Since the development of the distributed information network, people were given more opportunity and platforms to create and spread their own content, without the restrictions of the gatekeepers, filters and costs that legacy media forms need to work through. This led to mass production of content and information, and the services which held this content “automatically gets better the more people use it.” Because the users are the ones adding value to these platforms, this encouraged the rise of mass amateurization, with everyone producing and broadcasting their own content. The internet became a space where even the most unpopular content could remain accessible and included, this resulted in the development of the long tail, which extends to infinity and contains content only a few people will desire, but even so, still has an audience.
My remediation highlights the variety of content that you can find on the long tail. Chris Anderson lists examples of this variety including “There’s the back catalogue, older albums … There are live tracks, B-sides, remixes, even (gasp) covers. There are niches by the thousands, genre within genre within genre.” My SoundCloud track focuses on the abundance of music covers that can be found on YouTube, which demonstrates how “the internet is a copy machine” and how this constant copying is adding to the already infinite long tail.
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