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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
Can you switch my Wired Magazine subscription to a slashdot subscription, so I can at least read the online articles before everyone else?
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/
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.
...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.
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.
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
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.....
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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