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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
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/
...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.
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
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.