Why I Enjoy Learning About Spaghetti Sauce and Other Random Topics

This is long, but I promise it does get to music.

I always have trouble with a seemingly simple and straight forward question "who is your favorite author?" And not only because I always hate listing favorites in any broad category, who I would say is my favorite band changes more frequently than the hour. The real trouble is I don't read a lot of fiction, I read more far nonfiction.

To list your favorite author of fiction is easier because it has more to do with style, genera, plot devises, or how enjoyable we find the stories, things that are easy to have a preference on. And all things the author ultimately has complete control on, thus are a reflection on him, his imagination and his vision.

Nonfiction does not work that way. While an author can control the topic and a great deal of style the author can not control the stories or the ending. A great nonfiction writer is reporting facts about the world that are inherently beyond their control. The content in a book on torture or on the current state of race relations is not a reflection of the author, while how they cover it may be. And the most important topics may not be the most fun or enjoyable. But that is not the criteria for judging fiction. You can judge it on how important it is, on how accurate it is, or how much impact it has or a slew of other criteria.

The criteria I would chose is how much a book changes my world view, and how much it helps me explain the rest of the world and not just the topic. A great work of nonfiction, to me, does not just inform you on the facts relating to one topic but gives a framework to how the rest of the world works.

That is why today a 20 minutes lecture on the modern history of spaghetti sauce both fascinated me and helped explain my views on where the music industry is going wrong more eloquently than I ever could.

Malcolm Gladwell: What we can learn from spaghetti sauce

In short the lesson to be learned from spaghetti sauce is that there is no perfect spaghetti sauce, only perfects spaghetti sauces. Marketing anything, be it spagettie sauce or music, cannot be about lowest common denominator. In fact their is no lowest common denominator at all. When it comes to spaghetti sauce there are a few types, traditional and chunky being two of them, and everyone has the preference. Instead of trying to make one sauce that fills everyones apatite you need to perfect a few different sauce, each that that fills a different preference best.

For years the major labels have tried to find the lowest common denominator, the act that the largest number of people will buy. That act does not exist today. The act that is going to sell the most records today is the act that is going to best fill the appetites of its audience, and not the act that can sell to every audience. This is not a new idea, but the example of spaghetti sauce shows the phenomenon more clearly than any example I have seen.

The lecture was by Malcolm Gladwell; the author of two books, "The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference" and "Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking"; and the author I would list as my favorite. Both of his books have done more to change the way I think about how our world works than about any other individual books I've read.

Neither book is about music (one chapter in Blink does describe radio testing), yet both have done more to form my opinions on how the world of music actully works, both the business of selling it and the phenomenon of its spreading on its own, than anything else I have read. The concepts in them explain why "recording industry" is failing with out ever mentioning downloads, or marketing or even music it self.

For more on how this relates to music and radio Bob Lefsetz recently wrote on the lecture by Gladwell here.