'Long Tail' May Not Wag the Web Just Yet 132
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Expanding on an article he wrote in 2004 (and discussed on Slashdot), Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson argues in his best-seller 'The Long Tail' that the web is changing commerce from a hit-driven business to one focused on niches. But Wall Street Journal columnist Lee Gomes questions Anderson's data, and adds, 'I don't think things are changing as much as he does.' Gomes writes, 'At Apple's iTunes, one person who has seen the data -- which Apple doesn't disclose -- said sales "closely track Billboard. It's a hits business. The data tend to refute 'The Long Tail.' " ' On his blog, Anderson responds that Gomes 'stumbles over statistics and more, and in the end simply makes a muddle of what might have been an interesting debate over the magnitude of the Long Tail effect.'"
The message is clear: (Score:1, Funny)
Re:The message is clear: (Score:2, Funny)
Re:The message is clear: (Score:3, Funny)
Thank goodness for Web 2.0!!
Look at Amazon sales (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Look at Amazon sales (Score:2)
First off, Amazon sales rankings aren't that useful [webpronews.com]. But, it's still interesting to look into them. For example, look at the [tictap.com]
Is that meaningful? (Score:2, Interesting)
So what? How many copies do you need to sell to get an Amazon rank of 500,000? How many for 1,000,000? I'm guessing that to qualify for a rank of one millionth you'd have to sell somewhere in the 0-1 copies range. So if two people bought your book in the last week you might 'spike' to 500,000th, then drop right back down until your next sale in 2020. Hardly a compelling argument to support the importance of the long tail.
yp.
Re:Look at Amazon sales (Score:1)
We call this "noise." What you are seeing is the effect of a random event on low absolute values.
One extra person bought/did not buy the book to create the variance, whereas one extra/lost sale of a best seller doesn't even register.
One sale is a datum, not data. Noise is meaningless - unless you're an epidemiologist.
KFG
Re:Look at Amazon sales (Score:2)
Of course, I hope publishers decide "the long tail" is BS, and concentrate solely on hits. Because the new music hits they manufacture are worthless, and I want them to stop hogging the copyright on all the long tail stuff. So we can al
How could it not change things? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:How could it not change things? (Score:2)
I don't see that happening. (Score:4, Insightful)
For items that take physical space, the limitation will be the space available to the average consumer.
If 100 titles account for 90% of your sales and you have 1,000 titles that account for the other 10%, adding 10,000 titles will just give people 11,100 options to take up their limited space. If they have space for 100 items, then most of them will be focusing on the same top 100.
Re:I don't see that happening. (Score:2)
It is true that data takes essentially no physical space, but it is not true that it takes no resources. A file sitting on a filesystem is maintained in various ways; it is scanned to build file databases, possibly moved in a defrag, possibly copied in a RAID configuration or backup. These operations take a tiny but nontrivial amount of processing time. There is also the extra cost
Re:I don't see that happening. (Score:2)
The fat head (or whatever the opposite of the long tail is -- if that catches on, I'm claiming credit) might be the most lucrative market segment, but if you only cater to it, you're still cutting out the majority of consumers.
This is exactly the problem with traditional cinema distribution the
Re:How could it not change things? (Score:4, Insightful)
I think that a lot of the comments here are missing the point. You do not have to advirtise for the bottom 50% of music. It already has a devoted niche following. Just realize that it will never be as popular as the chart toppers.
How strange (Score:3, Insightful)
It's true you don't have to advertise. It doesn't cost anything really to have it available for download. Just sit back and rake in the
I'd like to see the music industry change in a lot of ways, but one really cool thing would be for the top 40 to account for 10% instead of 99.9% of sales
Re:How strange (Score:1)
In my fellow posters words, though, how arrogant..
Re:How strange (Score:2)
[sigh] the same "doesn't cost anything really" fallacy.
Sure - it doesn't cost 'anything really' for a single piece of obscure music. The problem comes when you are handling a couple of million obscure bits of music - those little costs start to add up fast. Even if it only costs a (US) penny
Re:How strange (Score:3, Interesting)
It's true, songs that sell less than 1 copy every 5 years don't turn a profit, but that's still very different from a record store. Try stacking a record-store with all songs that sell atleast 1 copy ever 5 years....
