The ‘long tail’ theory sounds great, it sounds revolutionary, but like so many Internet dreams it seems to be failing to materialise:
a study of digital music sales has posed the first big challenge to this “long tail” theory: more than 10 million of the 13 million tracks available on the internet failed to find a single buyer last year.
Still that’s three million tracks that found at least one buyer, I guess. That’s a much bigger inventory than any old-style retailer.
It is not ‘endless choice’ as long-tail adherents proclaim but it is a greatly extended choice. And that great expansion still matters a lot.
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Based around my listening habits, Red Eye Records in the city offers greatly long tail variety than iTunes.
Trevor, who’s actually said The Long Tail provides “endless” choice, apart from someone creating a straw man to knock over? “endless” is a bit like “unlimited” internet access. Everything has a limit: there’s only a finite number of people to make stuff in finite time.
Also, you are doing the glass-half-empty thing. A shop with 3 million products on offer is huge.And if it weren’t for the internet the other 10 million wouldn’t even have been visible at all.
And this is only the beginning. We’ve had coherent online music retail for a decade. Complaining that there’s a failure is like saying within a decade of Ford’s Model T that we didn’t have 8-lane freeways across the US.
Stig, the author or his publisher are responsible for the word endless as in this title from one of the editions of the book – “The Long Tail How Endless Choice Is Creating Unlimited Demand” – http://tinyurl.com/8er5se
I don’t think the other 10 million are visible in any real sense. They are there but I doubt anyone is listening to them or becoming aware of them. Otherwise presumably at least one person would buy them.
Online music is great – I hardly buy music any other way any more and I buy more now than I used to before – but I still have to have some connection to the music. In terms of new to me artisits, that is usually through a podcast dealing with my particular tastes (ie blues, americana, alt country) but that is a radio model extended through the medium of the Internet – it is not endless choice. An artist who wants to sell stuff still has to, in my view, generally use some ‘trusted’ intermediary to get the message out there.
What’s more all this endless / extended choice is great at first – but I now have far more music than I can realistically listen to. I still have CDs gathering dust in their cellophane wrappers and lots of stuff that I just listened to once. The endless / extended choice gave me a window of few years where I really did a lot of exploration but now I’m back focused on the really great stuff in the fairly narrow niches that I really like. It’s the same with RSS, twitter and friend feed after a while you get tired of new stuff all the time and want to focus on a few dozen great outlets rather than hundreds as I tried to stay across in the past.
Choice is wonderful but it is limited by human capacities, the practicality of everyday life and a desire to spend precious hours deeply immersed in really great stuff, of which there already exists enough to keep me going for decades.
If 10 million tracks failed to find just one owner, it is a clear indication that either; (a) there has been a gross failure in the marketing strategy; or (b) the tracks are poor excuses for music; or (c) both. I’m inclined to think it’s (c).