Book Summary Preview : The Long Tail

The Big Idea
It has been an accepted fact for decades now that 'hits rule'. Popular culture today is consumed by hits-- people can't help but talk about them, select them, and in general try to understand them. Executives from many different industries constantly rack their brains trying to come up with the next big seller.

Yet at the rate things are going, hits are beginning to rule less. Number one may still be number one, but the number ones don't sell as much as they used to. Hits are not the economic force they used to be; markets have fragmented into millions of niches.

The main difference between then and now is that consumers of today have far more choices than ever before. This incredible amount of choice is resonating in a very big way with modern-day consumers; they increasingly favor markets that provide the most choice. A new market is coming to fruition-- a market of multitudes and niche products that, thanks to the Internet and other such sources, is easier and cheaper to reach than ever before.

This book is about that market. It takes a look at niches, which are emerging as the new big market alongside the hits. The massed group of niches has always existed, but thanks to modern-day conditions the cost of reaching this group has fallen dramatically, and as a result it has become a force to be reckoned with.

Why You Need This Book

As the preceding section has shown, the era of 'one-size-fits-all' is over. The expertise gained from decades of experience in creating, picking and promoting hits no longer exists. A new set of resources, one that explains not only how to deal with this situation but to prosper, is vital.

This book is one such resource. In a nutshell, it provides readers with a history of the hit, a definition and short history of the so-called 'Long Tail', a look at the new units of today-- the new market, producers, tastemakers-- as well as a prediction of how tomorrow's Tail might look like.

What’s a 'Long Tail'?

In the course of his research on modern technology trends, author Chris Anderson made an astounding discovery. He was interviewing Robbie Vann-Adibe, the CEO of 'digital jukebox' company Ecast, and he was asked to guess what percentage of the 10,000 albums the company had sold at least one track per quarter. Even his wildest guesses were way off-- the actual figure was an incredible 98 percent. As the company’s executives continued to add albums to its archives-- some hit albums, but more and more of them obscure albums that were far from being popular – it was realizing that despite the fact that less and less of what was being added were hit albums, they sold more and more music the more they added.

Anderson realized that this statistic contained a truth about the economics of entertainment these days. Thanks to the Internet, the concept of limited supply has begun to become obsolete. Just about every product sold on the Internet has almost zero packaging cost and consumers have nearly instant access to them; this runs counter to the old model in which a limited amount of storage or shelf space, airtime or other such factors makes it sensible for retailers to fill them with the titles that might just sell best. This is the era of “unlimited selection.”

When the hard data was graphed, it started out resembling any other demand curve, with a few hits being downloaded a relatively huge number of times at the head of the curve, and with the curve falling off steeply with less popular tracks. But the fascinating thing was that the curve itself never fell to zero. It might approach it near the end of the graph itself, but it would never be exactly zero. Such a curve has a 'tail' section that is very long relative to the head, and is called, as a consequence, a 'long-tailed distribution'. Thus the title of an article based on these findings-- which was later used as a basis for this book.

 

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