Besides, sysadmin-costs and so on do not go scale O(n) with
Re:How strange (Score:2)
I'm not claiming it's free to sell millions of songs over the internet. I'm claiming if you're selling millions of songs it is insignificant extra cost to have a huge catalog.
Re:How strange (Score:2)
But aside from that, people really do follow the herd. I do it too. You can't seriously believe that tens of millions of people made an educated decision to buy the latest 50 cent album. People are more likely to buy something if it is perceived to be popular. Sometimes it even makes sense.
Many people use Windows because it is popular. Heck, I do. It makes it easier for me to earn a living if I am comfortable programming Windows applications. I'm not really proud of that,
Re:How strange (Score:2)
When my favorite author writes a new book I buy it. Same for my favorite musician. In both cases, I already own most of their older works, as do plenty of other people who also like them as well. So when a new book or album of theirs is released, I buy it.
From my perspective, the majority of the sales proceed from that point, rather than someone thinking everyone is buying 50 cent (over-priced) and they should too.
Re:How strange (Score:2)
Re:How could it not change things? (Score:2)
I suspect a very large portion of copyrighted works become unavailable a LONG time before copyright expires.
Re:How could it not change things? (Score:2)
Right here: Natural Tools by Weld [amazon.com] I think the Internet keeps a lot of stuff available (like the aforementioned AFOS and Weld albums) long after 99.999% of the world doesn't really care about it anymore. Needless to say, this is a real boon for those of us still living in the 0.001%
Re:How could it not change things? (Score:2)
Hi man, I owe you a beer if you're ever in my parts of the world. (Stavanger, Norway that is)
Re:How could it not change things? (Score:2)
Re:How could it not change things? (Score:2)
I think that a lot of the comments here are missing the point. You do not have to advirtise for the bottom 50% of music. It already has a devoted niche following. Just realize that it will never be as popular as the chart toppers.
I wouldn't quite go as far as to say "don't advertise". However, the focus of targeted advertising campaigns should remain on the big hits, where a small percentage sales increase may yield big numbers. Long tail advertising should probably rely on broader swaths... not single
Re:How could it not change things? (Score:2)
Re:How could it not change things? (Score:2)
What do people do when they can choose from everything?
I mean seriously, what if you could go anywhere, see anything,listen to anything, etc.
This explosion of choice is partly a product of the internet, but also a product of dropping prices on consumer items. Most middle class Americans can now afford any work of music they want,
Re:How could it not change things? (Score:2)
Things have already changed a bit, though. When I was a kid in the 70s there were just a couple of TV shows that people talked about. We have much more choice now. It is kind of neat to run into someone into Red vs Blue or Venture Bros. or some other thing that simply couldn't exist in the 70s. There is a lot of crap too, but that's
Re:How could it not change things? (Score:2)
Re:How could it not change things? (Score:1)
Also I think there may be a psychological difference between a buck a track and 17 bucks per month. When you are buying at a price per song, you are thinking about whether you are likely to get your money's worth, however
Re:How could it not change things? (Score:2)
Example: Lets' say that Anderson's correct and Amazon makes a disproportionate amount of profit from low-sellers. Why is that? probably because the prices of the low-sellers have already accounted for *higher costs* than Amazon is incurring. I.e. those low-selling books still had to be edited, marketed,
Re:How could it not change things? (Score:2)
Re:How could it not change things? (Score:2)
(I am not arguing, just genuinely trying to understand if there's something I am missing here...)
Duh (Score:4, Insightful)
Part of the problem is, of course, advertising.
The biggest sellers are always the most heavily advertised/talked about.
How do you advertise the other ~90% of your catalog?
Hint: You can't. Not in any specific way.
Re:Duh (Score:2)
You can, but at the expense of the other 10% that is currently generating 90% of your income. What successful company in their right mind would risk that kind of cash cow?
-Rick
Re:Duh (Score:2, Interesting)
The following snips are from Slate's recent article on the long tail:
"At Slate, our inventory is our articles. We publish 20 or so stories every weekday, but we also have a backlog of about 33,000 pieces in our archives. Because those stories are freely available to our readers, a chunk of our traffic each day comes not from our "hits"--current pieces that are promoted on our home page, which typically draw tens of thousands of readers--but from olde
Re:Duh (Score:2)
Re:Duh (Score:3, Insightful)
Alternatively, they could use a program similar to Pandora.
