The last truly cool thing the world had to offer with “underground” intentionally written into its title was probably Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground. Even that name is just an approximate English translation of the Russian that happened to win out as the most oft’ used anglo-moniker for the 1864 novel. Even if you’re a huge fan of, say, Tony Hawk’s Underground, it’s intuitive enough that once something is self-consciously labeled “underground” as a marketing tool, any “underground appeal” it may have once had is a thing of the past. The “YouTube Underground” promotion might ostensibly exist to promote four lucky bands, but what it actually signifies is a shift away from “underground-ness,” and not just because of the corporate sponsorship from Cingular. “YouTube Underground” is a big leap off of the Long Tail.

“The Long Tail,” Chris Anderson of Wired’s wonder-theory that you can’t escape from if you’re talking about anything related to internet media (and that he’s recently been able to turn into a book, i wonder how often books about economics get optioned to be movies?), goes as follows, according to Wikipedia

Anderson argued that products that are in low demand or have low sales volume can collectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters, if the store or distribution channel is large enough. Examples of such mega-stores include the online retailer Amazon.com and the online video rental service Netflix. The Long Tail is a potential market and, as the examples illustrate, the distribution and sales channel opportunities created by the Internet often enable businesses to tap into that market. successfully.

In terms of Amazon and Netflix, The Long Tail lends exposure and availability to those obscure books, movies, CDs, etc., that wouldn’t make it onto the shelf in brick-and-mortar stores due to the cost of keeping it on the shelf when there’s no reasonable belief that someone looking for a particularly obscure item will actually come into a store. In short, it’s worthwhile for Amazon to have that copy of Kurosawa’s Ikiru on DVD or Shogun Kunitoki’s Tasankokaiku CD available, whereas it probably wouldn’t be for your average chain store in Middle-of-Nowhere, USA. In terms of YouTube, though, let’s think about pure exposure along The Long Tail rather than anything that’s actually sold.

Since there’s no cost involved in putting anything up on YouTube at this point, it’s probably in the interest of an obscure band with a video or a budding filmmaker with an amateur short to throw it up for the world to see, simply because it can’t hurt - having your band’s home performance seen by ten people online is better than having it seen by three friends in your parents’ basement. Ideally, weird left-field underground bands with equally weird, left-field videos are given an equal shot at exposure as the ones that might be accessible enough to some day show up on MTV.

Enter “YouTube Underground”:

YouTube describes the competition as follows:

YouTube is on a quest to find the most talented and entertaining unsigned musicians and bands out there. Submit videos that best represent your group’s musical, lyrical and video-making skills. The YouTube community will vote and decide just who rules the YouTube Underground.

So the competition is meant to publicize, ostensibly, the best four bands on YouTube, voted on by users. Sounds as democratic as it gets, eh?

The problem is - well, there’s two problems. First of all, the whole deal seems shady, because as mentioned before, it’s sponsored by Cingular, and corporate sponsorship almost guarantees that the best band will probably be the most marketable band. It’s hard to imagine a truly bizarre, inaccessible act winning the contest in an upset with Cingular footing the bill.

But more important than any potential impact of corporate sponsorship, the contest itself robs YouTube of a certain “underground” appeal. In terms of its “long-tailness”, YouTube has thus far created space where the weirdest, most left field acts offered the same amount of exposure as the popular ones - in the “YouTube Underground” contest, the most popular acts, the “big head” of the power-law curve becomes as important as it does in traditional marketing. Popularity wins out, and the “musical underground” that generally benefits the most from YouTube - if it doesn’t suffer directly - has its importance diminished because it lacks the accessibility or fad-appeal that might make it a hit with YouTube’s main demographic.

One can only imagine that when the contest results are in, it will have some structural effect on the frontpage of the site. Obscure videos might not necessarily get less play than they would otherwise, but the contest winners will no doubt be plastered all over the front page and thus get more play, and there’s no way around it. More accessible videos will win, and they’ll be the first thing you see when you login. That means notably more hits for the winners.

Whether this actively deprives less accessible, weirder acts from getting hits, due to the majority of users not looking any further than the sexy splash graphic that will accompany the contest results, or whether their hits remain consistent, they’re still falling victim to YouTube’s shift in focus, from long tail to big head. Granted, in its current form, user ratings are in part used to determine what videos are “featured” on the front page. But the contest changes the entire concept of the site, giving certain videos of certain marketable artists a prominence that can’t be achieved by artists farther out on the fringe.

“Underground”? Hardly. This contest marks YouTube taking a step towards favoring the mainstream and popular, cutting off the fringe, the outsider, the poor old long tail.