De la visibilité à l'atention: les musiciens sur internet

The long tail theory (Anderson, 2006) argues that the development of decentralized promotion on the Internet is likely to change the distribution of revenue in the music industry, to benefit relatively unknown artists. However one of the necessary conditions for the long tail to become operational is that decentralized promotion be accessible and efficient for all artists. In this paper we study whether new and small-audience musicians are able to benefit from e-commerce, social networks and blogs to capture their audience's interest. To do so we have built an original and large dataset of promotion and audience indicators, both offline (promotion through traditional media, record sales) and online (comments on MySpace and Amazon, Facebook fans, customer reviews, blog posts, etc.) for a 6-month period, as well as a sample of 1,000 musicians who released an album at the end of 2010. We show that, as things stand, despite strong online self-promotion by relatively unknown artists, online promotion by fans and online success still essentially benefit artists who have already achieved success offline.