Slashdot Mirror
The Long Tail
Chris Anderson writes "I'm the editor of Wired Magazine and if you'll forgive the autohornblowing, I think you'll be interested in my piece in our latest issue. It argues, with a lot of new data, that the entertainment industry is shifting from an era of hit-driven economics to one of niche-driven economics. Content that was once relegated to the fringe, beneath the threshold of commercial viability, is now increasingly able to find a market in distributed audiences, marking a shift towards the previously-neglected Long Tail of the demand curve."
A notable exception was Red Dwarf, which many people recommended as the next Hitchhikers, as good as Hitchhikers, etc. I found the two books to be like they said, but perhaps not as they intended, I found Red Dwarf to be very derivative and fairly juvenile, as if someone really loved a book so much that they wrote in a similar setting (sci-fi in this case.) I didn't pursue it past the two books I was given, it was a bit of a downer, too as the authors had a small group of characters to play with after killing off the entire human race and finding bugger all in space.
I've had satellite radio for two years now and can tell honestly say I don't listen to current pop anymore, as I've found swing and standards to be awesome music, it's a bit puzzling how music evolved from that to Britney Spears, et al, but as The Long Tail indicates, we're leaving a top-down dictation of our musical tastes and finding our own way, whether in the past or in the present but other genres than commercial radio wants us to hear (and buy.)
Years ago I moved to Santa Cruz, which has the Nickelodeon and Del Mar theaters. I've found about 3/4 of the films I watch are there rather than the big hollywood multiplex (Santa Cruz 9) down the street. I'm more surprised and intrigued by what I see on those screens (which included Touching The Void) than the shiney, candy-like offerings from down south. I can't say I'd have had the same choice in the city I moved from, where no such independent cinemas existed, shy of driving 125 miles to the Maple Theater in Troy, MI.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
you'll forgive the autohornblowing
On the contrary, i'm quite impressed by your agility, even jealous.
The long tail resonates with me in a way that makes me think this is the future of entertainment. And it should be. If you want to see the salvation of the music industry, it is not DRM or 'the next big thing'. It's Wilco. It's Radiohead. It's the Roots. It's thousands of artists you've never heard of and likely never will.
Back in college I was a record collector. I would spend hours upon hours trolling every used record store in the Bay Area looking for obscure items on my 'must have' list. Whenever I visited a new city, I would always try to hit some used stores, regardless of the weather or the character of the neighborhoods they may be located in. I also spent nearly as much time in used book stores looking for anything that struck me as interesting at the time. Over the course of the years and several cross country moves I've shed most of the books and all of the vinyl. My cd collection has plummeted from several thousand down to a few hundred. And yet I now have access to more literature and music than ever.
I've been using iTunes for over a year now, and I've bought more music in the past 6 months through iTunes than in the entire 3 years prior to the release of iTunes. I don't spend much time listening to whatever is on the top 40 charts. Most of the artists I like live in the long tail. They are often even names you might know, but they are not chart toppers. They won't go platinum, but they'll still make money. I worked at a used CD store in Colorado for a while, and the owner there understood the long tail even though he didn't understand it as such. When people were selling us CDs he would just look at the titles and be able to tell you what it was worth without even looking it up on the computer. Here's a tip for you: you can always get top dollar for a Frank Zappa CD.
Already posted on my blog, but what the hell.
this is getting old and so are you
blog
Why does /. succumb to these blatant types of advertising. If the article was submitted by a non-Wired affiliated person ... I might have read it. At least some other Slash-Advertisers post anonymously. pfft.
KARMA TAG! You're it.
ungggghhhh
I'd like to use s;ashdot to promote / advertise my magazine for free too....
this weeks feature story is "Broadband is faster than modem dial up"
http://slashdot.org/~GuyFawkes/journal
Can you switch my Wired Magazine subscription to a slashdot subscription, so I can at least read the online articles before everyone else?
Haven't read the article yet (gotta get that karma, baby!) but I think the movie Primer is a great example of a niche movie. (And the niche is us geeks.) It's a hard movie to follow and is definately geared towards smart folks, so the audience is bound to be small, but it will definately generate a profit. Dig a bit and you'll see why...
:)
Oh yeah, it's being released in Dallas and New York on Friday. More cities to follow.
Lots of pics of long tails and demand for curves.
I wouldn't bother buying Wired magazine, it has way too many advertisements in it. The ratio of advertisements to articles looks to be about 100 to 1 at the moment.
Don't get me wrong, I can understand they need to make money but last months Wired only had about 5 articles, only one of which I would call full length, but before the contents page there are at least 5 pages of advertisements.
but it would have been a lot more interesting if the author had provided us with some background information. He now makes a lot of statements, but where did he get all this information from?? the idea of the paper is nice though, now it is time to write something a bit more scientific about the subject?
http://www.virtualconcepts.nl/
That Wired had an article on tail recursion. Woa!
For every page of insightful content thou shall have 7-8 pages of advertising thinly disguised as "tech updates" or "cutting edge information"!
Cloud City Digital: DVD Production at its cheapest/finest
Thank you for advertising Wired on Slashdot.
By the way, your magazine fucking SUCKS. Always has.
In fact, my friends and I use "Wired" as a kind of measure of quality. As in-
"Man, that chick is really ugly. I wouldn't fuck her with a stolen dick"
"Yeah, but she's still better than an issue of 'Wired'"
"I concur"
It sounds great and I hope it is all true, but how can 'the tail' possibly pay for projects that cost hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars? Many movie, music, game etc depend on the hits to bring in cash to pay for the misses.
I guess we will see how things turn out. I'm not saying the article is wrong, I'm just saying 'the business' will have to change.
niche, eddy, mainstream,
there are only two stories:
hero goes on a journey
a stranger comes to town
all the rest is hornblowing
and markets
...I think this is confusing somewhat random picking up of the novel and different being in vogue, with there being a widening of the focus.
