big. Social Media helped to make "The Strike" a local band from Utah big enough to perform at the Stadium of Fire this year. I was there and they were amazing! Something like that never would have been able to happen without social media (granted there was a contest involved, but it wouldn't have spread as far if social media hadn't been a part of it) You can check out their facebook page here.

I guess the point is that the long tail has already influenced our subcultures in more than just getting more people to buy different things. It's also helped to inspire an entire way of life, and a hate group (there are plenty of people who hate hipsters.) I think that's pretty amazing.