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One of the hot concepts mentioned frequently when discussing Internet businesses and applications for the last year or two has been that of the "Long Tail". The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of "hits" at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into "one size fits all" containers.
What happens when everything in the world becomes available to everyone? When the combined value of all the millions of items that may sell only a few copies equals or exceeds the value of the few items that sell millions each?
Forget squeezing millions from a few megahits at the top of the charts. The future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream.
Anatomy of the Long Tail
Online services carry far more inventory than traditional retailers. Rhapsody, for example, offers 19 times as many songs as Wal-Mart’s stock of 39,000 tunes. The appetite for Rhapsody’s more obscure tunes makes up the so-called Long Tail. Meanwhile, even as consumers flock to mainstream books, music, and films, there is real demand for niche fare found only online.
Does The Long Tail Apply to Mobile Music?
The Long Tail in e-democracy
The Long Tail concept is a real corker, simple and graphical, perfect for stimulating a good brainstorm. The left of the long tail is the top of the continuum, where the most influence is wielded through more direct forms of interaction. Like for Amazon or the iTunes Music Store, the new “market” in e-democracy is down the tail, using the low-cost, mass-reach of the Internet to service these less influential people’s democratic needs.
This helps explain the emergence of Internet email, cell phones, automobiles, and many other systems we take for granted today and is useful for evaluating systems and business models for the future.
The short tail
What happens when everything in the world becomes available to everyone? When the combined value of all the millions of items that may sell only a few copies equals or exceeds the value of the few items that sell millions each?
Forget squeezing millions from a few megahits at the top of the charts. The future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream.
Anatomy of the Long Tail
Online services carry far more inventory than traditional retailers. Rhapsody, for example, offers 19 times as many songs as Wal-Mart’s stock of 39,000 tunes. The appetite for Rhapsody’s more obscure tunes makes up the so-called Long Tail. Meanwhile, even as consumers flock to mainstream books, music, and films, there is real demand for niche fare found only online.
Does The Long Tail Apply to Mobile Music?
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The Long Tail in e-democracy
The Long Tail concept is a real corker, simple and graphical, perfect for stimulating a good brainstorm. The left of the long tail is the top of the continuum, where the most influence is wielded through more direct forms of interaction. Like for Amazon or the iTunes Music Store, the new “market” in e-democracy is down the tail, using the low-cost, mass-reach of the Internet to service these less influential people’s democratic needs.
This helps explain the emergence of Internet email, cell phones, automobiles, and many other systems we take for granted today and is useful for evaluating systems and business models for the future.
The short tail
