Do you remember where you were on June 10, 1991? Me, I was at a Black Crowes concert in Fresno. I remember this because it was precisely where I did not want to be. My girlfriend Kim was a fan and had already bought the tickets, so we went, but why did it have to be the same night as the series finale of Twin Peaks, our mutual favorite show?

We bonded over Twin Peaks early in our courtship, marathoning through the seven-episode first season on my birthday in 1990 while my father was out of town. Admittedly, we were kinda distracted and didn’t start watching it in earnest until Jim and his girlfriend showed up, but hey, I was newly seventeen and Kim was sixteen, and the carpet was quite comfy.

When the series finale approached almost exactly a year later, Kim reasonably pointed out that we could tape it and watch it the next day. Well, yes, sure, I taped every episode of the show for keeps anyway but feh, I wanted to watch it now, or at least as close to now as was possible. It wasn’t out of spoiler fear; school was out and neither us of had to work for the next few days, so there was no buzz to avoid. Semantically speaking, this was before the word “spoiler” was invented. I simply referred to it as “not wanting to know what happens next.” I didn’t watch the previews for Star Trek: The Next Generation, a practice which continues today with the new Galactica.

But this was Twin Peaks, damnit. A teevee show produced by David Lynch, my favorite director, an episode directed by him, those were always the best, and after this there would be no more. Then again, there was no telling when Kim would get another chance to sing along live with Chris Robinson to “She Talks to Angels,” and the correct decision was made. We went to the concert, watched the episode the next morning, and it was all good.

Hardly anybody else watched the show anymore, and those who did were vocal in their disappointment. Most people tuned out by a few episodes into the second season, maybe returning for the heavily-hyped episode in which the Laura Palmer storyline was finally resolved. The result was a major backlash, evolving from the minor backlash which started brewing when the murder wasn’t solved five minutes into the second season.

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In the past couple of weeks, an interesting phenomenon has been happening in American Idol. A singer named Sanjaya Malakar has been surviving the popular cut despite the fact that he seems to have no vocal talent whatsoever.

A lot of people have been attributing this to a groundswell made up of people who either really don’t like American Idol, or just want to mess with it. Cool! This has been crystallized by a website called Vote For The Worst, which (along with a host of morning show DJs) has thrown its backing behind Sanjaya week after week after week.

I fully support this. Partially because its fun to frack with something as ubiquitious as American Idol; partly because its funny, but mostly because if he somehow wins, it would go a long ways towards proving a theory that I’ve had since the early 1990s. I call it the Theory of Popularity, and it goes a little something like this:

In a culture defined by niches, the more popular something is purported to be, the less popular it actually is.

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It’s not easy being an industry leader these days. The moment you hit the top, every time your competition releases a new product, it’s going to “kill” you. The Zune was the iPod killer. Microsoft’s new and improved search was the Google killer. And NBC Universal/News Corp’s new service is, naturally, being touted as the YouTube killer.

All which makes for violent headlines, but the proof, as we all know, is in the audience. It’s not enough to release a new service into the wild and expect it to take the Internets by storm. YouTube didn’t become the go-to online video service simply because it was there. And that is the lesson big media needs to learn.

I think it’s important to review what makes YouTube, well, YouTube. It’s obviously not the only video sharing site out there. Grouper, Revver, and a host of other services allow users to easily upload video. If rumors are to be believed, Revver is the place to go if you’re trying to make a buck off your work. But the zeitgeist — that intangible thing — is with YouTube. Users cross the myriad cultural divides. My mother-in-law finds stuff on YouTube, because YouTube is pretty close to foolproof. It’s designed for the casual user.
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This is probably going to be the last time they allow me to write for Medialoper, but I can’t conceal the truth any longer: I can’t work the iTunes store. I’ve tried and I’ve tried and I’ve tried, but I just can’t get iTunes to work for me. It turns out that I’m a niche girl in a broadband world.

As online services strive ever-harder to be everything to everyone, I find myself retreating into my comfortable spaces. It’s not that I don’t enjoy finding new stuff — serendipity is still my favorite way to navigate the web — but when it comes to consuming media, I like to take a boutique approach to shopping.