There's only 20 spots on the best seller list. There are generally more than 20 good books that have come out recently. Quite a lot of really ambitious, deserving stuff is out there, that gets ignored in favor of "what everyone else is reading." You see similar trends in music, movies, etc.
Sure, there are a few critics who went down the road less traveled, found something new, and held it up and said "hey! this is pretty good." And people listened. But has that really created a wider market?
Sure Into Thin Air did well. And now that author's other book is doing well. Great. So, name me one author (or one book you've read) on Skydiving. Mountain biking. White water rafting. You say "well, there aren't any." My point is "how would you know?"
The net here, is that we've still got popularity that's driven by what's getting recommended as "the new hot thing." And, like lemmings, people flock to it. The mainstream has fairly limited bandwidth.
If nothing else, this is proof that there are a lot of reasonably well-written books out there, that a lot of people might enjoy, and picking one at random and giving it the star treatment can make it a success.
My favorite experiment on this--Stephen King (in his preface to "the Bachman Books," a collection of works he pubslihed under the alias "Richard Bachman." These were published without fanfare, under a name no one knew. About as well written as any of his other books, just less well known. They didn't do poorly per se--they did all right, but nothing like his "Stephen King" books. And, once he was unmasked and people knew he had written them, all of a sudden they turned into MUCH bigger sellers....
It's still a question of marketing hype.
I subscribe to Wired and I read the article a few days ago when I got the magazine.
I want the article to be right, but it seems more like a hope than any evidence. Amazon, Netflix, etc are selling/renting a lot of material that traditional stores don't stock, but it doesn't seem like it's indicating any great shift.
Amazon was most dramatic as far as how far much of their sales are of items not stocked at normal book stores. But that just makes sense; if I can buy the book at a brick and morter store I will because then I get a chance to see it, read a bit of it and be sure I like it. Once I've done all that, I don't want to wait a few days to get it from amazon just to save a few percent, I want it right away, so I'll buy it at the store. If I can't find the book in normal stores, then I'll look at amazon.
If this is true, the Canadian movie business would finally find it's own. Up to now, the movies that are produced in canada simply have not received the exposure that they deserve. Many of the worlds best directors, writers and editors are canadian but unfortunately most of them now work in CA doing what they don't want to.
:]
Hmmm Maybe it's time to get the Panasonic 24 fps DV cam
Seeing as how the web is sicophantic and I already read this when linked from BoingBoing, I actually have RTFA.
And I don't like the style- it comes off as scientific (Ohhh! It even has GRAPHS! That must be science!) but really is just a bunch of gross generalizations. This kind of crap is what keeps me away from wired.
Though I do appreciate the mention of MP3.com as a long-tail only failure, there are significant issues with respect to business plan specifics that are completely glossed over yet are central to the success Anderson talks about. If Touching the Void weren't reprinted with a vengence, then the resurge wouldn't even exist.
Also, lets talk about the major underpining of Netflix that allows it to "over throw the tyrrany of space"- the US postal system. If Netflix couldn't send the disks cheap enough, fast enough, or had more broken DVDs than they do, they would be out of business.
In short, this whole article reminds me of a DotCom pitch- full of colorful and modern-styled graphics, long on exposition, but with holes.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
This trend is also a generational phenomenon. In researching the buying habits of current teenagers for a client, I was shocked to find that the majority would be LESS likely to buy a product that was used by their favorite star ( see national youth survey on brand loyalty). Nor were the surveyed youth very prone to peer pressure. The results pointed to a high degree of individualism amongst this group.
If people stop buying what the stars are wearing/using and don't respond to peer pressure, then buyers will fragment and the long tail will rise in importance.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
be the editor of a industry (?) mag? if I were to post what I though was an article that readers here could be interested in, but was created by the company I work for, is this wrong?
...and to go off on a tangent and combine it with election-year politics, the "long tail" would be a perfect place to test out rank aggregation methods (a fancy term for voting). You could have people vote for the songs and artists by plurality, IRV/STV, Borda, Condorcet, Approval, or however they want, and they produce the rankings based on whatever criteria you want. You could even see suggestion by people whose rankings were similar to yours.
Get as much tail as you can!
Unlike "hard goods", digital products have greater agility when it comes to gauging demand. You don't have to wait for sales figures to come back from stores after end-of-day. You don't have to worry about replenishment after you sell out of a product. There's really no overhead incurred with carrying a digital product, other than securing licensing and providing a delivery mechanism. This makes for a great depth of product and, depending on the ease of use for the customer, will keep a customer coming back if they know they can find exactly what their looking for.
-Randy
At long last I can indulge my cravings for video of dwarf amputee line dancing.
I must say, everyone who's been telling me to RTFA has been giving good advise. If you're reading this, but you haven't RTFA, you should RTFA now. I agree with the assessment that the traditional 80/20 rule is no longer in effect for some entertainment markets (or at least, not as much as the Powers That Be would make it seem). I've purchased CDs from Norway and Germany that weren't available in the US. I'm always disappointed by Blockbuster's "Top 40"-esque approach to stocking movies. I'm glad to see that it's not just me. Mike
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. --Nietzsche
The article basically says that the internet and the information provided in it will allows services and products that are only of interest to a few people to be profitable, by marketing them globally. Well duh. As always, the porn industry is the leader in technology and market trends. Ten years ago sites popped up that provided pictures of one-armed women in golf cleats doing obscene things with cottage cheese. There were forty people who would pay to see that, just enough to make it profitable if you roped them all in from around the world. The mainstream media is just catching on. Provide that obscure service and weirdos around the world will google for it.
Huh? This is not ECO5101? Maybe Lynda de la Vina knows what nonsense you speak, but we mere mortals are way too stupid to catch your meaning . . . dude !!
I'm old enough to remember when Wired was relevant. Then it decided to dedicate all of its covers to managers rather than technologies, and focus on their human side (short story: they are all dweebs), rather than on the technical aspect of their contributions, which is why they became famous/wealthy in the first place.
