From the moment I stumbled upon Chris Anderson’s longtail.com blog, I knew I had found a gem. The theory just struck me as so right on a basic level and fit in so well everything I had read five years prior from sources like Ray Kurzweil and the unabomber himself, Ted Kaczynski, about where the world was headed.
Now, a little bit about me. I am a breakdancer from the right side of the tracks. I have traveled around the world trying my best to learn from the best dancers and soak in as much of the culture as I could. Along the way, I always wondered why this dance wasn’t more popular. Everywhere I go people stop dead in their tracks when my friends and I start dancing. In particular, the kids beg their parents to stop and almost immediately begin trying to mimic the movement.
As I see it, the demographics of breakdancing are similar to those of skateboarding. Rebellious creative teenagers get an outlet that allows them to express themselves, be cool, and perhaps most importantly, attract members of the opposite sex.
But breakdancing is INCREDIBLY niche. In the style I do, popping, there are certainly less than 10,000 active dancers in the United States, and this is a hugely liberal estimate. How can this be? Basically, there is nowhere to learn–or to use Anderson’s metaphor, the island is underwater.
Like in Anderson’s Bollywood example, where there are 2 million Indian-Americans too widely distributed geographically to have films they would love and support released in theatres, there has been no central way for people to learn how to breakdance. Movies like the terrible-yet-successful U Got Served and the runaway television hit So You Think You Can Dance show that the market to learn is most certainly there, but no one has managed to come through on the supply side.
Cheesy videos like Darrin’s Dance Grooves, which almost no one including professionals could learn very much from, manage to sell 4.5 million copies because there are simply *no other sources.*
Enter the Internet: Let the Long Tail Begin
Ahhhhhhh 2006. I think that this is quite likely in the minds of many visionaries to be remembered as the year of the long tail. The year when youtube woke everyone up from a collective slumber. When the sleeping giant woke-the-f-up and said, wow, *I* can do it too!
And so we return to breakdancing. Now we have the means to attract all these disparate hope-to-bes through the simple yet effective filter of google search to sites where they, yes they, can learn how to breakdance, through flash video, through text, through online classes, through DVDs. A repository, Amazon-style, of all things breakdancing. With almost 0 distribution costs, with a demographic who is so tapped in that e-mail is so 2002 (think myspace), and with a product that is so incredibly viral–”hey dude! check THIS out”–that it almost runs itself, the long tail of breakdancing may well prove to be quite large indeed.
On top of this, something that Anderson has recently begun to discuss, global long tails, where what is niche in one market is mainstream in another, already applies to breakdancing. In Europe, in South America, and especially in Asia, breakdancing is nearly mainstream already and like the hip-hop movement that spawned it, breakdancing may prove to be one of the first truly global movements we see. On top of this, fans in other countries are so accustomed to listening to American music, watching American television, and learning English in school, that the language barrier begins to crumble. As the children around who are now 7 and learning English almost as intensively as their native language turn 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12 by 2011, we have a foundation for a global movement that is to a large extent unaffected by language and cultural barriers, being that the performance, learning, and appreciation doesn’t require that much language in the first place.
The hit is dead (relatively). Long live the niche! And c’mon over to learn2breakdance.com. YOU KNOW YOU WANT TO…
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