Re:Duh (Score:2)
Yes, that would draw more people into the ~90% of music that isn't wildly popular
BUT
they would be advertising their recommendation 'feature', not the obscure music.
Too much choice = too much noise.
Targeted Ads are good business (Score:5, Insightful)
Advertising can take a lot of different forms, and I think Amazon is just scratching the surface with their recommendations. As advertising companies become less obsessed with just shotgunning a "message" out to as many eyes and ears as they can, and hoping they hit the right audience in the process, and instead catch on that you can get a lot more bang for your buck when you don't try to sell the same product to everyone, I think the "recommendation engines" type of ad-delivery will play a bigger role. (Because, when you get right down to it, the difference between a "recommendation" and an "advertisement" is just the context.)
There are always going to be hits, because people always want new stuff. Even if everyone had access to the entire back catalog of human civilization, for free and on demand, there would still be 'new hits.' Not as big, probably, because right now there are a lot of people who only listen to hits because they can't find the stuff from the back catalog that they want, but they would still happen.
What has to happen is that the music/movie companies have to realize that "hey, we make just as much money if you buy a song from 1994 than if you buy a song from 2006." That's the key thing that I don't think they've really understood yet, as evidenced by their seeming refusal to advertise anything but the newest stuff. A sale is a sale -- particularly when selling a back-catalog song doesn't mean that it's been sitting in a warehouse for 10 years, doing nothing but tying up capital.
What I see happening is more individually-targeted advertising that takes into account consumer preferences and offers up stuff from the catalogs for them to buy. Once you've accepted that it doesn't matter whether the consumer buys "MI:3" or "Dr. No," as long as they're both your products, you can advertise whichever one they're more likely to buy. In fact, it's stupid not to advertise whichever one you think they'll buy, because to do otherwise risks losing a possible sale. It just makes good marketing sense.
This requires that you have a lot of information on the purchasing patterns and preferences of each customer, but that's not hard to get (and a lot of people will give that up freely, if it means they get good recommendations).
Re:Duh (Score:2)
Sure you can advertise the other 90% of your content. Look at what Amazon does. They look at what you've bought and said you like and they find other things you might like. Sure, as a consumer, I can't even look at 5% of what amazon could sell me, but a million consumers can cover 95% of what they sell, and actually be interested in buying it.
Re:Duh (Score:2)
Hint: It's called P2P advertising, or as my grandma used to say, "Tell yer friends!"
Best way to advertise: PRICE (Score:2)
When all songs cost basically the same (say, $.99 as most do on iTunes), that's true.
But what if the "hits" cost $.99 and the "old stuff" cost, say, $.50?
How many people would sort by price and suddenly start buying on PRICE instead of what the latest advertising is pushing?
When all songs cost the same, there is no tail.
Steve
Targetted advertising. (Score:2)
The shop that sold it tome asked me about itand i told them so.
StillI keep getting advertisements for other gaming platforms and far and between forPSP titles, novelties and news.
Companies are sitting in a gold mine of information and are doing naught with it
Mr. Anderson (Score:1)
Mr. Anderson writes that as things move online....
I was thus a little surprised when Mr. Anderson told me that he didn't have any examples...
Mr. Anderson told me the lack of an example of misses...
By Mr. Anderson's calculation, 25% of Amazon's sales are from its tail...
My name...is NEO!
Agent Smith (Score:2)
sales "closely track Billboard" (Score:5, Insightful)
Right, but isn't that the point of the long tail? If Dan Brown sells a bazillion copies of "Da Vinci Code" and I sell 500 copies of PMD Applied [pmdapplied.com], we're both happy since we're meeting the expectations that we budgeted for. Of course, he's then a billionaire, whereas I've still got my office in the laundry room, but, er, anyhow.
Re:sales "closely track Billboard" (Score:1)
Re:sales "closely track Billboard" (Score:2)
Re:sales "closely track Billboard" (Score:2)
Oh, and the Beastie Boys will have 2 more albums by then...
Re:sales "closely track Billboard" (Score:2)
Re:sales "closely track Billboard" (Score:2)
Practice, young Jedi, practice [sf.net]
Re:sales "closely track Billboard" (Score:2)
Re:sales "closely track Billboard" (Score:2)
Re:sales "closely track Billboard" (Score:5, Insightful)
No, Apple is the one that is happy. The point of the 'Long Tail' is really that a lot of money can be made from large stocks of low volume items. Particularly with digital merchandise where no product needs to be stocked or with things like print-on-demand where the product is produced quickly to meet actual orders. You may only sell 500 copies, but when Apple sells 500 copies of 100,000 different less-known artists songs they make a hefty amount of money.
