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The Sometimes Fallacy of The Long Tail
There's been a lot of talk (maybe too much talk, to paraphrase Bono) about The Long Tail and how it changes everything about what people consume, how hits are made, what people want to hear, how everything big is small again -- but people have taken that perhaps too far as Lee Gomes contends in a recent blog post about hits. Lee's piece is well thought-out, and I think raises a very valid point that whereas there is value in the Long Tail idea, sometimes people take it too far and that "Hits" still count for a lot. His earlier piece is a more direct critique of The Long Tail and worth reading as well; we covered that piece about the Long Tail a couple weeks back.
Bad news for hype-driven marketing and economics people, but Pareto got it right in 1897!
I was pro Bono, until he broke up with Cher.
"The Long Tail" is itself a bestseller?
...so exactly what are we to learn from that -- does that prove it right, or wrong?
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
I think the value add of the long tail is that the concept of "Hit" changes.
Where in a brick and mortar store, which suffers from space constraints so the ROI for any give stock has to be fairly high, the internet shines because the space constraints are looser and therefore the ROI for any given stock can be less and STILL be profitable.
If a Tower Records can only carry the top 10% of goods to be profitable, Tower Online can afford to carry the top 20% of goods and still be profitable. The top 10% will still sell, as always, but the next 10% may contribute up to 30% of the profits despite only being in the second percentile.
As efficiency increases, then each percentile after that becomes "more" profitable, relatively. If Best Buy online can afford to carry the top 30% and remain profitable, with the third percentile adding 11% of the profit and the second percentile adding 25% of the profit, they will sell more, necessarily, than Tower.
So all things being equal, the store with more inventory can sell more. The store with greater efficiency can afford to carry more.
GPL Deconstructed
most people behave in flocks, a few don't
that's it
it's not like the internet is going to come along and change simple human psychology:
1. the internet is not going to make less people behave in herds
2. the internet isn't going to make more people behave independently
take an old concept, spruce it up with a buzzword, and people think gold has just been discovered. pffft
perhaps the most ironic thing about the idea of the long tail is that the concept itself is now a mass media driven success story with a herd-like following
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If you want to stretch the analogy to its logical limit, it shows that a business needs a solid base of popular sales and a ever expanding long tail of indie, cult, and oldie stuff that serve as loss leaders and marginal profit makers. You can have a successful business with a well connected short tail, but a fabulous business needs a longer tail. If the end falls off, you can still be ok! But if you loose the base of the tail, well...all you have is a big ass :-)
If folksonomies aren't tagged by the technorati, who or what will linkroll the mashups? The impact on the remixability of emergent systems will likely be severe.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
d00d, you'r gonna believe Wikipedia when they flub such common knowledge? Bono broke up with Cher and started the U2's a play on his previous hit single "I've got You Babe". He then went on to be a Senator to represent Mickey Mouse. He died in a ski accident and currently tours with the U2's and is involved in trying to stop poverty and stuff like that. Jees! Keep up with what's goin on, eh!
According to Casey Kasem, the U2's "are from england and who gives a $hit!"
If anyone talks about the "long tail", ask them if they know how to integrate the area under the curve. The simplest number for evaluation purposes is the value for which half the area under the curve is before that point, and half is after. What's that number for movies? For books? For audio CDs? For iPod downloads?
Netflix says that 30% of rentals are from the top 50 films, so the halfway point is probably below 100.
This is a killer issue for companies that have huge hardware inventories. Consider Digi-Key. They have the broadest inventory of electronic parts in the industry, with over 70,000 parts. Which is a big win for them, because you can usually use them as your only supplier. So there's an Internet-based company that really does profit from the "long tail".
Digi-Key doesn't get much attention as an Internet company, but they're one of the most successful ones. They had online ordering early, and it works really well. Not just the web front end, which looks boring but has what users need, like the ability to search by component parameters. They have a near-complete collection of online data sheets. When a part you've ordered previously is about to be discontinued, you get an e-mail, so you can order a final supply before it goes away. And they have an incredibly effective order fulfillment operation. Orders entered before 7 PM (yes, PM) Central time ship the same day by FedEx. They actually do that, consistently. When you order from DigiKey, you get a confirmation e-mail when the order goes in, and another when it ships, with the FedEx tracking info. The shipping confirmation often comes in within fifteen minutes of placing the order. Now that's operating on Internet time. And that's for orders which might contain twenty different electronics parts in small quantities.
That's a real "long tail" company.
Let me see if I can break this down...
