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Hey, don't try to pin all that stuff on mathematicians: the original cloud-gushing author, Chris Anderson, says, "background is in science, starting with studying physics and doing research at Los Alamos."

To the end consumer this means that those with varied 'non-popular' music tastes can get what they want from the online provider of music that they cant get from a shop.

The whole concept of selling lots of one album is changing to selling a few of many albums.

See http://www.thelongtail.com/

This is not really an indictment against Chris Anderson or his most excellent work on the Long Tail concept so much as it is a demonstration of Amazon's lack of infrastructure (or management) in their Amazon Advantage program.

I've heard from more than one person of their frustrations in dealing with this program which has lead me to delay efforts to publish a couple of items through them...

Record labels pay the bills better than PayPal tip jars do.

Eventually the sum of all the independent artists' sales will surpass the sales of artists you'll find at Wal-Mart, but that still doesn't guarantee that the indies will make any amount of money or gain any significant exposure.

• Rhapsody Data (Long Tail of Music)
• Tim O'Reilly (Long Tail of Books)
• Blockbuster v. Netflix, Record Stores v. Online Music (long tail is very flat!)
• The Long Tail of Beer

• Rhapsody Data (Long Tail of Music)
• Tim O'Reilly (Long Tail of Books)
• Blockbuster v. Netflix, Record Stores v. Online Music (long tail is very flat!)
• The Long Tail of Beer

• Rhapsody Data (Long Tail of Music)
• Tim O'Reilly (Long Tail of Books)
• Blockbuster v. Netflix, Record Stores v. Online Music (long tail is very flat!)
• The Long Tail of Beer

• Rhapsody Data (Long Tail of Music)
• Tim O'Reilly (Long Tail of Books)
• Blockbuster v. Netflix, Record Stores v. Online Music (long tail is very flat!)
• The Long Tail of Beer

• Rhapsody Data (Long Tail of Music)
• Tim O'Reilly (Long Tail of Books)
• Blockbuster v. Netflix, Record Stores v. Online Music (long tail is very flat!)
• The Long Tail of Beer

Here's a good (extremely quick) breakdown of where they fit in conceptually.

I suspect statistics will triumph over design, no matter how knowledgeable a group of musicologists you assemble. At the very least, statistics can do it faster and easier, because it skips the messy aesthetic questions and cuts right to behavior of peers (objective data).

One example of this efficiency in action: Pandora has been struggling to include latin and classical music. Last.fm doesn't care if you listen to white noise all day long (as long as someone else is too).

Pandora can behave unhelpfully if you program a station with a bunch of genre crossing interests (I've found that I have to compartmentalize my tastes into subgenres for Pandora to behave sensibly).

But Pandora lets me compartmentalize my tastes for more accuracy. The Last.fm algorithm gets diluted by my punk interests when recommending new funk for me to listen to, and vice versa.

And sometimes, when you're looking for recommendations, sometimes you don't just want to follow the crowd. Sometimes you want the help of an expert whose taste you admire, and sometimes you want something completely random.

Wouldn't it be great if there was a way to create a station on Pandora using your top artists of the week in Last.fm automatically? Wouldn't it be great to import all your distates from Pandora into Last.fm?

Who's got a script to hybridize these two, make them greater than the sum of their parts?

So I'm a big reader of gapingvoid.com and www.thelongtail.com. I see a few major problems the "music industry" have. (Do they realize they're just RIAA? Music has always and will always do just fine.)

First, basic identity problem. They don't do anything people can get really thrilled about. Sure it's nice to be able to have your music actually arrive, but it's not like most of us care which studio or trucking company actually got hired in the process, or how it was done. On top of that, they make a lot of customers and good musicians really, really dislike them. For all kinds of reasons you can follow in any number of posts here. It's not helping that an increasing number of people on both ends of the supply and demand chain realize that they can just as easily do without 'em. (Not to mention how distastetful it is to be thought of as part of a "supply and demand chain.")

On top of being largely unnecessary and disliked on average, their entire top ten hits model isn't the best way to deal with art. (And face it, good music is art, not industrial product.) I don't care what's on their top ten hit list - their top ten hit list includes the opinions of thousands of middle school girls, probably several hundred skinheads, a bunch of washed out hippies, and any number of other people who's taste I have absolutely no repsect for. That one song by Inverse Cinematics which can't be found in any store is worth far more to me than a dozen of their top ten lists, and 99.9% of the rest of you wouldn't give that song 10 seconds of your time.

And, to top the whole thing off: Their vision for the future means they stay in control of what gets out there based on mass market research, tight control over distribution, and locking things up with DRM and lawsuits against fans and musicians alike. What they're fighting against is a future in which musicians have a direct relationship with their fans (to the point where some could reasonably do shows in people's living rooms) and both actively seek ways to support eachother having a really good time.

Given those choices, I think it's high time they crawled back under the $sys$ they came from.

Chris Anderson also got one early and is interested in the Xboox 360 from a Long Tail perspective as a media center.

Chris Anderson also got one early and is interested in the Xboox 360 from a Long Tail perspective as a media center.