Re:sales "closely track Billboard" (Score:2)
Re:sales "closely track Billboard" (Score:2)
The tracks that get almost no play still takes space on your hard drive, eats space on your index, require time to enter information, etc.
It is highly unlikely that 80% or greater number of tracks in iTunes will every sell enough to recoup the costs.
Only reason they do it is because the other 20% or so more than make up for the rest and you need to be able to say "we
Re:sales "closely track Billboard" (Score:2)
Re:sales "closely track Billboard" (Score:2)
So I have spent (and spending) about 80% of my capital investment, and more importantly, on going maintenance cost, for stuff that hardly ever get touched.
These items will NEVER break even (due to the maintenance - ie. power, share of IT
Re:sales "closely track Billboard" (Score:2)
No.
Re:sales "closely track Billboard" (Score:2)
So let say even if you got rid of the 80% of the title and you only keep the 20% that actually makes money. Let's say it costs twice as much since you are losing the cost benefits from scaling (unlikely, it probably would be closer to 20 ro 30% increase in cost, but lets just assume the worst). That would STILL BE 60% LESS to maintain then the old infrastructure with 80% catalog that lost money.
So what is your point?
Re:Doubt it (Score:2)
Then you can add the prices for the cached sites all around the world. You maybe able to get around not caching unpopular titles, but when the user tries that unpopular title for the time and it takes considerably longer time than other regular titles, they bitch, and they bitc
Re:sales "closely track Billboard" (Score:1)
Right, and Billboard and iTunes both only look at, care about, and pimp "head content". There is not nearly enough tail content in iTunes to make any real determination as to how it affects sales.
--jeremy
not really (Score:2)
But more people use long-tails to state that if people could buy off-brand and specialized products as easily as they can buy mainstream stuff, the off-brand stuff would gain a disproportionate boost in sales. That is, big brands have advantages due to inequal distribution in traditional channels.
Since iTunes is equal access, it should show off-brand stuff selling at higher rates tha
There are a lot of niche markets (Score:2, Insightful)
The sum of the unpopular music sold, or niche commodity for that matter, may be larger than the sum of popular music sold. Whether or not t
People look for fewer options on the web (Score:2, Insightful)
A music example is electronic dance music. I don't go to iTunes for this stuff, because all th
It's economics, not statistics (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems that Mr. Anderson's book (I RTFA, but not the book) claims that higher sales in the tail will increase the profit of the tail and this will change the economics of the web. This doesn't make much sense to me, and the article rightly points out that there is not that much interest in the tail.
But that's not the point. The point is that to stock "tail items" (niche items) in a brick-and-mortar store COSTS a lot of money. It costs money in terms of the hit-items you can't stock because you've got limited inventory space (opportunity cost at work). But the cost of stocking niche items digitally is far, far less. The promise of profit from the tail is not based on increased revenue as much as it is on decreased cost.
Take the example of Apple's iTunes sales. Even if they do closely track Billboard sales, this doesn't change the fact that Apple is profiting MORE from their tail items than a brick-and-mortar store would be.
It seems as though both of these guys are missing the point: the promise of the tail is not in increased revenue, but in decreased cost.
-stormin
Re:It's economics, not statistics (Score:2)
First, the additional availability of the niche products in the long tail will help to increase their sales. For example, I bought a book on metaprogramming from Amazon. I'd been looking for that book for a long time, but was never able to find it. Amazon's ability to (virtually) "stock" that niche item was a major factor in me buying it.
Second, it's not the individual items that matter. It's the sum of the items in the long tail that add up
It's about where that revenue goes (Score:2)
The long
Re:It's about where that revenue goes (Score:2)
This is incorrect. See the wikipedia article on the topic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_tail [wikipedia.org]
The curve represents sales of a type of commodity. Say CDs. The height of the curve is the volume of sales. The curve has a very high "hump" near the left - representing that a few select titles (the hits) make the majority of the sales. The "long tail" doesn't refer to shifting anything, it refers to the narrow part of the graph to the right o
Re:It's economics, not statistics (Score:2)
Re:It's economics, not statistics (Score:1)
Just think of how many bags of sugar are on store shelves in the hopes of a sale for $0.79. The cost to make a product available to your target market via brick-and-mortar distribution is ridiculous! How many Treo700p units were necessary in order to have them sit on Sprintel shelves across the country? How many of those will be sold before another two generations makes them obsolete?