1. Mass media enables mass marketing.
2. Mass marketing leads companies to target "the sweet spot."
3. This pays off, and so reinforces the idea.
4. Companies become more and more focused on the center of the market.
5. The tails become under-served, the center gets over-served.
6. White Stripes, Pulp Fiction, Clerks, et al. do it for the artistic vision.
7. Hungry tails turn White Stripes et al. into overnight sensations.
8. Meanwhile, companies continue to pump the center.
9. Overfed center can't consume all the mass-market product.
10. Idiot misinterprets this as the the curve flattening, rather than companies over-serving one market and under-serving another.
11. Idiot publishes a pop-business book, which appeals to the mass of idiots that make up the heart of the market.
12. Some companies buy it, and rush out to the tails.
13. Some of these get burned, and so they backlash against Idiot.
14. Gomes writes a backlash piece.
15. With any luck, we can get the companies to rush back to the center, and start all over again - feeding the economic market for half-witted business books. (not casting aspursions at all business books, many of which are good, just the ones that are the business equivalent of Dr. Phil)
All the while, the market hasn't changed at all. It's a bell curve, same as it ever was. Gomes isn't so much sharp, as just not quite as idiotic as the heart of the pop-business market.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
People in general really have a problem with subtle points. If there isn't an "A IS GOOD, B IS BAD" in there somewhere, they'll simply convert the point into an "A IS GOOD, B IS BAD" point, and to hell with understanding what's actually being said.
The aspect of the "long tail" argument that I think makes sense is not that there will no more hits. In fact, the entire Long Tail argument is really predicated from the get-go that the popularity distribution will remain the same, albeit possibly with a scaled-down top end. (But even a hit that is 25% of the best hit of today would still be a big hit.) The point is that there is an untapped "long tail" that it is now possible to reach economically. The tail has always been there, but it has been difficult to make serving it work economically.
There will still be people who deal only in hits, it's just that there will also be people who deal only in the tail, and the latter may become very large, too, perhaps even Amazon-sized, whereas before this was essentially impossible.
Converting this into a "THERE WILL BE NO MORE HITS (BAD!), ONLY THE LONG TAIL (GOOD!)" is really missing the point entirely, and arguing against that is arguing against a strawman as far as I am concerned. (Of course, arguing against a person who is actually saying that means isn't a strawman.) The ratio may change, in fact I think it will change, but due to network effects, there will always be bona-fide hits.
You cannot have a long tail when the price of every song is the same. When the price of every song is the same, marketing will drive purchase choices.
But when unpopular songs only cost $.05, as opposed to $.99 for the "hits", there will be a lot of people who suddenly are driven, by price, to investigate, and (gasp) might even like, "unpopular" songs.
Even in the record stores, when I used to shop at them, I was always very glad of my affinity for classical music. My music was always in the bargain bin.
Of course all of this is up against the fact that much music, especially the "hits", are available for free on P2P networks.
Steve
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Does "true independence" even matter? It is not necessary for someone to be "truly independent" in order for his point to be valid. The simple fact that people would consider a purchase that can be made in relative anonymity when they would not otherwise speaks to this.
It's funny then how eMusic, despite only exploiting the 'long tail', is the number 2 music store behind iTMS - easily beating all the online music stores selling the popular stuff. Of course, that might have something to do with eMusic being the only music store other than iTMS which sells music that will play on an iPod.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
I was surprised to see that folks stuck to hits when Rhapsody scanned their usage lists. I think many sites are trying to entice folks to follow the "sounds like" and "genre" trails for new music, but in the end Promotion does indeed play a role.
Promotion on the internet may best come from "word-of-mouth" sources, where hot links of the week propogate through blogs and link-lists and such. The SNL rap-spoof is just such an example from earlier this year. Every past popular web meme is just such an example. I think podcasts(audio & video) are underrated, since the future of web may be to "leave the chair" and use portables to continue the experience.
Perhaps in the future a portal will present a Busker-style downloadable playlist of music, completely copyright free "for personal use and sharing" - and then simply ask for donations that go directly to the artist. Popularity and payment mixed into one. For the large portion of music history, this is how such performance careers worked anyway. Then at least a band could make use of the File Sharing networks as a promotion layer, rather than constantly having them viewed as evil.
Like the Long Tail purports, lowest overhead can make the most profit from the smaller market segments. I cannot see a lower operating margin than online distribution from the artists themselves. The sacrifice is promotion: Labels fight hard for airtime, shelf space, billboard pasteup and DJ chatter. There is a strong argument that "the music world is full of crap and the public wants someone to cull the list for them." But perhaps if these concepts of web meme, genre/artist linking and a modern payment system all converge, things will change.