Thus Wired became the "Cosmopolitan" of the internet revolution, with the sole difference that the faces on the cover are ugly.
I quickly droped my subscription and none of my tech friends read it either. In fact I can't recall when was the last time I saw an issue of the magazine.
I thought Wired was just a write-off vehicle for some company that had millions of gallons of fluorescent and metallic ink on their hands. You mean there's words in that magazine?
pooptruck
The entertainment is a unique beast in that it permiates almost every part of our lives. From the morning news to the cereal we eat to the drive to and from work, people will find they are being bombarded by the entertainment industry. It didn't used to be that way, but has come on really strong in recent years. Group that with the number of movies that Hollywood produces each year, and you will find entertainment sensory overload?
"So what?" you might ask. Well, the problem here is that there appears to be only so many formulas that main stream Hollywood can produce. So, all that sensory overload is starting to become the same thing over and over again. How many firefighter movies do we need? Obviously one more since Ladder 49 found its way in theatres. And, if you have seen it, you will find (besides the way it ends) that it lacks originality in almost every facet of its existence. Same thing with Shark Tale. Get down to it, its just a gangster movie with a kids front put on it. I am not the only one who has noticed this, either. Most in my group feel that most every movie formula has been done to death by the movie industries. Look at the movie Taxi coming out soon. Go and rent the likes of National Security or Lethal Weapon and you will see basically the same formula.
This is where the indie industry is coming to the rescue with their niche titles. Its why your Napolean Dynamites are doing so well while main stream stuff is struggling to stay in theatres for any length of time. Its why Donnie Darko has such an underground following where as Armegeddon is considered loud crap by many.
This, of course, extends down to the rental businees. People are hungry for entertainment and these niche titles fit that bill to a tee. I, for one, am glad we have a Netflix that is able to provide the alternatives to the Grade A blockbuster crap from mainstream studios. Otherwise, I think I would have given up on the movie industry a long time ago.
Bryan R.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, or $12.50 as seen on eBay.....
Breakfast served all day!
It's ok, Jason- we all make mistakes, but at least you've come out and admitted you have a problem, and that's the first step.
Who's next?
Please help metamoderate.
I completely agree that the future of commerce is a niche-driven market. That is why when I created my company -- WeaselBalls.com , we decided to cater to a specific kind of consumer, and only that kind of consumer.
In the long run, I think it's going to pay off.
It's a fringe-content article on Slahdot about pushing fringe content to distributed audiences through alternative channels! I was surprised that it didn't use itself as an example!
For a far better analysis of the issues, see "The Perils of the Imitation Age" by Eric Bonabeau in the Harvard Business Review June 2004.
say...2+ years ago?
...post your Curriculum Vitae.
You are basically using your position at Wired to override the whole moderation process to publicize an article you wrote and your views. If you are going to do that, I would like to see if you are more qualified, at least on paper, than the average slashdot user. I don't think being a writer/editor for Wired automatically makes your voice about economics more important than another Slashdot user. If you were editor of the Wall St. Journal or a professor of economics, then maybe.
I will give you respect, however, for being honest about publicizing your own article and not using some pseudoname. Perhaps Slashdot should create a special category like shamelessplug.slashdot.org.
can't sleep. clowns will eat me.
However, the article did not need to be as long as it was. The same point was repeated over and over, and although there's nothing wrong with presenting evidence, I thought, "Ok, I get it." The article also had that high-school-position-paper feel to it. I would have preferred to see more facts and a little less dissertation.
Whilst the concept is interesting (more choice, more sales), what the article doesn't take into account, is that for many people, they'll only spend a limited amount per month/week/year/whatever on films or music. I live in a small city, with a smallish HMV. I know that if I lived in a much larger city, with a record store with more choice, I wouldn't spend more money on records - I'd spend the same - that's all I can afford. I might choose different records, but the total spent wouldn't change. It may well be that documentaries are selling more on netflix, but one can't assume that these documentaries are 'as well as' another film - they might just replace a 'top 100' film, and so the company doesn't gain any more...
Content that was once relegated to the fringe, beneath the threshold of commercial viability, is now increasingly able to find a market in distributed audiences, marking a shift towards the previously-neglected Long Tail of the demand curve.
Unless you are the part of the fringe that wants the original unedited Star Wars trilogy released on DVD. In which case you are SOL.
Maybe you should educate the morons of tomorrow so they'll stop believing the leaders of tomorrow. - Dogbert
That doesn't make sense, Miss Moneypenny. Amazon is cheaper than your LB, and shipping is probably free, too. So it takes a week, can't you wait to read some off-the-wall book ? Or do you make a habit of dropping $10 on the ground and walking away ?
Basically I just look at the weekly box office for each movie divided by the number of screens squared and that tells me how much acceleration the market is placing on the distribution channels for the movies.
It works pretty well. Playing the Hollywood Stock Exchange with this metric does a pretty good job of detecting bargains.
Seastead this.
He could have copy'n'pasted other news sites' content to his own blog, added some banner ads to make money, and then sucked michael and CmdrTaco off so they would post anything he submits as "news".
Really, Roland needs to become an editor, or at least be given his own category. He can astroturf for cash all he wants then, and we'll be able to ignore his stories.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
It's pretty much the same the other way round for books based on a film or TV series. My take on it is that the arts don't often translate well across media.
Deleted
test
With today's technology, it is possible to profitably release a product that looks like it came from a "big player" in the industry, but is manufactured in batches of a few hundred, as orders permit. This gives us tremendous flexibility to create and customize new products based upon a central core.
My point? Its not just music and publishing that are being morphed by technology. Its also software -- think of all the shareware and open source projects that have dramatically changed the landscape of the software industry.
Cable comes along and adds a few more channels, at a lower distribution cost. Some local unaffiliated stations become "superstations" (TBS, USA I think, WGN), and a few niche players develop (most notably MTV, VH1, CMT, and eventually TLC, Discovery, etc). But remember the old cable boxes? They had a cap of about 36 channels, so there was no room for diversification, only replacement of one interest with another.