The reality is different for digital content. Negligible storage and duplication costs me
Re:It's economics, not statistics (Score:2)
I don't know about that. I would be more likely to buy books from a brick and mortar bookstore if they have the books that I want (this is ignoring the issue of cost - Amazon.com doesn't discount mass market paperbacks).
Case in point - I wanted to buy Conventions of War (Dread Empire's Fall) at the bookstore, but they didn't have it. If that book isn't there, the probabil
Re:It's economics, not statistics (Score:2)
In your case, you are talking about revenue. You point out that if they don't stock enough books, they will loose revenue because you won't by the book. But what you fail to acknowledge is cost. There are at least two types. First of all, they have to pay rent for every squ
Re:It's economics, not statistics (Score:2)
What I said was: The promise of profit from the tail is not based on increased revenue as much as it is on decreased cost.
How is that backwards? And in any case, the long tail is not a result in the cost of anything. The long tail is just an artifact of the fact that a few items are really popular and account for most of the purchases, while the majority of titles account for on
Maybe it all depends on how you look at (Score:1, Insightful)
missing the point (Score:4, Interesting)
Sears & Roebuck, the "long tail" of retail. (Score:2)
There's a reason it's called "the long tail" and not "the long club-foot." The tail tapers out -- it's not very big, in terms of sales volume per item. It just goes on for a while (hence, long).
Right now, the tail is chopped off because of the costs of maintaining a huge physical inventory. It's only economical to keep the stuff in stock which generates a certain number of sales per week, because it costs a significant amount of money to keep it there. Digital distribution
Misses the Boat? (Score:4, Insightful)
Stores always want the most selection. If it was all about hits, why stock anything other than the Top 40? Because people want other things as well, even if the Top 40 sells the most. What the long tail does, is makes offering selection much cheaper to the stores.
Say you have a mom and pop store in a town. They need to take a risk to buy one or two copies of a relatively unknown book or CD. Since they're not buying in bulk they don't get as much of a discount from their distributor. Then they have to hope someone in that area wants to buy it. If not, they're stuck with it because their customer base isn't large enough.
With an online store, suddenly your potential customer base is millions of people. Many more than the thousand or so that may come into a local store. Now you can order a small bulk order of an obscure item and most likely you will find people who want to buy it, regardless of where they are located.
In fact, people who find obscure items at your store will probably be more willing to buy other things from your store because you sell the niche items they like. Some of these may even be hits!
I think this is why the Long Tail is important.
Completely wrong. (Score:2)
The Long Tail and the Blogosphere (Score:4, Insightful)
Case In Point:
Person A likes something really popular at the moment(Say, Pirates of the Caribbean), but also likes some less popular things at a constant rate for a longer period of time (the DS Lite, Gaia Online, Crocs) and some niche things that have a burst of interest for a short time period (Sonata Arctica, Super Princess Peach, Jibbitz)
Person A blogs about all seven items in a single entry, and most likely spends more time talking about the niche things in total than on the really big popular item. Likewise, while information about PotC is probably easily accessible on Wikipedia or elsewhere, the user may have to seek out (and link to) niche sites for the less popular items, and thus lead her readers to these niche sites as well. The niche sites generate interest for the niche item, and boom, we now have more people wanting the niche.
It's the rough equivalent about how Shopping Centers usually have an 'anchor' in the form of Wal-Mart or a Bookstore, and then have the specialty shops around it to fill out the real estate. As more people notice themselves doing this with their blogs/LJs/MySpace/whatever, the niche items gain swing and soon gain a sizable portion of the market in this way.
The internet's main impact on the Long Tail is its ability to piece together far-flung bits of interest in an item, allowing them to congeal into a sizable force. Saleswise, however, the impact is only noticable to internet sellers (or big volume concrete sellers, like department stores), since smaller concrete retailers still find the costs of marketing to a niche prohibitive unless they dive into specialties. However, with the Long Tail, the consumers of these niche items become far more entrenched than before.