Well, if Sony is going to be trying to install rootkits onto my computer, they could not pay me to download their movies. Screw-em.

However, barring malware distribution by major corporations, I believe that Apple has showed the industry exactly the business model to follow for media distribution, so, provided a fair and reasonable DRM policy like that of iTunes, I would be more than happy to pay $5/movie, but not more than that. Come on now, the industry has the opportunity here to make far more money off of not just recently released movies, but following a long-tail model, they could make obscene amounts of money off of older movies/content that is no longer available or being distributed. Think about all the old classic Sci-Fi movies or classic movies that are only available on TCM on occasion? What if you really could watch them "on demand" rather than waiting for them to rotate through. How about old TV shows?

Being able to watch movies at home on your computer or on your laptop on the plane is not just a convenience that they should be charging premium costs for. It is a mass market scheme to drive insanely high revenues if the price point is made attractive. If they were smart, these movies would be made available more cheaply and the "premium" experience could still be had at the theatre.

So, for an industry that already is sitting on media that is no longer generating significant income, they have the opportunity to create potential huge revenue streams for media already bought and paid for, so why gouge the customer? It is a surefire recipe for slower adoption, delayed revenue streams and potentially failure.

Thank you Apple! Once again this company (along with ABC this time) has the stones to step up and offer a service that is a market primed to explode. The iTMS has proven to be a good long tail business model for the distribution of music, offering popular and otherwise out of print or hard to find (Indie) tracks that are simply unavailable in the large retail outlets. I have not watched much TV in the past while, but having the iTMS model of distribution for TV shows that are out of syndication or are otherwise hard to obtain would be a tremendous boon. And if Ted Turner would get on the ball, all sorts of older movies could also be made available via this model, that would increase revenues over what they are making by the current limited access to the media. Documentaries, "foreign" (to the US) films, and indie films could make it truly big by talking to Apple. Sundance Channel and TCM, you are the big guys in this market......So, are you paying attention? And for you TIVOheads out there, in essence, if this propagates to the rest of the industry, this will be a centralized TIVO allowing you to pick and choose without having to take the time to program, and like the article said, this could make the ala carte system moot. Who knows, this could even open up the option of letting us pay for content that is without commercials or get it for "free" if we agree to watch the commercials. It's could simply be our choice.

P.S., Ted, thanks for the buffalo ranching, but there is more money to be made still in media. Don't give up.

TV is a vast wasteland of crap, with a few great exceptions like Galactica and Six Feet Under.

The blogosphere is full of nonsense, self-referential mental masturbation, and useless blogrolls. Then there are blogs like Daring Fireball, The Long Tail, and WWDNK which are each compelling in their own way.

Spam, though, is 100% crap. In that 10% lies the difference.

No matter who you are, someone you don't know has found the coolest stuff.

The sad reality is that most of my friends have rotten taste in music (I don't hold it against them), while the music recommendations I actually follow are mostly from people I've never met.

The assumption that there's a correlation between the people I like and the products I like is a flawed one.

This really plays into The Long Tail scenario that is so often spoken of these days. I wonder how long before the major portals starts making deals with these owners of massive amounts of content. When a revenue model is established around this release of content we will see things really pick up. I am betting on instream advertising as the way they do it.

Given the quality of the writing in the blogs I have seen, I doubt that many of the Blog People are in the habit of sustained reading of complex texts.

Yo is sure to get schooled from my mad skillz. Oh by the way, this 3l33t haxor had oatmeal for breakfast this morning. Oh and here's a picture of my cat.

It is entirely possible that their intellectual needs are met by an accumulation of random facts and paragraphs.

On one level, blogs are intended for brief communications or thoughts that often revolve around a central theme, but not always. Often they are intended as a means for maintaining communication with family and friends or as a creative outlet. However, this guy has obviously not been very informed or is lazy about finding informative/interesting blogs out there like:

Kevin Sites whose reporting pioneered the use of the blog in combat reporting.

Dan Gillmor whose new efforts are targeted at grassroots journalism from sources exactly like blogs.

Or Chris Anderson's blog The Long Tail which discusses businesses, economic, cultural and political models whose goals are to take advantage of the significant portion of those populations underlying the distal distributions of a curve.

And many others whose careful investigation, research, thought and reporting go into the content on their blogs.

Oh, and then there are the blogs like mine........

Do you think the traditional music album is dying out because of advances in technology?

Nope. As long as artists that have something substantial to say exist, there will be albums.

If one's only source of new music is MTV and crap like that, one may think that the albums are a thing of the past. But, that's about the same as eating only in McDonald's and thinking that traditional gourmet cuisine is dying out.

Market for music is much, much bigger than Top40. In fact, if anything, advances in technology, enabling the Long Tail phenomenon (http://www.thelongtail.com/) will do just the opposite. When everyone can trivially access every bit of music ever recorded, albums will have a much easier time finding an audience.

Sure, some forms of music will never be strong on albums (dance, club oriented music), but again, they don't represent the majority of music out there.