Cable began to broaden as TV sets came cable-ready, adding broader interests again, but the floodgates have really opened with the advent of digital cable and satellite. Now, the incremental distribution cost of a channel is marginal. Channels number in the hundreds, and more unusual interests can now be explored - think Discovery Health, VH1 Classic, TechTV, Game Show Network, etc. The distributers are still limited, but those limitations continue to fall as cable providers find ways to squeeze more bandwidth out of their lines and satellite adds capacity in the sky through new satellites and better (or just more) compression. The new limits are becoming simply the ability of the channel to remain profitable, and provide their channel at a price the dish and cable services find profitable as well. Content is getting cheaper as media has become near omnipresent. We have channels on local Atlanta cable - Falconsvision and Comcast Sports South. Both capitalize almost entirely on previously recorded and produced content, repackaged. By aggregating existing content, they're able to provide something that distinguishes them from the satellite providers, and is easily a profitable endeavor.
I see this trend stalling for a while as increased capacity is used for distribution of the same content in higher resolution (HD). This pause may be quite drawn out, depending on when the consumer decides that the image is "good enough". (There is little demand, for example, for higher resolution digital audio. I don't think 1080i is the end of the upgrade cycle for video.) Alternately, a new distribution channel (easy to use internet-based channel surfing) may accelerate this growth, but this seems unlikely for quite some time - with ~15 Megabit/s plus bandwidth requirements for compressed HDTV, it will be a while before the average home is able to receive content at a resolution that can compare to current TV technology. More hindering is the lack of a broadcast mechanism for the internet (one source, unlimited listeners within a certain range). A PC with gigabit ethernet would only allow 66 HD concurrent viewers, provided the hardware could keep up. This tech needs to cheaply scale to hundreds of thousands to become practical.
Seen any BadMarketing lately?
Actually, that wasn't Chris Anderson's Wired back in 1996. A few years after Conde-Nast (publishers of Cosmopolitan, among other things) bought Wired in 1998, they brought in Chris as the new editor-in-chief, with the provision that he could hire his own staff and redesign the magazine. So the Wired you know and loathe today is Chris's baby -- not the one you might still have some nostalgic memories for, back during the bubble.
Breakfast served all day!
In fact, Wired could probably cut deals to put their magazine in seats in business class.
Hence, Hollywood, which produces most of the films, must target a fragmented audience. Each film must be profitable on a tiny percentage of the viewing audience. By definition, such films are niche films
Consider "Star Trek". When it first aired, its ratings were considered terrible, but those same ratings would be considered a success today.
The negative side of niche films is that they divide the culture of the nation. In the golden age of TV, with only 3 TV networks, a huge percentage of the population shared the same TV experience by virtue of watching the same TV programs. Now, with so many TV networks and so many films, where is the binding glue for a common culture?
What is remarkable is that FOX news regularly beats the competition in this fragmented market, besting ABC, CBS, and NBC. Perhaps, there is something to this "No Spin" thing.
I found this article pretty interesting, and I wonder if his thesis would apply to venture capitalists. I've raised venture capital for startups for two decades, and one theme common to most of the VCs I've dealt with is their search for the "hit" company. The usual hit/zombie/crash ratio VCs quote is 1/3/6, that is out of 10 investments, 1 will come in big, 3 will keep going but bring minimal ROI, and 6 will go under. This seems close to the 80/20 Pareto ratio in the article.
Would any professional VCs mind commenting on their investment model? Might there be a place for VCs who invest on the basis of multiple successful niche companies, rather than looking for the blockbuster hit?
I also think this was one of the biggest problems with the dot-com boom. Everyone was falling over themselves to make everything mass-market in order to gain the most "eyeballs" and sell more ad revenue. It's been shown that people prefer more "niche" content aimed at their interests. It's interesting to note that you can often sell more expensive advertising since you are delivering a targeted audience instead of a wide, undefined audience.
I've been doing this in my professional life, too. I'm a developer of Meridian 59, a classic online RPG. The game focuses a lot on player vs. player (PvP) combat, with the advantage of having a long time to develop a very balanced system. We've targeted the game to the niche that is interested in this type of game, and we make enough money to get by.
I think we'll see another large, sustainable boom once people realize that servicing a niche can be very profitable.
Have fun,
Brian "Psychochild" Green
MMO developer's blog
It was such a horrific thing when MTV Unplugged came into vogue, all your favorite bands were shown to be unable to carry a tune outside of a studio. Do they even have that show anymore? Back in my day, if you had talent, and you went out and played shows, your talent would get you recognition. Nowadays, you have to audition your tits instead of your voice. (I think I still have a fair shot, LOL)
WARNING: Shameless plug!
Our band uses no vocal sculpting - all but one of our songs was recorded in one take. All natural baby!
www.curedbyporno.com
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
I think he was re-planting liners from older CD's.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I read the article in the dead tree version when I first received it in the mail and found if very insightful.
The one analogy I liked was that the Catholic church lost control of content when moveable type was invented. Perhaps the RIAA won't take 400 years to realize that Galileo (in this case P2P) was right.
There was also an article in the mag about the program director for XM. You can draw some comparisons with XM since they have a number of niche stations that could play selections from the long tail.
It seems as though Mr Anderson is describing two different effects here, though they both spring from one root cause: the advent of large Internet-based stores with low overheads which have an effectively national (or even global) market.
On the one hand, there is the 'long tail' of the curve, that is, the sale of many different items, each of which sells in low volume. These are the niche products which most people will never have heard of.
On the other hand, he describes the impact the new economy has had on bringing niche products into the mainstream, making them big hits.