I’m not alone in this. Chris Anderson, who will likely forever have to deal with issues surrounding his Long Tail and, well, I hear he’s addressing the crowd from Novelists’ Inc, and, oh, Chris, there is much I should warn you about), is talking again about the power of the niche. I cannot begin to tell you how much I believe that we are entering the Age of the Niche.
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As a teenager, I was seldom without my Walkman. Among my more prominent memories of 1986 is of sitting on the bus on the way home from summer school (frackin’ Algebra), listening to the MCA cassette of The Who’s Odds and Sods, trying to decipher the lyrics to “Put the Money Down.” It was one of my favorite Who songs; I loved the synth line, the peculiar rhythm, the sense of longing that was conveyed by the emotions of the vocal. The words themselves surely meant something deep and profound, the way that most of Pete Townshend’s music felt to me at the troubled age of thirteen, but I couldn’t figure out what Daltrey was singing most of the time, no matter how loud I played it. And I played it loud, right into my fragile aural canal. Is someone’s phone ringing, or is that just me?

It wasn’t just Daltrey’s phrasing and/or Townshend’s frequently obtuse imagery keeping me from unlocking the mysteries of this particular universe. Hell, it could have been a spoken word piece done in a perfect Northwest Fresno dialect and I probably still wouldn’t have understood, so muddy was the sound of the store-bought tape. Based on what little has been written about the song—as usual, nobody else likes it as much as I do—”Put the Money Down” is another in a very long line of Townshend songs about the travails of being a rock’n'roll star. A life which bore no resemblence to mine, to be sure, yet I connected with it in that way that most depressive teenagers do. (Oh, the spin that Pink Floyd’s even more alien The Wall would put me into shortly thereafter!) That I didn’t pick up on the recurring theme is why I could never be a rock critic. For that matter, I’m still surprised whenever I discover that a Neil Young song uses a C-D-G chord progression, even though they all do. It’s all one song.

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One of the great, sort-of-under the mainstream media’s radar stories of this past year was/is Google Book Search. If you hang around publishing circles (which, well, I do), it’s been a blip on the screen, but if you’re looking at big media stories, this one just seems to escape the big press.

Maybe it’s just that books aren’t as glamorous as movies, I don’t know. But while the major studios and music labels try — and I use the word very deliberately — to wrap their minds around the concept of digitizing and distributing content, Google (and, to be fair, Microsoft and Amazon) has pushed forward with its plan. As I type, I can access digitized books and make decisions about their usefulness in my current research. As more product gets added to the search engine, I find myself using this feature of Google more and more. I have actually made one purchase based on this feature. Not a bad return on investment, considering I never would have found this book on Amazon. I tried; Amazon’s search functionality denied me, time and again. Google, however, was more than happy to offer the book up right away.
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I was reminded of Lonelygirl15 recently when the December issue of Wired magazine mysteriously turned up on my coffee table. It was only last September that Lonleygirl’s YouTube videos were revealed to be a hoax, yet somehow it seems like decades. The fact that Jessica Rose finally made the cover of Wired in time for the holiday shopping issue says more about the limiting nature of print publication cycles than it does about Lonelygirl’s staying power. Wired might as well have run a picture of Ellen Feiss on their December cover.

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One of our goals when we started Medialoper was to look at independent efforts to create cool content for the new media audience — and Rocketboom was a prime example of how two people with a a camera, a broadband connection, and a good idea can succeed where so many media giants had failed.

The concept was simple: present interesting news in a cool format. It worked. The daily broadcast reached a huge audience. And then…the bottom fell out. Host Amanda Congdon left the program and the back-and-forth “he said, she said” stories flew across the Internet. It doesn’t really matter if Amanda was pushed or she jumped, not in the long run. After she left, the great Rocketboom experiment continued with a new host.
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Following up on Kirk’s article yesterday on bootlegs, I thought it might be a nice waste of bandwidth if I threw together a list of music that I would purchase instantly if it were only legitimately released. Some of this is music that I have listened to zillions of times, in every format imaginable, as bootlegs were taped or ripped for me over the years. Or purchased on vinyl from long-gone record stores in San Luis Obispo and Westwood. Or maybe they were cassettes I found found at the Camden Town Street Fair; or CDs I came across at the KUSF record swap.

Some of them, of course, came via Napster or other like-minded sites. Hell, a couple I even recorded from the A couple I originally recorded from the King Biscuit Flower Hour. All of them have two things in common: either the record company or the artist thinks that these have no audience and/or artistic merit, and I would buy them in a split-second if they were ever actually legitimately released.

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Several months ago, I put together a list of TV shows I’d like to see on DVD. Since we are talking about piracy this week, and using DVDs as an example, I thought it would be interesting to:

1. See what movement there has been on that list
2. Talk a bit about the lengths we’ve had to go to at our house to avoid buying a pirated DVD set of a show that will never come out on DVD.

So first, let’s look at that list:

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