So I've been reading The Long Tail a book by Chris Anderson. I first heard the phrase "the long tail" while in Australia, taking a class in web production. It totally made sense as soon as I heard it, about how the web has brought about a new industry not only for consumer markets but also with information in general. To explain it, look at the graph on the left. Let's give the example of music. The red part is where all the "hits" are, the britney spears, DMB, nirvana. These are the CDs that are carried in retail stores. The orange part are all the other CDs and songs that aren't as popular but there is still a market for. These are the songs that are listed on itunes or in the amazon music store. What Anderson says in his book is that the amazing thing is that the tail goes on for a long long time, almost never getting to 0, that's incredible! That means for every joe-shmo garage band track that gets sold, when combined with all the other joe-shmo garage band tracks out there, those sales can (and do) account to 25-50% of the revenues of online sales. Internet stores like amazon.com or itunes are not constrained by the physical limitations that traditional retailers are. That means that they can give the option of selling many more diverse genres of a song or go into more obscure listings because they'll only sell 4 or 5 copies, but when the cost of supplying these songs is almost nothing, it can be quite profitable.
While talking to the professor I'm working with this summer, Steven, he brought up an amazing idea that TV is going to go into the long tail very soon. With cable and fios tv, we are no longer limited to the channels available on old-fashioned antennae-frequency television. MTV, and VH1 aren't going to be the only music channels, it's going to be joe-shmo TV coming live from the basement! Like.... Wayne's world or the truman show, shows that also have a niche market.
At the same time that I think this is all so incredible and amazing, I'm also worried that the niche market might just be another phrase for "sifting through all the crap to get to something good". Take you tube, there are some really clever shows, programs, projects and comedy that are completely uncensored and raw. We have all been there though when you have to watch 8 bad videos to get to a good one. I mean how many more videos do we need of babies laughing and why is that "charlie, you bit my finger" bit so damn funny? Same goes with blogging and news. Not every blog can be as informative and ground-breaking as, say the Technocrat-shilton blog. I mean there are all those live journals about "omg my bff jill is a huge jerk", but I guess there's a niche for that somewhere. I guess I'm just worried that the good information is going to get clouded by the ...crap. We'll see, we'll see.
1 comment:
I don't know about the television bit... I see the option of most channels which aren't funded by a huge corporation simply moving to vodcasts (as much as the terminology makes me cringe). Hell, even corporate networks offer streaming video a few days after the premier-- there may soon be the eventuality of cutting out the middle man. I find it endlessly amazing; I can only hope that it won't lead to more DRM issues.
I don't know too much about these things, though-- I'm sure there's a reason why that is far less practical on a full-blown migration kind of scale.
However, I'm glad to finally have the terminology of long tail to describe this: it's a pretty nifty concept.
-MG de Wyndham
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