What's It Like To Live In A Long Tail World?

In the early 1980s, in the dark days at the very end of disco, a proto–Long Tail music culture emerged in a former industrial strip in Chicago.

A half decade after the release of Saturday Night Fever, the craven commoditization of clap tracks and R&B had reached the end of its run and consumers were rebelling. They’d had enough of the bland and formulaic output of a music industry trying to clone its previous hits.

People attending a baseball game in Chicago’s Comiskey Park were invited to bring all their unwanted disco records, and after the game they tossed the vinyl refuse into a massive bonfire to the chant of “Disco Sucks.”

But in a nightclub called the Warehouse, the resident DJ, Frankie Knuckles, was doing something new.

He was wildly remixing, mashing up different genres of music into something brand-new. Knuckles took old disco classics, new Eurobeat pop and synthesized beats, including those produced with then-new drum machines, and turned them into a frantic, high-energy amalgamation of recycled soul.

Taking its name from the club, this new sound became known as house music.

The sound spread to another Chicago club called the MusicBox, where DJ Ron Hardy took it up several notches with massive volume and a frenetic pace, something, it was said, that was inspired by his heroin use.

Then, eventually, the sound traveled to the north of England, where house became the foundation of what would later emerge as the Rave scene.

What was notable about the rise of house was that it was both a reaction to the bankruptcy of blockbuster culture and a vibrant culture of its own. DJs and clubs created a music industry that was radically different from pop music.

Clubbing is really about surfing the Long Tail of dance music, and this ecosystem has seen the evolution of new models of innovation around it.