Monday, January 25, 2010

Assignment #1: The Long Tail

Chris Anderson, author and editor of Wired magazine, created his idea of The Long Tail. At first, he wrote an article describing his idea. However, it became such a popular idea and response/feedback rates were enormous enough to warrant his writing a whole book on it as well. Essentially, Mr. Anderson uses what he calls a "Power Law" (shown below)


Photo Credits: http://defensetransformation.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/power-law-curve.jpg

On YouTube, he calls it the "80/20" rule named after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who noticed that 80% of the income in Italy belonged to 20% of the people. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Yku0GTrcuw)

Mr. Anderson uses this same principle with his "Long Tail" idea. He mostly concentrates on the entertainment industry to illustrate his point, so I will do so, too. The most popular songs, videos, and books are sold in stores in hard copies and tangible objects (i.e. cds and leather-bound volumes of books). Other, more obscure tracks or books, don't even make it to store shelves. So many songs and books are made that less than half of them make it to the market. The "head" of Anderson's power law (the 80%)is made up of the popular tracks, hit-songs, and bestsellers. The "tail" (20%)part of his curve is reserved for the less-known, often unacknowledged pieces that don't make it that far. This is where the internet steps in.
Less popular tracks don't need to compete for shelf space like the more popular tracks do in stores. Because it is so relatively cheap to store songs or books online, a lot more is stored and competition is not so fierce. These songs or books are relatively unknown, but sites such as Amazon.com or Rhapsody.com help the case some by using "recommended" features. For example, clicking on a book and indicating your intent to buy it will lead to a portion on the page dedicated to telling you that "users who bought this book also bought...".
Also, on Pandora.com, one can create a radio station with songs they like and get suggestions of songs they MIGHT like according to different aspects of the songs they choose. This can lead to a person going online to listen to a song they know and love, being led to a song that is less known but similar in style, leading to a song that a very small amount of people have heard but has similar elements. Ultimately, this can lead a person to discover "hidden talent" and a whole world of songs they like without necessarily having been exposed to the artist otherwise.

There's a whole website dedicated to what "you might also like"!

This relates to the 80/20 rule because 80% of the people that like the popular songs only get a small portion of songs to listen to (i.e. those songs you keep hearing repeated on the radio) and the 20% of songs, mostly unheard and undiscovered artists, are found online (and ONLY online). But the 20% has the longer part of the tail because these little purchases add up from different sites and can actually make loads more money than the hit song would have. It's a debate of many people buying only what is offered in stores (which, admittedly, is less than half of what is found online...for example, Border's Books and Music only sells half of what Amazon.com has to offer--they have to be selective of what they sell because there is limited space to put it in.) versus many many more people buying one or two tracks of things they find online. Oftentimes, online wins.

Democratically, the Long-Tail is the better option. It takes the monopolizing out of selling because it equalizes the playing field. Anyone can get anything published or recorded and the internet provides a great distributing tool for such purposes. However, this should also come with a warning--it can lead to a lot of people sharing explicit and implicit material, so viewer discretion is advised.
As far as creating opportunities for budding artists, though, the Long-Tail is excellent news for budding artists and musicians.