Sandeep Sood: ‘Long tails’ mean steady sales for obscure artists
By Shellie Branco and Sonya Senkowsky
Sandeep Sood
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Sandeep Sood’s interest in global media began when he traveled to India while in high school. Rather than finding the romanticized, remote place he expected, Sood found a land that also rang out with the music of pop musician Tiffany.
“This altered my perception of India and the third world and how media travels very quickly,” he said.
Today, Sood is the creator of an online comic strip that reaches 2 million and is designed to appeal to
“the global Indian,” or the approximately 14 million Indian people living outside India — a task for which the Internet, he said, is the perfect medium.
The Internet’s library of data will soon encompass every movie, song and book ever made, predicted Sood — a development that could lead to the end of the dominance of the “mega-hit.”
In order to make a profit, movie rental companies like Blockbuster need to fill their shelves with mega-hits because of their stores’ limited physical space. But money can be made on smaller hits on the Internet, said Sandeep Sood.
It’s called the “long tail” model. Sood pointed to the Indian “Bollywood” hit Lagaan, which, outside India, is the most popular Bollywood movie ever made. In America, Bollywood makes $100 million per year for U.S. population of 1.7 million Indians. Though the typical Bollywood movie open in only two U.S. theaters, Lagaan was rented thousands of times on the Net-based rental service Netflix.
The tail model goes something like this: The music of superstars like Britney Spears generates huge sales — imagine big stars’ album sales as a dramatic spike on a graph. Then, as sales numbers on the graph slope downward from Britney to smaller Billboard chartmakers, there’s still a tail that stretches out horizontally to include the thousands of diverse artists who may not have namepower, but do have devoted followings.
As major online retailers like iTunes are finding: “There are some cases where you can make more money by focusing on the ‘long tail’ instead of focusing on making your Tiffanys and your Brittany Spears.”
In music, Sri Lankan artist M.I.A. (Maya Arulpragasam), the daughter of a Tamil Tiger freedom fighter, is one of the highest selling artists on iTunes. She used the Internet to market her underground image, feeding online blogs and podcasts with her unique life story and seeding political discussions online, Sood said. She would become angry when her songs were “leaked” to the Web, appealing to a microniche of music fans who follow the newest, most underground prospects. Before any label cut her a deal, she was already an Internet phenom.
On Sood’s own site, Badmash, a 90-minute Simpsons parody cartoon, The Singhsons, has been downloaded 10 million times.
Parody site JibJab.com (and creator Atom Studios) likewise showed the power of online video with its election-time hit “This Land Is Your Land,” garnering 800 million downloads. Al Gore’s project “Current TV” and Google’s video search are also pushing the way toward opening smaller video productions to greater exposure.
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