The Red Thread This Week:
"Nobody reads ads. People read what interests them, and sometimes it's an ad."
– Howard Gossage
I work in streaming music, so naturally I think about grocery stores all the time.
Some of that's my family. We're food people (when we get back from vacation, we talk about where we ate).
My wife is a fantastic cook, I love to cook, and my father-in-law treats grocery shopping like an Olympic sport. I'm talking multiple stores in the same day, chasing the “just right” ingredient for whatever's for dinner tonight.
So I'm in grocery stores a lot, and I'm still amazed by them. You can walk into one almost anywhere in the world and find a can of tomatoes, or a box of crackers. That’s insane if you really think about it. It's one of the most impressive things the modern industrial world has ever built.
And it can't make you want a single thing.
That's because a grocery store doesn't really sell. It offers. You walk in already in need, and the store's genius is getting you to what you came for.
Sure, it can move things around. It can rent the end of the aisle to whoever pays the most this week. But the want was there before you parked.
Streaming music is the same, except with nearly infinite shelf space. More than a hundred thousand new songs arrive every day. We can put a new record on the homepage and wrap it in flashing lights, and it's still really hard to get people to care about anything truly new.
Radio has understood this for seventy-plus years. One of the oldest rules in programming: if you want to play a truly new song without losing the audience, sandwich it between two hits. The new song borrows a little trust from the songs on either side. The slot itself isn’t that important.
That's why paying for the spot so often disappoints. The end cap, the featured slot, the deal where an artist takes a smaller royalty for a better look from the algorithm. All of it is the last mile. It satisfies demand that already exists.
The wanting gets built somewhere else, much earlier.
Even people who hate Taylor Swift are curious what her next record sounds like. She spent years earning that curiosity.
Or take Sriracha hot sauce, a favorite in our house, who famously never advertised. People bumped into that rooster bottle with the green cap on restaurant tables, then went looking for it at the store.
The store is where people pick up what they already want. Making them want it is your job, and it happens before you ever reach the shelf.
That's why the music business mostly favors artists who arrive with proof. An audience they can point to. Tickets already sold. Pre-orders.
Everyone else arrives with hope that someone will pick them and do the hard work of creating demand for them. It happens sometimes. Not often. And it's almost never the store's job, or the platform's.
Next time you're in the store, stop at an end cap. Somebody paid for that spot. Then look in your cart. Almost everything in it, you wanted before you walked in.
And if a few new things snuck in, I bet they're sandwiched between more than a few hits.
~ Jaime
Co-host Slackers podcast
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P.S. What’d you think of this issue? Hit reply, let me know.
And thanks as always for being on the other end, I’m glad you’re here.
It's been twenty-five years since September 11, 2001.
I was in college in San Diego, up early for a class, and my roommate had the news on. We watched the second plane hit live. My wife was a high school senior in the Northeast, where a lot of her friends had family working in the city.
Last night we watched Nat Geo's 9/11: Reunited and invited our kids to join us. Parts of it are very hard to watch. It's also full of survivors meeting the strangers who helped them get through that day, many for the first time since. It led to a really good conversation.
Here it is, if you want to watch.