Thursday, July 12, 2007

Ricky Gervais and The Long Tail


This is probably old news to some of you, but I only came to know about two surprising pieces of information just now:
  1. Ricky Gervais of The Office fame was the singer of my favorite new wave song; and
  2. More To Lose (as performed by his band Seona Dancing) did not do well in the UK Charts or anywhere else. It became a hit only in the Philippines two years after it was released. (It looks like the rest of the world suffered from a failure of taste.)
I think that the way this song did poorly in the beginning and eventually became a hit once it reached our shores would qualify as an early example of The Long Tail.

5 comments:

Resty Odon said...

i luv more to lose. it's a hit among lovers of a-bit-obscure new wave titles at the time

cvj said...

I took it for granted that it was a big worldwide hit. I wonder why it did not catch on in the rest of the world.

Resty Odon said...

well, for one, it's brit music, which is omre 'exotic' than the usual american sound

Anonymous said...

There seems to be a bit of a Ricky Gervais backlash going on in the the UK (http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/tv/2007/07/call_me_crazy_but_has_ricky_ge.html). What interested me from the comments was how few people seemed willing to stand up for Gervais.

cvj said...

Torn, thanks for the pointer. I went to that Guardian article and so far, most of the comments do agree with the article. OTOH, there's this one comment added recently (at July 16 16:55 by Patriot22) that says:

"The sheer amount of criticism levelled at Gervais in this article and in the subsiquent discussion threads, to me, reveal one of the flaws of the great British public: the second someone becomes a success they are derided, sneered at and genrally 'brought down a peg or two'."

That observed mentality is something we Filipinos can relate to although from this distance, i couldn't tell whether or not Gervais deserves to be on the receiving end.