His first example (the success of the book Touching the Void) is really of the second type. It's not an example of the long tail at all, but an instance where the new economy has thrust an obsure book into the mainstream. This is really not essentially different to the very familiar case in which an artist, scientist, etc. is only appreciated long after their original work is produced --- only after some comfortable context has been provided in which to situate the work.
Phoenix, Boston, Little Rock, see a pattern?
As a geek, I don't sit around in meetings trying to figure out ways to draw a bigger audience. I don't own any theaters and I likely never will. Also, the article describes the obvious trend that's occuring everywhere in all the things and services available lately, i.e. more choices and increased customizability. So all I get from the article is the fact that I can expect more independent films and more variety in the future, which I kind of already do.
BTM
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
Can we get a new mod, '+1 Dwarf cripple humor'? I gave it +1 humorous, but that doesn't seem to be quite right...
Slashdot has to pay the bills too, welcome to the real world.
Post many times on the same story in hopes of getting moderator's attention.
Fucking karma whore.
Hmmmm. The editor who posted this is also Roland Piquepaille's boyfriend. Wonder... All these boys hang at the same gay bar?
Some people might worry that Blockbuster can take over and do the same thing Netflix has done, by offering a subscription that you can use to get movies from a local store.
But Blockbuster can only carry so many movies, and hardly any are the ones I want to see. I have 200+ movies in the queue and think Netflix will be around for quite some time, because they embrace diversity wholeheartedly and I can wait a day or two for some really obscure movie in the mail.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Thanks for posting an article to Slashdot that might possibly be of some interest to those that read it. Of course, the fact that you're the editor of Wired magazine means that many of the holier than thou slashdotters will now take the opportunity to tell you how much they dislike your publication, how irrelevant it is, how many cooler publications they've read etc.
Some may even go so far as to suggest that they have the opportunity to fsck actual chicks with both stolen and non-stolen dicks (see parent above).
God forbid, you may have actually posted this article because you frequent slashdot and thought it might be interesting to those here.
between december of 2003 and january 2004 something died at wired. go away, evil editor, and take your POS magazine with you.
I could be wrong here, but I think you may be confusing some nebulous niche-driven economic model with good old fast-food like convenience.
Sure, you could go to a fancy french restaurant and get some good food, for I don't know, $50 a plate. Or you could waltz down to your nearest McDonalds and grab a plate of crap for $5.
This is why people use NetFlix and iTunes. Mp3s in general. The convenience of it. Why would I want to drive to the CD store, dig through CDs, come home and rip it, just so I can slap it in with the other gigs of mp3s I have. When I could sit on my ass, download it and be done with it?
Sure, there's a greater selection, but I sincerely doubt that is the main draw. It's a pleasant side effect of the lack of overhead, as you point out. But that's not why people do it. They see the recommendations, it becomes much easier to stumble across rare music online. And when it's not expensive, and convenient, I'll snag a no-name band and check them out. I probably wouldn't if I had to go actually go to the store and buy a CD.
And the fact that recommendations encourage people to look into new music/books/movies doesn't say much about people's tastes... as much as it says that they still do what they are told when it comes to taste.
And there's various posts from people, "I listen to X unknown band, and I have niche tastes." Well, in most of those cases, if the music isn't coming out of you or your neighbor's garage, it's probably not nearly as "niche" as you'd like to think it is.
And then there's the people who perpetually seek out obscure and shitty music just for the obscurity factor. Even they aren't really niche buyers. I think most of the time they'd buy whatever ISN'T mainstream. It's not a specific niche, as long as they is some shitty, mostly unknown music for them to rave about, they are fine.
It's very easy to please the two major groups. (pop-chasers, whether they realize it or not AND those who chase obscurity for the sake of it, the intellectual aftertaste.)
So, I don't think it's the "Long Tail" selection that is drawing in consumers. I think it's simply the price and convenience of it all, that gives people the opportunity to experiment with other, less popular movies and music.
There is no American teen sound and hasn't been for years, and the music business model hasn't really changed since the days of American Bandstand. A musician who might do perfectly well on his own selling 10K records a year at $5/profit per record isn't helped by the industry to sell 20K or 50K, he's dumped by the label and out of the nusic business.
Remember heavy metal? It's fragmented into a number of subgenres as different as chalk and cheese.
I'm sure this is going on in lots of markets that I'm not even remotely familiar with.
How can gigantic entertainment monoliths get their ears into enough sub-markets to find the most profitable players? Well, automated analysis of P2P network downloads is one possibility, but they're paying for it while they are trying to make them illegal.
This is the content industry's ultimate long-tern problem, and if they don't solve it, no amount of DRM and anti-technology legislation can save them.
Tech Public Policy stuff
But what he failed to see is that while new distribution channels are opening up which allow profits to be made in the "tail", as he puts it, there is a parallel phenomena surrounding the creation of media. The same laws surrounding big business' approach to 'hits' in distribution--that scarce distribution channels require them to focus on a few titles which have a potential for big profits--apply to the creation of the media in the first place. No film or record company is going to produce and market a title with the potential to only hit a small niche market, even if it will find that market spot on with the likes of iTunes or Netflix. At least, no media company that operates under a traditional model.
He states "That leaves the costs of finding, making, and marketing music. Keep them as they are, to ensure that the people on the creative and label side of the business make as much as they currently do.". But just as new technology is opening up new avanues for media distribution, it's giving us completely new ways to produce and market that media. A band can now cut an album and put it online using inexpensive equipment. A good band can now get promoted online through word of mouth. No need for expensive A&R men, no need for payola on the radio, no need for any of the services traditionally provided by the record companies. As technology gets better, the film industry is being changed too. A special effect CGI that cost millions to do just 15 years ago can now be accomplished on a desktop computer.
The point is, just as changes in technology are changing the economics of distribution, they are changing the economics of media manufacture and promotion. This is a great thing.
The Internet is generally stupid
before seeing this Personal Horn Tooting. I think the article does articulate a different business model that many people may just refuse to see. I believe that it was Tim O'Reilly who wrote an article saying that it was the Googles, Amazons etc. that were really creating the new killer software, not Sun or MS, and that part of the reason was that they gave more control to users. This theme is echoed in the book We The Media.
I've lived through 30+ years of overhyped predictions about the future, starting way back when with The Greening of America. But there's a big difference between a book/essay that's trying to shape the future by exhorting its readers to make the future that way and one that is slightly more objective and says that it thinks things are developing in such a way as to come to this predicted future. I mention all this just to say "I hope that I won't be fooled again."
And that I think what these various authors say is most likely true: there seems to be an inevitable democritization of media/commerce that allows for the Long Tail, whether it be in newspapers, bookstores, blogging, music stores or whatever. All seem to have the common thread of better too much than too little, better too all-inclusive than too exclusive. From what I've seen they are right and we might, I hope, all gain from it.
I just wish I could figure out how to make a good living from it.:-)
Just keep in mind that this is the same magazine that predicted "The Long Boom" in 1998, which was 35+ years of sustained global growth led by the emerging Asian economies.
Of course Wired lost me way back when they ahd a caver that said "Viacom Doesn't Suck".
SPOILER!
Be careful reading the story / production, the bit about production gives away what mysterious discovery the scientists make
Recently I picked up a superb video game -- Katamari Damacy on PS2. Conventional game-industry economic theory dictates that if you want to make money you will publish a game in one of a narrow set of genres: jumping platformer, first-person shooter, fighting game, etc.
A game involving rolling a ball of junk around and around, attracting objects as you go till it gets bigger and bigger and bigger, doesn't have a place in this conventional view. But I think Namco, much to their credit, realizes certain things about the US game market: it has at its center a richly connected core of young adults who have discriminating tastes in gameplay and a fondness for the offbeat and original, and who laughed at the "All your base are belong to us" jokes. KD appeals directly to these cultural values. Before, Japanese companies were reticent to release games that were a) weird and b) possessed a distinctly Japanese cultural flavor. Word of mouth spreads quickly about games like this throughout the chewy-nougat otaku center of American game fans, and what was once a sort of throwaway $20 release has become something of a cult hit.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
I think the enternainment industry is just trying to squeeze every last damn cent from the demand curve. Because the damn price of hookers and cocaine just keeps going up.
Two quick comments, and I'm not quite sure what to do with them:
... but the price is negligable compared to a 10,000sqft warehouse to store a million standard CDs.
1) The entire point the article is trying to make, and thus avoids making, is that electronic commerse violates one of the most sacred foundations of economics: scarcity. This whole online vs. retail distribution model does nothing to explain the fundamental difference between the internet and brick&mortar, which is *there is no physical inventory to worry about on the internet*. At least, not at the scales we're talking about. Sure, it costs something to store a million songs digitally in eighteen different incompatible formats
The bottom line is that the online model of distribution has lowered the break-even point of multimedia to the creation phase. Books, Music, Movies all become the same as signals on a wire that can be plugged in anywhere in civilization. Once the initial cost of production and advertising has been recouped, there's a *minimal* cost to distribution online that scares economists and retailers alike. You don't have to worry about stock, about shipping, or about inventory management. Thus, a twenty thousand dollar movie like Clerks or Blair Witch can easily become a hit -- because it takes much less effort to make more profit than a hundred-million dollar blockbuster!
2) When mentioning the MP3.com lawsuits, the article fails to mention the paradox of it's greatest innovation and fatal flaw. The reason MP3.com became so huge and the reason it got sued was because of a service that allowed you to put your CD in your PC at home, scan it for authenticity, then be able to access those songs from anywhere. The downside was, these songs were all in one database, created by MP3.com, and stored by MP3.com. The laws that say you can make a backup copy clearly (or not) state that only *you* are authorized to access *your* backups. Just because you own a CD doesn't entitle you to access MP3.com's digital copy. It's a rediculous semantic issue, and even further befuddles the issue of rights management. Ie. When I buy a CD, what am I getting? If I'm getting a physical piece of plastic, then I can do whatever I want with it. If I'm getting a license to listen to those songs, then I should be allowed to have access to those songs in whatever format I choose, and a replacement CD in the case of distaster should only cost the price of the round plastic and shipping.
These issues will be ironed out, not by courts, but by the people who want their music. They're already speaking with their wallets, and that's what scares institutions like the RIAA. It's not because people want to steal all the music (some do, but they make us look bad).
It's because the people, the consumers, want a free market to decide the cost of their entertainment. Artifical Scarcity in the form of big movie theaters, Book stores, CD stores, and DVD rental outlets are going to suffer due to the changing economics of the internet. It's not hype, and it's not loved by everyone, but it's the future.
It's why I can put a Wassily Kandinsky painting on my wall for $9.99. Not because I don't appreciate the art or think that the artist doesn't deserve to get paid. It's because technology has provided the ability to reproduce art at such a high level of quality. Now I can be one of a million people to buy that $9.99 poster and still appreciate fine art.
Reasons:
Is there some stuff that I'd like to see? Sure. I wish the articles were longer, and that there were more of them. I wish that the number of graphics-intensive, full-page 2-paragrpah articles was a little smaller. Apart from that, I wouldn't change anything.
As far as the tail goes, we have more choices because our larger retailers (online and otherwise) are able to make so many more diverse choices in terms of what they want to (and can) sell. The supermarket is a good example. As years went by and people learned more about regional cuisine, and fresh/organic vegetables, retailers became pressured to supply these items because they were losing business to these little niche shops and mom&pop veggie-fruit stands. When organic veggies first showed up in my town (15 years ago), you just didn't have enough of them being grown to allow a major grocery to buy the stuff. As production of organics rose in volume, they became part of the ordinary offering. In dense urban areas (London, Paris, NYC), the range of choices was always wide and varied because of the diversity of the population was similarly wide and varied. I see the diversity of today's channels of information (cable, the net, books, papers, magazines) as spreading demand out along the tail. The choices were always there, it's just that people are more likely to know about them, and getting exactly what one wants is easier in the age of fedex.
