The explosion of the Internet and e-commerce and the interconnectedness of everything is generally A Really Good Thing. As Wired editor Chris Anderson has explained ad nauseam on his blog, we’re in age where more different things sell to fewer people and the collective weight of all that less-popular stuff is growing. The “long tail” is a reference to a sales distribution graph’s thinner, outer region (hint: the yellow area of this picture from Anderson’s web site).
So when I got all excited about the song “Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)” in Wes Anderson’s short film Hotel Chevalier, I was fascinated to learn via Wikipedia that the singer, Peter Sarstedt, had also recorded a sequel. A little sleuthing around Google uncovered that the later track, called “The Last of the Breed,” was on Sarstedt’s 1997 album England’s Lane. It wasn’t on any download service I checked at the time, so some more sleuthing around found the entire CD available for purchase with a four week wait from a vendor on Amazon.com’s UK site.
I ordered and waited and waited and waited. It took so long I almost forgot I had ordered it when it arrived. I ripped off the plastic, pushed the disk into my CD player and skipped ahead to the song. And — ugh — it was horrible. Whatever happened to poor Mister Sarstedt between the two recordings, he completely lost the charming and entrancing style that made “Where do you go to” so great. Oh well. Sometimes you eat the long tail, sometimes the long tail eats you.
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