There’s been a lot of talk on the interweb tubes recently about The Long Tail advocated by Chris Anderson
Helienne Lindvall, writing in the Guardian, cites a survey that appears to question the existence of the long tail, but on closer examination appears to show that’s she hasn’t really understood what the long tail theory says; you’ll get no understanding of the length or width of the tail when you’re not looking below the neck. Quite a few commenters have pointed this out, although you should ignore the twit who equates going to a gig where a member of the band greets you by name with ‘giving money to buskers’.
The Jinni Blog makes a very imporatant point, that the real importance of the Long Tail is not economic, but cultural. If you’re only interested in the size of Simon Cowell’s bank balance or which corporate indie clone bands get playlisted on Radio One, then you might not care about the long tail. But as far as I’m concerned, the long tail is where most of the worthwhile music can be found. More importantly, it’s where the mainstream will be getting it’s new ideas from.
Just about all the music I love lies deep within the long tail. Of my top ten albums of 2008, no less than seven were purchased directly from the band, either from their websites or from merchandise stands at gigs. And four of those were pre-orders, where fans pay for an album before it’s recorded, instead of the band getting an advance from a record company.
Long live the tail.
Actually, on a parallel note … I suspect I’m going to be in roughly the same position as a writer, where I get my work out there by cultivating a close relationship with fans instead of letting a marketing machine second-guess everything. It means a lot less sales and exposure, sure — but it also means I write what I want, put it out when I want, keep my day job, and don’t have to worry about writing becoming untenable as a career when my publisher no longer feels I’m flavor of the month.
Most certainly – I buy all my music in the tail, 99% of the artists I would buy from are on small indie labels, and very few are on majors.
The problem is that the long tail tries to make an argument for an economy coming out of the tail – when in truth it is no self sustaining economically.
You’ve got The Long Tail effect slightly backwards. I see this a lot in roleplaying PDF industry discussions.
The Long Tail is about aggregate sales, and while the things that make The Long Tail work for Amazon do benefit non-hit products and the niche markets, it really doesn’t say much about the *success* of those niche products. Every single publisher of niche books and music on Amazon could fail financially, but Amazon still makes a profit off of books and music that, individually, may be unprofitable. The Long Tail speaks to the *retailer’s* success, not to the individual publisher.
What most people are talking about when they talk (incorrectly) about The Long Tail isn’t the Tail itself, it’s the thing that makes the Tail *possible*… the power of the Internet to connect people.
There certainly is a large cultural impact created by the Internet bringing down barriers between creators and audience, publisher and customer. It *does* make it more likely for the niche publisher to succeed.
But while the Internet is making it easier to connect people, I’m wondering if it’s doing much of anything to help people make a living artistically in the long run. The more artists that make connections with fans, the smaller and smaller the niches become.
As to Lindvall… I think we need to give the music industry more time for things to shake out before we can make strong judgments about where this is going. How we find, acquire and listen to music is in flux. And how Last.fm manages and *displays* rankings could be influencing the rankings themselves… the now-very-old problem of “the items in the top-ten get reinforced because people look at the top-ten for what to listen to first.”
What music is available digitally, how much it costs, how hard it is to get, whether it “features” DRM… these kind of things could influence sales in ways that have nothing to do with music preferences.