.. pa-ra-bo-la, pa-ra-bo-la, 2 pi R, 2 pi R, where's your latus rectum, where's your latus rectum, 2 pi R
Then they owe me about 900 pages of "insightful" content; and this ain't it.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
What we need is a cross between a Kinkos, a record store, and a coffee shop. Lots of listening stations to sample the music. A social atmosphere, like a book store. High quality printing and CD burning facilities to fabricate the end product. To prevent piracy you have highly secured local storage and VPN back to the central server.
It'd basically be a mix CD burning store.
Who thinks Wired is the Time/Cosmopolitan/steaming pile of do-do of tech magazines. Years ago, in 97, I was actually interviewed by them for finding a security flaw in Internet Explorer based on shortcuts. Yes, yes, I know every CS major in the country has found an IE security flaw (it's kinda like freecell for CS geeks) but back then it was quite the cats pajamas. Anywho... The person interviewing me turned out to be a Mac person BSR (Before Steve's Return) who didn't have a F'ing (Fudging) clue about Windows. It was about the third time explaining what a shortcut was that I finally just stopped talking and let my roommate deal with it. It's a magazine by liberal art majors for liberal Art majors...and Florida State Grads. ;)
I don't know what the industry is doing, but I'm moving towards collections.
These are DVD-ROMs or even Hard Drives that have 70 or so albums on a DVD or several hundred albums on a old hard drive. These aren't just random musical albums, but related titles.
It goes without saying that the only money changing hands is for the medium. No copyright fees, no rentals, no payments to the 'artists' or the global media corporations, no payments except the cost of the media.
And the media is cheap. Blank DVD ROMs hit $0.30 (US) each last week at Fry's Electronics, cheap enough to trade. 30 gig hard disks sell in the $30 range.
Collections are a really good way to get exposure to lots of 'long tail' artists. The article was well-reseached and well-thought-out, but it ignored the central but often unspoken truth of the digital media age: the price to the consumer for digital content has fallen many orders of magnitude compared to content on older analog media. The fact that this is currently illegal doesn't really change anything. The laws were custom written by the global media companies for their continued enrichment during the transision to the digital age. When the global media companies disappear, the copyright laws will also. And orders-of-magnitude cost and profit reductions will make them disappear. It's just a matter of time.
If the media corporations go bankrupt, will the stream of new content and new artistic works disappear. To a great extent, yes. But it will mostly be the product of the stars. The real artists will continue to work and produce, however they will be compensated in quite different methods. Perhaps the new permanent class of super rich being created by current American policies will take to being patrons of individual artists in a manner similiar to the Medici's sponsorship of the artists of Florence in the 1400's. Maybe the church will fund the recordings of great rock musicians in order to revive the faith amoung the young. Who knows? The only thing that seems certain is that the five global media companies will go bankrupt within about 20 years at most. Don't invest your life savings in them.
This sort of economic model spells the death of the Top 20 mindset that a lot of the traditional media conglomerates care about.
.5% of the revenue vs selling 80000 records and get 70% of the revenue?
NOT PIRACY. Piracy just accelerates the change,..
Previously if your band topped out at 2000th most popular nobody gave a shit. Now if you can do that you can make a respectable living off of making the music you like.
The PHA3r the loss of power. Who gives a crap about "getting signed" when you can spend 7000 dollars on a recording studio in your basement and sell your records on the internet and promote it with free mp3 downloads?
What is the difference between selling a 1000000 records at and receive
That's 8% of the sales and you get about the same revenue. That's what the RIAA is scared of.
We still want music, artists still want to make a living making music (and other media), but neither of us like or even want the RIAA anymore. Their entire industry is growing obsolete.
I am not a librarian, but half the time those of us who imagine being at the leading edge of computer technology run into a problem, we find that librarians found and addressed the same problem years earlier.*
From the article:Inter-library loans and, even more particularly, searchable indexes spanning many academic libraries, have long provided one channel to make quite obscure books available to widely and thinly distributed autiences.
*A couple more examples
- in the very early '80s, intrigued by the possibilities of online information services, I briefly joined the Australian Database Development Association which I soon discovered was driven by librarians.
- Our vocal concerns over censorship trail along behind those that well organised library associations have long been expressing.
Of course like most IT types if it's not invented here we don't want to listen.And I still buy Wired every month but rarely find time to open it:-(
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
...to ESPN 8, "The Ocho!"
Oh, go on, check out my job.
I really hope such a thing comes to pass. I want to live in a world where I can get access to any information that I might want whenever I might want it.
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
Of course it's all (formally) "music", but Sinatra doesn't suck because Frank didn't suck. Music is an extremely high bandwidth human communications medium, highly referential to language, past works, current events, feelings and knowledge. It employs some of the oldest techniques, like rhythm, scales, tones and timing, and many of the newest in any media. All to convey what's on the mind of the sender to the mind of the listener. All the tricks in the world, some invented by people like Sinatra, can't make the medium any better than the messenger, or their unique message. Britney, like so many pop stars (including Sinatra contemporaries), doesn't have anything to express. Sinatra had a deep, unique personality, and his stardom was generated by his persona. We feel Frank when we hear his music, and are impressed. We feel Britney sometimes, through the synthetics, and feel nothing - usually we feel only the machine bringing her to us, and feel even less.
--
make install -not war
It's the _OMNI_ magazine for technology.
--
make install -not war
"I'm the editor of Wired Magazine and if you'll forgive the autohornblowing, I think you'll be interested in my piece in our latest issue. It argues, with a lot of new data, that the entertainment industry is shifting from an era of hit-driven economics to one of niche-driven economics. Content that was once relegated to the fringe, beneath the threshold of commercial viability, is now increasingly able to find a market in distributed audiences, marking a shift towards the previously-neglected Long Tail of the demand curve."
