A recurring problem with the creative media industries is that the path from initial concepts to audience awareness is quite lengthy and convoluted. Even great

A recurring problem with the creative media industries is that the path from initial concepts to audience awareness is quite lengthy and convoluted. Even great creative products tend to have a preferred niche, and rarely is the marketing information available to nail down niche audiences for a big launch day. But these industries are still mostly focused around big launches, because they have to completely reorganize with smaller budgets to attack the long tail. Music, comics, and writing have all made some progress towards this reorganization since both their production and marginal costs in digital form are low, so there's a great opening for the non-pop genres. Games are a bit less so, and video probably the least. But what's slowing this process down the most right now is that a niche audience has to be built from scratch, on a per-creator basis. So either you work within the system and hope for a big door-opening break, or you go completely indie and bootstrap your entire business model, customers, etc. from nothing - which effectively means that even if you are indie, you still need to find a bandwagon to jump onto, or you'll probably never get a critical mass of interest. I suspect that there's a business in providing aggregation mechanisms for untapped genres; I've just started building something along these lines in the last few days :)