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.

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.