Gosh, remember when Wired was the next big thing, and stuff like "autohornblowing" didn't seem as pretentious as hell? Back in the day, it was possible to believe that there was a secret society of geeks talking this way, but now we are the secret society of geeks right here on slashdot and you don't really see this kind of precious, self-conscious diction.
Oh, you're autohornblowing, alright, but not in the sense that you mean....
I thought Wired was just a write-off vehicle for some company that had millions of gallons of fluorescent and metallic ink on their hands. You mean there's words in that magazine?
I always thought that the printing style was intended to force the demographic toward "young tech-savvy yuppies" by excluding anyone old enough to have presbyopia (along with anyone with other visual problems, such as color perception abnormalities.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
This sort of economic model spells the death of the Top 20 mindset that a lot of the traditional media conglomerates care about.
NOT PIRACY. Piracy just accelerates the change,..
More importantly, this gives them more ammunition for pushing to extend copyrights and claim that there is residual value in their old material that must be protected, and which can be tapped as soon as those nasty pirates are slapped down.
Think about it: The Wired article is talking about the old stuff and non-top-10% stuff pulling in MORE MONEY than all the current in-store product combined.
Granted that requires digital distribution and a sane pricing model. But now we've got an article from a respected source giving them the opportunity to put a pricetag on the potential market - a pricetag larger than their current multi-billion-dollar gross.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I finally had a look at this rag for the first time since the dotcom meltdown. It's turned into Vogue for geeks, with iPods in the place of the lingerie and face cream. The few "real" stories were insufficiently sourced and/or tendentious fluff without much in the way of sound reasoning to back them up.
So I would say that Mr. Anderson's magazine is crap, except that "crap" sounds a bit too substantial. Someone slap Cowboyneal for letting this one in.
You could say the same of Frank Sinatra or Bobby Derren. Why does their music have impact and BS doesn't?
To begin with, they do have a brain.
Is Tampico's restaurant still there in downtown SC? I have some funny stories I could tell about that place...
My guess is that it generally won't. However, the price of technology is dropping, we're only a few years from being able to make movies with comparable-to-Hollywood production values with no more than a closet full of PCs full of programmable video cards, i.e. a poor-man's CGI renderfarm.
The dominant reality is that the market is fragmenting and the projects which can reasonably expected to be profitable with multimillion production budgets are going to get fewer and fewer. So some people will be making content with $100K, others will make it with pocket change, and we'll be able to find either if we really want to.
The big discontinuities will happen when this catches up with the Hollywood content cartel providers in the form of a shakeout.
Their best hope is to put this off long enough for the current CEOs to retire.
Sony will probably survive, via crosssubsidy from it's consumer products. My guess is that one of the others in the Big 5 will be smart enough to see which way the wind is going and change business models in time.
The other 4 will exist. . . nominally, they'll be bought out by investors to get their content catalogues and their production assets will probably be put on the block at fire sale prices.
Tech Public Policy stuff
// I will show you fear in a handful of jellybeans.
The book also provided some background for the two main characters, for some of which the TV series provided only hints.
I would like to see SciFi or BBCA show reruns of the series.
(BBCA is currently rerunning "The Prisoner", so there's hope there, and Sci-Fi is rerunning "Lexx", and any channel that will rerun "Lexx" will rerun anything.)
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
If that's too much typing for you,(without any spaces put there by Slashdot) yields: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld
Hey ?!
... how will I ever get a post!?
If authors post messages about their own work
-- The Dude
Just a li'l nitpick - the Maple's in Birmingham, not Troy. I can't think of any alternative theater venues in Troy. Closest would be the 20+ years extinct Somerset Theater (I saw Stooges and Little Rascal midnite marathons there), but even that was a mainstream place.
Actually, several places in the Detroit area do cover more indie fare - the Main in Royal Oak (fortunately, THE closest movie place to my house) is also in the Landmark chain now (bought up along with the Maple), there're a few screens at the new Birmingham theater, and there's always the Detroit Film Theater at the DIA (more than 25 years and going strong).
----
WWJD...For a Klondike Bar?
I want to thank you for putting the economics of web driven e-commerce into focus for so many with your fabulous article. You obviously demonstrate a proficient grasp of the e-tailer situation and coupled with the insight you have on the industry you have put together a very enlightening article. Thank you for sharing your knowledge with me. I had not previous ever considered the perspective you note in your column and was quite pleased to learn about something I hadn't previously known.
Totally OT but: I first saw KISS at the Coliseum, too, on the reunion tour. (I had flat-out refused to go see them without their makeup.) I was dressed as Ace, silver boots and all! Are you still around or have you since left Tidewater?
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
This is a great article. Good job!
Jeez, I didn't know that! How about some proof (in the form of lots of JPGs that will make it through my company's web "protection"). TIA.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
I'm looking forward to the Long Tail hitting video. "500 channels...and nothing's on" seems awfully close to the truth.
A big part of the problem is connecting with what I like. Descriptions of shows are mostly inadequate. Word of mouth works intermittently. Shows I might like go by without me hearing of them.
I agree 100% with Wired's Anderson that the recommendation feature is an essential part of the Long Tail phenomenon. I see it coming to my TV watching real soon. Now that half our homes have cable Internet or DSL, delivery of 2 minute to 2 hour videos over that medium to a set top box for viewing once delivery's done is now possible. Netflix, but with DSL/cable replacing the mail. The selection cam be broadened way way way out.
Once downloads augment the broadcast & cable shows, and there's a decent recommendation feature to help me find shows matching my tastes, I'll tune out PBS documentaries paced for fifth graders and tune in to better fare. That's my hope.
Building a good recommender has got to be an interesting job. How do you keep the different tastes of the different family members from muddying your data? What happens when a mother in law visits for two months and uses the system heavily? Do you isolate porn? Do you ask customers to say if they *like* what they downloaded?
Tell me again, who knew Mary was a virgin, and how did they know?