Is the Long Tail Shorter Than We Thought?

Apparently, things aren't so great in the business of unlimited supply of niche goods. Writes Patrick Foster in the UK TimesOnline:

"The internet was supposed to bring vast choice for customers, access to obscure and forgotten products -- and a fortune for sellers who focused on niche markets.

But a study of digital music sales has posed the first big challenge to this "long tail" theory: more than 10 million of the 13 million tracks available on the internet failed to find a single buyer last year. [more...]

But I'm not sure that the Long Tail should imply that everything sells -- crap is still crap, and there will always be lots of it. If everyone can cheaply produce media -- music, text, video, sound, and photos -- then much of it is going to be of little interest to most of us; some of it of some interest to a small number; definite interest to the maker; and sometimes, of no interest to anyone else. Sometimes the little guys will explode, and all of us will have more choice and be better able to get the stuff we really want. But that doesn't mean that the golden 80:20 rule will somehow disappear.

Still, I have benefited greatly from the long tail as a consumer: I listen to countless podcasts from around the world (because neither commercial radio, nor Canada's public broadcaster, are much interested in my tastes); I get all sorts of obscure movies from zip.ca (Canada's Netflix), some of which I don't much like, some of which I love, and almost all of which are unavailable at Blockbuster. Amazon lets me buy strange titles my local bookstore doesn't carry, and where would the Arcade Fire be without the web? You've read all this before.

In short, Long Tail does not mean that everyone is going to get rich, and every author and singer and podcaster is going to find a big audience. And it does not mean the end of the corporate media mega-hit. It means that some of us will find things we could not get before; and those who produce those things will be able to get them to the people who want them.

I am convinced there is great business to be had in those exchanges, not to mention the cultural benefits of a healthy ecosystem for all kinds of makers and consumers of art and media of all kinds.

Comments

[mheister]

That's three million tracks that DID find buyers. I'm sure that compares favorably to the pre-Internet days of the CD, or vinyl before that.

Also, at least some of those artists were smart enough to self-promote by various means, sell their tracks through their own websites or at least use artist-friendly online outlets like CD Baby, cutting out the music moguls and keeping a greater percentage for themselves. For a lot of artists, this is actually good news.

Mr. McGuire, how about posting a list of your favorite podcasts, possibly along with blurbs about what makes them great?

I'll go first:

The Chillcast with Anji Bee - she has amazing taste in downtempo electronica. She's turned me on to a lot of stuff I've bought either directly or through eMusic.

Accident Hash - good variety of mainstream-sounding pop/rock.

High Orbit with Matthew Ebel - a highly-trained musician himself, Ebel shares musical treasures within the ongoing audio adventures he has with his robot droids on a spaceship that uses old Celine Dion CDs as heat shields.

UC Radio Podshow (Mevio-Show???) - Just because the host Mike is rude.

[RickSp]

The traditional market place had limited shelf space and high costs. As barriers to entry were high, only the products that appealed to the broadest market segments made it in. It guaranteed a certain minimum quality which was good, yet also ensured a certain blandness.

The internet has endless shelf spare and relatively low costs. Barriers to entry are low so the proverbial floodgates have been opened, which is the downside to the "long tail". The challenge now is to find new arbiters of quality for the suddenly wide range of choices. There are diamonds in the dross. The challenge is how to find them.

[AnotherMcIntosh]

Somewhere, behind the misguided belief that U.S. manufacturing could be shipped to foreign countries while "The internet was supposed to bring ... a fortune for sellers who focused on niche markets.", is an army of misguided MBAs.

Find some big-time business screw-ups and you'll find MBAs who willingly believed the assumptions that they were taught rather than to challenge them.

Find some big-time governmental screw-ups and you'll find even more of them. George Bush, as just one example, has an MBA degree from Harvard.

[AprilLHamilton]

The 'long tail' is the indie author's bread and butter, because we start out on the fringe and build up readership from there. On Amazon, the long tail levels the playing field; indie artists are ushered into the store right alongside their big, mainstream peers, and given more or less the same sales and promotional opportunities. But where the big boys merely make their backlist titles available and don't generally put any effort into marketing them, an indie author can build his 'platform' around an Amazon centerpiece, thereby playing right alongside the big boys, but round out that platform with an author website, blogging, social media and the like, thereby reacting more nimbly and effectively to changes in the market or among readers. The long tail can work for you, but you can't succed by merely making a product available in a vast marketplace like Amazon and waiting around for customers to bump into it accidentally.