Accessibility is the art of making a product as easily available as it can be.
But we shouldn’t pretend accessibility is simply a bolt-on that makes a product appeal to a larger number of the same sort of people.
Instead, by appealing to a wider audience, we also fundamentally change the product.
This happens because we’re often moving from a product that appeals to a niche audience - committed to use it no matter how clunky - to a larger audience who will only use this product if it’s both easy-to-use and provides the utility they want.
(At this stage of the life cycle, we’re probably worried about how our product compares to rival products too.)
//Foreseen consequences?
I was reminded of accessibility’s slippery nature by the news that in the UK, for the third year in a row, the Christmas #1 music single was a charity-oriented cover version by YouTuber LadBaby.
Following his previous success with We Built This City on … Sausage Rolls (2018), and I Love Sausage Rolls (2019), this year’s ‘masterpiece’ was Don’t Stop Me Eating.
It means LadBaby is one of only three music acts to have three consecutive Christmas hits, the others being The Beatles and the Spice Girls.
//Everyone’s metric
The charity/viral aspect is clearly one key element for this success but the main vector has been the inclusion of music streaming into the chart’s metrics.
Back in 2018, it was decided video and audio streams would also be included into the UK singles chart, with 100 paid streams and 600 free (ad-funded) streams being taken as the equivalent of one paid download.
There’s nothing wrong with this, of course. In theory, it makes the charts more accessible to everyone and hence more representative of public taste.
But is this what the music charts are actually supposed to represent?
In an inverted way, weren’t they more representative when they only measured the tastes of people who really cared about music: the friction they overcame actually making their efforts worth counting?