Long Tail, The

The Editor-in-Chief of Wired Magazine here examines global technology trends impacting interest in, access to, and diversity of entertainment media. Chris Anderson begins by citing an example of the way in which the online bookseller Amazon.com's "recommendations" feature (e.g., "customers interested in this title may also be interested in...") can create revenue for even obscure, out-of-print titles simply by virtue of their relationship to another book, film, or any media product. Anderson coins this new trend "the Touching the Void phenomenon, based on the way in which Amazon.com's software assessed consumer behaviour - interest in Into Thin Air (a 1998 book about a mountain-climbing tragedy) - to fuel renewed interest in Touching the Void (a 1988 book on the same theme). He claims that Amazon.com initiated this phenomenon "by combining infinite shelf space with real-time information about buying trends and public opinion."

For Anderson, this "is an example of an entirely new economic model for the media and entertainment industries, one that is just beginning to show its power." He suggests that "the emerging digital entertainment economy is going to be radically different from today's mass market." He embraces this trend: "For too long we've been suffering the tyranny of lowest-common-denominator fare, subjected to brain-dead summer blockbusters and manufactured pop. Why? Economics. Many of our assumptions about popular taste are actually artifacts of poor supply-and-demand matching - a market response to inefficient distribution."

To illustrate, Anderson points to "the plight of Bollywood in America. Each year, India's film industry puts out more than 800 feature films. There are an estimated 1.7 million Indians in the US. Yet the top-rated (according to Amazon's Internet Movie
Database) Hindi-language film, Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India, opened on just two screens, and it was one of only a handful of Indian films to get any US distribution at all. In the tyranny of physical space, an audience too thinly spread is the same as no audience at all."

In short, "Hit-driven economics is a creation of an age without enough room to carry everything for everybody. Not enough shelf space for all the CDs, DVDs, and games produced. Not enough screens to show all the available movies. Not enough channels to broadcast all the TV programs, not enough radio waves to play all the music created, and not enough hours in the day to squeeze everything out through either of those sets of slots. This is the world of scarcity. Now, with online distribution and retail, we are entering a world of abundance. And the differences are profound."

The trend Anderson is pointing to, and the one he highlights through the title of his piece, the "long tail", involves a new market for diverse, obscure tastes. He explains, "Long Tail business can treat consumers as individuals, offering mass customization as an alternative to mass-market fare....[T]he cultural benefit of all of this is much more diversity, reversing the blanding effects of a century of distribution scarcity and ending the tyranny of the hit." So, for this author, "Forget squeezing millions from a few megahits at the top of the charts. The future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream."