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."

Comments

Re:More Democratic Market

[ackthpt]

You are confusing Britney Spears (BS?!) with a musician. She is an entertainer. Nothing more, nothing less.

You could say the same of Frank Sinatra or Bobby Derren. Why does their music have impact and BS doesn't?

interesting article

[ZenBased]

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?

I'm not convinced...

[Fluidic Binary]

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.

Re:More Democratic Market

[sgant]

They again, were entertainers...no one really goes and studies the "music" of Sinatra like one would go and study up on Miles Davis or Bob Dylan or Jimmy Page....as in the art of music itself.

But there's certainly nothing wrong with Britney Spears if you're into her. It's what someone likes...and the "music" is really secondary to BS or others of her ilk. It's the entertainment that's the draw.

Ok article, but not great

[Retrospecter]

I'm happy to see this topic addressed, and the author clearly makes a good point. I hope the suits in the leather chairs are starting to understand this. Most of us were already aware of this apparent shift in purchasing patterns.

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.

Re:More Democratic Market

[Fnkmaster]

While that is true, Sinatra may not have been a great musician to be studied by posterity, but at least he was a singer. He entertained with his voice, by singing good tunes in an aesthetically pleasing manner. The reason Britney Spears and the like get derided is that the talent of singing has taken a backseat to glittery semi-nude outfits and titellation of adult men with teenage booty. Don't get me wrong, I am all for some teenage booty now and then (I think I'm getting too old to say that, so don't arrest me please), but I don't want to turn on my radio and hear these chick singer voices that have to be processed to hell and back again to make them sound aesthetically pleasing.

My metric for this is "would this person be entertaining if you gave them a microphone and a couple of acoustic instruments to back them and sat them down on a stage?" And in the case of nonvocal music, it's a question of whether the music itself is sufficiently enjoyable to stand on its own merit. If neither of these metrics are met, then it may be entertainment but it's not really music. And some pop songs are decently catchy and enjoyable, in *spite of* the singer behind them - you can have a great songwriter or producer behind an otherwise mediocre talent and still come up with something that sounds pretty good. And I can appreciate those songs for what they are, but still dismiss the singer as worthless.

Two different effects

[gihan_ripper]

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.

I've been expecting this

[alizard]

I've said for years that record companies need to rebuild their business model so they can service and profit from lots of artists that can sell 10K units in a good year.The problem is solvable. Hint: their problem is based on physical CD distribution. What if all new record sales at record stores were burned on demand except for a small minority of megahits?

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.