Long-Tail 101: Create Your Own End Cap, And then Leave It There

     I find that while there are plenty of independent artists that naturally understand, or have become familiar with the practice of long-tail marketing, there are still a number of independents who insist on taking down an "old" single, CD, or product when "making room" for the new. As a professional in the industry I come across many artists and management teams each week and I have heard just about every excuse for this practice; I stand firm in my opinion that this is the absolute worse choice one could make. Of course, there are exceptions for very new and beginning artists whose prior work was complete garbage and needed to be taken down to make room for a polished product handled by a producer, etc, but outside of these cases of truly poor production/content, the product needs to stay, forever.

     One of the very first things a true artist should be concerned with is their repertoire and total catalog. How many times have you been to a concert or watched an awards show and the songs by any particular artist have come from multiple albums? How many times have been to an online store or merchandise booth only to see 20 different designs for shirts, key chains, USB drives, and the like, some of them from three tours ago? Artists have websites, social pages, mobile pages and apps… each with never-ending shelf space and the front page is their very own end-cap. If shelf space is unlimited why not have all of your products listed for sale, and since it never goes away, why not keep it there forever?

     The benefits of this are not only that you will undoubtedly gain new fans in the long run who happen to like an older song better than a new one or perhaps just happened to hear that one first, but this will also tremendously help sales numbers over the long-tail as older products continue to sell along side the new ones. This also gives you a chance to actively promote older product or even group the older product with even better performing product to gain numbers for those that have fallen behind. What if an advertising agent or music supervisor heard about a song you did and came by that page looking for something very specific? You’d better have it there for them! Get the picture? It is all about the long-tail kids.