Back in the October issue of Wired Magazine there was an article called The Long Tail. The idea is that in this age of Amazon and iTunes Music Store, it's possible to make available for purchase all the low-volume items that are never carried by brick&mortar stores. And the discovery is that there are buyers for basically all of these low-volume items. It turns out that there is a customer for everything, as long as there's a cost-effective way to offer it. And the net makes it cost-effective.
From the Wired article:
...it is an example of an entirely new economic model for the media and entertainment industries, one that is just beginning to show its power. Unlimited selection is revealing truths about what consumers want and how they want to get it in service after service, from DVDs at Netflix to music videos on Yahoo! Launch to songs in the iTunes Music Store and Rhapsody. People are going deep into the catalog, down the long, long list of available titles, far past what's available at Blockbuster Video, Tower Records, and Barnes & Noble. And the more they find, the more they like. As they wander further from the beaten path, they discover their taste is not as mainstream as they thought (or as they had been led to believe by marketing, a lack of alternatives, and a hit-driven culture).
I've been thinking a lot about this since I read it. Now Doc Searls has picked up on the meme and added this article from The Independant.
Here are three facts. Every one of the 1.2 million tracks on Apple's iTunes Music Store site has been downloaded at least once. A large-ish bookstore can carry 130,000 titles. More than half of the online bookstore Amazon's sales come from the titles ranked lower than 130,000. Put these facts together, and you have an indication of a phenomenon that has got analysts of the information economy very interested: the "long tail".
Take a look at these, and think about it. It may be a real breakthrough in understanding how the new technology is changing, and mostly improving, the way things work.
BTW, one aspect of the long tail that troubles me is, that it seems to benefit the sites that "aggregate" the content of many-many creators, more than it does those creators. Put another way, iTunes may be making decent money selling 2 downloads per year from 10,000 artists, but each of those artists is only selling 2 copies per year, not really paying the rent.
Posted by jackhodgson at December 1, 2004 10:49 AM