The story of the long tail

Heads or tails? The editor-in-chief of the Silicon Valley bible Wired, and the man who has written the clearest explanation yet of the shift from the one-size-fits-all, mass-media world to a diverse, complex world of millions of niches, is keeping both options covered.

Fresh from appearing on a very much mass-market radio programme, Chris Anderson is also blogging on his progress towards publication of his book, The Long Tail, which expands on a seminal article he wrote in Wired two years ago. “One of the challenges is to blog and do a book tour at the same time. It may involve no sleep,” he says.
That essay, which coined the phrase that is now the title of his book, has become required reading for every executive struggling to understand the way the media world is changing from one where the means of production and distribution rested in the control of the few, to one where anyone with a Mac and a broadband connection is a mini media mogul.
The Long Tail is an eloquent exposition of a simple idea, but one that has huge ramifications for our media and culture if followed to its logical conclusions. Essentially it describes the elegant line of the demand curve that shows the “short head”, the big hits that have traditionally sustained record companies, Hollywood studios, broadcasters and publishers, petering out into the long tail, the never-ending cornucopia of a million niche products that will all appeal to someone, somewhere.
In music that could mean rare 60s psychedelia, in film, Russian cinema of the 30s, in publishing, the anarchic explosion of blogs, or in broadcasting, a video of a duck skateboarding. “Broadly, the long tail describes the shift from mass markets to millions of niches, the low sellers that we traditionally haven’t had room for on our shelves, screens and channels, but which we now do have room for thanks to the Internet and abundant distribution systems,” says Anderson.
When you can offer anything at marginal cost, the collective demand for those niche products approaches or even overtakes the traditional demand for the heavily marketed hits, he demonstrates.
Anderson’s first eureka moment occurred when he was talking to the head of Ecast, a service that provides digital jukeboxes with a huge catalogue of songs, who told him that 98 per cent of all its 10,000 tracks were bought at least once in a three-month period. With marginal cost of storage and distribution, all those single tracks started to add up.
Before long, he was seeing the long tail in action everywhere — in the success of Netflix, an online DVD rental service, in the popularity of amateur video aggregators such as YouTube and Digg, and in the success of Amazon, eBay and Google AdWords.
Anderson’s theory is not exactly new. Since the early 1990s digital seers have been hailing the Internet as a democratising force for musicians, film-makers and writers. But his rational style of explanation, logical delivery and snappy writing make it palatable for mass consumption.
These seismic changes hit the music industry first and Anderson believes that it has started to grapple with what they mean but needs to go further in clearing rights to archive recordings, loosening pricing structures and continuing to innovate with “digital only” labels that lower costs.
The fly in Anderson’s ointment is eloquently pointed out by John Cassidy in his review of the book for the New Yorker. As the big media behemoths of the 20th century crumble, others — Google, Amazon, eBay — are taking their place as gatekeepers with the power to set the rules.
The impact of all this, predicts Anderson, will take a generation to fully emerge but will produce a more global network of niches that intersect at various points. He dubs it “tribal culture”.
“A richer culture is a stronger culture and leads us to be more satisfied consumers.”

WIRED FOR SUCCESS
· Wired is a monthly magazine and on-line periodical published in San Francisco, since March 1993
· The magazine was founded by American journalist Louis Rossetto and his partner Jane Metcalfe in 1993
· It reports on how technology affects culture, economy, and politics.
· Wired has both been admired and disliked for its strong libertarian principles, its enthusiastic embrace of techno-utopianism, and its sometimes experimental layout.
· In July 2006, Condé Nast announced an agreement to buy Wired News for $25 million.
· After the dot-com boom Wired outlasted its competition, and found a new direction under Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson, who took on the job in June 2001.