Long Tail vs. Sustainable Content Production (Score:2, Insightful)
Getting that from iTunes means getting
Re:Long Tail vs. Sustainable Content Production (Score:2)
While iTunes might have the best business model in the world, they aren't going to do it for free very long. Sure, at some initial point selling music at cost without expenses pushes the iPod into people's pocket. But that only goes so far. Then, reality sets in.
I think $150,000 income would requi
I think you're looking at it wrong. (Score:4, Insightful)
Where I think you're off-base is to somehow imply that the situation that your hypothetical band faces is any worse than the situation they have right now. At least in this model we're discussing, they have the possibility of making a few bucks from their music alone -- perhaps enough to make simply recording music a pleasant hobby, if not a day job. It might be enough for a garage band who previously played only for themselves to justify buying some better equipment, or justify it instead of some other way of spending their free time.
The band who is not going to make a professional career out of the "long tail" music scene, certainly wouldn't be able to do it in a purely corporate, hit-driven model, where your odds of success are comparable to what you'd find by playing the Lottery (and the effect roughly the same -- for every person who strikes it rich, dozens if not hundreds of other bands go bankrupt).
If you were a band that could have done well under the old hit model, then you can still do well today; the 'hit effect' still abounds, and by cutting out the middle man, a band today or tomorrow could conceivably make more money selling less songs, but cutting out the labels' overhead.
Furthermore, in your calculations you're leaving out the band's income due to non-music sales: concert tickets, merchandise, endorsements, etc. Those make up the bulk of a popular band's revenue today, under the studio-centric model, and that probably wouldn't change immediately. People are still going to want to go and see a band they like in person, wear that band's t-shirt, and companies trying too hard to be hip are always going to be willing to pony up dough to artists willing to promote their schwag. It's a mistake to assume that a band's main source of income must come from iTunes. In reality, a smart band would treat the iTunes income as a "bonus," and use it in ways that help to increase their real revenue sources.
Nobody ever said that being a musician should be easy: that you should be able to just make music and then wait for the money to roll in. Succeeding in that business is like any other, it takes a lot of hard work; under a 'long tail' model, the most successful bands would probably be the ones that stay endlessly on tour, working venues small and large, selling high-markup merchandise, and using their music essentially as an advertising vehicle for self-promotion and to establish a fanbase. If the Internet allows them to derive income from their music directly instead of having to pay radio stations to pay it (as the studios basically used to do), all the better.
How to Dig out of the 'Deep Long Tail' (Score:2)
That's $200 a week that the band can count on, if they sit on their ass. Now let's assume that they're not.
Let's toss in that every concert they play, they manage to spike iTunes downloads enough to make an extra $100 each time, with a residual o
Lyricist, what? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Long Tail vs. Sustainable Content Production (Score:2)
You have 3 members. You have a booking agent (who collects 5% commission on all gigs booked) and otherwise it's all you.
You play 40 gigs. You make (a fairly liberal) $1,000 a gig. (Some places pay $100. Some places pay $2,500. Most places pay around $1,000. Plus free beer!) $40,000 - your agent's take ($2,000) = $38,000 in concert revenue.
Your latest CD's production session cost you $30,0
Forget about iTunes... (Score:5, Insightful)
A couple of years back, I was telling a friend about a great book I had as a kid, called "Who Needs Donuts" by Mark Alan Stamaty. My friend had just had a kid, and I was thinking it would be cool to get a copy for him, but it was long out of print. I shelved the idea for a few months, and then decided to try again, and if that didn't work, scan my old copy, which I had saved, and print a new one. In the intervening months, the book came back for a reprint, 30 years after its first printing.
My feeling is that it shouldn't have been that much work, and there's no reason the publisher should have to print up a whole multi-thousand book run. The occasional nostalgia buyer would do really well for publishers and authors who have low-volume books.
So if I want to find old editions of the Book of Knowledge from 1944, where the commentary following the story of "the first men on the moon" indicates that "maybe your children's children's children will walk on the moon", I should be able to.
In short, no more dark ages. No lost wisdom. No lost idiocy, either.
Re:Forget about iTunes... (Score:2, Insightful)
Yep, this is exactly what this about. Technology and the internet make things such as older books and music available because of on-demand-printing, inexpensive storage and transfer.
Seriously, what does it cost for a book publisher to store an electronic copy of a book and than kick out a single copy when somebody decides they want one?
