And everybody does not know.
If everybody in the U.S. watched Sunday night's John Oliver show, the Big Beautiful Bill would be dead on arrival.
But almost no one does.
In case you're not a viewer of this HBO institution, once or twice a season John Oliver pulls a stunt. Recently, he offered to rebrand and market a minor league baseball team. Sunday they announced the winner. And the team took a camera into the dugout to get the players' reactions. NO ONE WATCHES JOHN OLIVER, ONLY ONE PERSON HAD EVEN HEARD OF HIM, AND EVEN HE WASN'T SURE HE KNEW WHO HE WAS!
Now let's get this straight. John Oliver has a show on HBO every Sunday night, which can be pulled up on demand.
But it gets better, the show is subsequently posted on YouTube, where you can watch it for free, and still "Last Week Tonight" has minimal impact.
You should watch last night's episode here:
www.youtube.com/live/vjFL-cBcjKc You'll find it impossible to poke holes in what it says, because unlike the bloviators on social media who shoot from the hip, "Last Week Tonight" is meticulously fact-checked, for fear it will get sued. Warner Bros. Discovery has got deep pockets, and the Trump administration has sued many media companies.
The arguments are very convincing, the truth is self-evident, but it doesn't make a difference, BECAUSE ALMOST NO ONE HAS SEEN IT!
It's not like John Oliver and "Last Week Tonight" are unknown quantities, the show has won the Emmy for Outstanding Variety Talk Series EIGHT TIMES STRAIGHT! But still, it's just a drop in the bucket of the endless miasma we call the modern world of information.
Now in the old days, there were only three networks, all of which reached tens of millions of people and if something was said, it penetrated the entire public. Forget that the news was more accurate back then, because of the Fairness Doctrine and the fear of lawsuits, everybody started from the same point, with the same facts, that ship sailed decades ago with Fox News and it's far worse today.
But this is not solely about politics, this is much broader, this is about all news, especially entertainment!
If John Oliver can't reach the majority of Americans, nowhere close, what are the odds that your little ditty in the Spotify Top 50 has nationwide penetration? NIL! But the record companies and the media keep telling us these streaming hits are ubiquitous, when nothing could be further from the truth.
As for appearances on radio and TV... Talk about narrowcasting.
John Oliver exists in his own world. He's got no casual viewers, you either buy into his show or you don't, there's a plethora of alternatives, no one watches a show they don't want to anymore and no one listens to a record they don't want to anymore. But the machine keeps operating like they do!
Never mind not every person loves every record. That's what we learned with cable and then streaming TV. Those network shows with astronomical ratings? Once people had options, they stopped watching those shows, their ratings cratered, their ratings were only high because viewers had no other choices.
Look at how much content Netflix makes. What are major labels doing? Putting out fewer records in fewer genres. They're not throwing anything against the wall, they are not interested in niches, they're interested in broad, and there is an appeal for that but the niches added up far exceed what the theoretically broad does.
As for ones and twos... This is how an industry gets disrupted. A business is crude and generates little income, then it grows and kills you. This is why the major labels buying all the indie distributors is so scary, they want to eliminate this possibility of competition, this is why IMPALA is agitating to stop Universal's acquisition of Downtown, but even this purchase is unknown by many, because of the John Oliver problem.
But if you are selling, if you are marketing, just know that your product/message reaches a small sliver of people, don't delude yourself otherwise. If your economics depend upon reaching everybody, give up, the economics must work with small numbers. You've got to readjust your vision, but despite saying how hip they are, the major labels as well as the movie studios are still executing on the same paradigm they employed in the pre-internet era, badly. If it weren't for their catalogs/libraries, they'd be out of business.
I mean if a show on HBO every Sunday night can't even reach most people, what are the odds your product/message will?
We're never going back to the old days, this is the world we now live in. Endless niches. But no one in entertainment or politics or media is willing to admit this. They're all playing by the old rules, because it's too scary to operate in this new world. But the public is already living in this new world, and it must be catered to if you want success.
Netflix makes shows for everyone.
Universal, Sony and Warner make records for very few.
Think about that, they're ceding so much of the market whilst telling us they dominate, which is patently untrue. Never mind all the people who would become customers if they were just catered to.
Once again, everybody is not going to like everything, and in every field today there are zillions of options, so you'd better give them to people, or else the joke is on you.
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