Matt Asay on the Blockbuster vs. the Long Tail

Link to his June 27 post, "Blockbusters stomp on the long tail, Harvard study finds".

Excerpt:

Remember the long tail? It was the omnipresent theory that suggested there were oodles of cash to be made by monetizing a market's disparate tastes via the Web.

Why sell a million copies of Led Zeppelin's Coda, when you can make a thriving business of selling two to three copies of your neighbor's garage band to Rick, two copies of a Nigerian band's tunes to Susan, and so on?

As new research highlighted in Harvard Business Review suggests, the answer may well be that the real money is in the blockbuster, not the long tail, after all:

Link to "Libraries and the Long Tail: Some Thoughts about Libraries in a Network Age", by Lorcan Dempsey (blogging here), Vice President, Research, and Chief Strategist, OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc (from April 2006)

Link to "Libraries, the Long Tail and the Future of Legacy Print Collections", Paul Genoni, Curtin University of Technology. (March 2007)

Excerpt: [Chris] Anderson’s Wired Magazine article did not consider the case of libraries at all, and libraries received only a cursory mention when his thoughts were expanded to book length in 2006 as The long tail: How endless choice is creating unlimited demand. Library bloggers nonetheless picked up on the long tail concept and began discussing how it might be applied to their own domain of collecting, storage and distribution.

Information about Chris Anderson, the person who introduced the concept of "The Long Tail", is found here. It includes a link to the October 2004 Wired article. (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.)