Flawed Argument (Score:5, Interesting)
Reality is in between (Score:3, Interesting)
I think the truth between the two discussions (Anderson vs. Gomes) is more likely to be something in the middle, not at one extreme or the other. I don't think hits are going away, and I think hits make their mark on most any marketable thing/meta-thing. With that said, I think that niches are more meaningful and valuable than ever before.
The book example is great - I get more access to niche publications because of the long tail concept, largely because of funding and popularity of hits. Said a little differently: the niche stuff generally sits alongside the hits, and generally benefit from some of the hits' halos.
My music isn't hit music. That's OK, it's just stuff made from my soul, and I am not planning to quit my day job. The money made from niche availability on the internet (for me) fund dinners out, an occasional instrument upgrade, or a small household bill or two. Why is the long tail beneficial to me? Because when someone is browsing James Blunt [numberonemusic.com], they'll often see me on the front page in a promo, and sometimes (well, briefly) listen to my stuff too. Similarly, iTunes/Rhapsody/Emusic/Yahoo! Music/etc. browsers often buy the latest hits, but will splurge on a Jimmy Bear tune or two - how do they find my tunes? Because my niche music is available with the hits, and because searches sometimes come up with one of my funky little musings.
My point is, that niche stuff isn't taking over the world, and hits aren't all there is. I think the niche markets of the world have been greatly enhanced by Internet access, and that they also benefit from proximity to the hits.
Data (Score:2)
Second, iTunes catalog is certainly skewed toward commercial catalogs, and not toward most musicians you'd find appealing to the Long Tail. Given this selection bias, is it any wonder Apple's data doesn't confirm Anderson's analysis?
Ironic (Score:2)
I-Tunes Not The Best Example (Score:2)
This was a valid insight, as the largest bookstores typically carry 150,000 titles. Anderson revealed that the size of the book market is more than twice as large as what the largest bookstores can carry.
It was Bezos' decision to launch with 1,000,000 titles that drove this, plus Amazon's own set up, which makes it easy for
What about other countries? (Score:2)
The UK is famous for it's "clone towns", i.e. cities where all they have are chain stores and no independants. I live in Portsmouth, which is a prime example.
Chain stores take all the fun out of shopping. Plus, you can never really get what you want, so I do most of my shopping online. eBay and independent web sites are fantastic for this. And it's starting to cross over to normal p
Re:What a crock! (Score:5, Informative)
Gomes is refuting Andersons thesis by saying that 20% of the items still make up 80% of the sales (percentages of the old 80/20 rule used for illustration)
Anderson's response though is that with essentially *unlimited* inventory percentages aren't always the best or only way to measure the "tail". Anderson's definition has to do with the absolute numbers that used to get cut off. So Gomes is counting a bunch of sales as "head" which Anderson is counting as "Tail".
For example: Imagine a market in which the old brick and mortar stores could stock only the 100 most popular items and that only 20 of those items made up 80% of the sales. In the new world of unlimited inventory there is an ecommerce store has a 100,000 items in stock and the top 20,000 account for 90% of the sales. So before the web the top 20% of items accounted for 80% of the sales but afterwards the top 20% accounts for a full 90% of the sales. Gomes says this means that Anderson is wrong and that the web made things even *more* hit centric. Anderson's "tail" includes items 101 through 20,000 which Gomes is including in the "head". This overlap between Anderson's "Tail" and Gomes's "head" used to be unmarketable "misses" but are now able to find a market & have even increased sales individually and also now make up a significant percentage of total sales to the retailer. Sales that previously didn't exist because the old brick & mortar store didn't have space for the product
As Anderson said. If Gomes had been a little more intellectually honest about his argument there could have been an interesting debate over how long the long tail is & what the limits of the phenomena are etc. Gomes does have a good point which he simply overstated. 20% of the products *are* still accounting for 80% of the sales, which Anderson's thesis *seemed* to undermine. To be fair Anderson (at least in the original article, I haven't read the book) doesn't dispute that 80/20 rule. Instead I think he could be summed up as saying that with unlimited inventory the 20% of inventory is a much bigger absolute number and also that retailers can profitably capture the 20% of sales that come from the 80% of the inventory that they used to have to forego for reasons of limited physical space.
Mod Parent Up (Score:2)
Re:What a crock! (Score:2)