The Long Tail

FAQ: Does the rise of the LT = the fall of mass culture?

The Long Tail is about the shift from hits to niches. Several readers have asked what this means for the future of mass (hit-driven, mainstream) culture in America.  The short answer is that it will not only get less mass, but that this is a trend that's already well underway.

Let's start by defining mass culture. The usual test is the "watercooler effect", the buzz in the office around a shared cultural event, be it the finale of The Apprentice or the opening of the last Star Wars. The number of such events has been shrinking for years, driven mostly by the fragmentation of the television audience.

Cable TV started this with its explosive increase in the number of shows broadcast at any one time, which soon resulted in half of American viewership moving to cable, where they are today scattered among nearly 300 networks.  The arrival of TiVo and other DVRs amplified this by taking the time component out, too. Today even if people are watching the same shows, they may not be watching them on the same night. Who wants to listen to the morning-after recaps of real-timers, who risk ruining the surprise of shows you're yet to replay?

The result is that the day when most of America watched the same things on the same night is long gone. All but one of the top rated TV shows were in the late 70s and early 80s; the one newer one was  the 1994 Winter Olympics, still more than a decade ago. Today's top shows have Nielsen scores that wouldn't have put then in the top twenty two decades ago.

Likewise for music. By my count only ten of the top 100 best-selling albums were released in the last decade, and only four of those were in the last five years. Occam's razor says this is more likely due to the diminishing power of radio as a hit-making machine than it is to some Darwinian decline in music talent. In 1993, American spent on the average 23 hours and 15 minutes a week listening to radio. As of spring 2004, that figure had declined to 19 hours and 45 minutes per week. America's Top 40 just doesn't matter as much anymore.

So instead of the office water cooler, which crosses cultural boundaries as only the random assortment of personalities found in the workplace can, we increasingly have our own tribes.  My tribe may have all picked up the "all your base" meme at the same time, but your tribe was into the steroid scandal. These days our water coolers are increasingly virtual, there are many different ones, and the people who gather around them are self-selected. We are turning from a mass market into a niche nation.

FAQ: Does the LT increase demand or just shift it?

Does the Long Tail grow the pie or simply slice it differently? In other words, as the number of available products grows many-fold with the infinite shelf space of virtual retailers, does it encourage people to buy more stuff or just less popular stuff? Several readers have written to ask about this, some arguing that at most the Long Tail will shift demand because consumers don’t have extra time to consume more content and they don’t have extra money to pay for it.

I've touched on this some in the economics of abundance discussion, in particular noting that scarcity of human attention is indeed a limiting factor in demand. But in general, the answer depends on the sector: some do seem to have huge opportunities for growth as their niches become widely available and some do not.

Although human attention and spending power are finite, you can get more for your time and money. Some forms of entertainment, such as music, are "non-rivalrous" for attention, which is to say you can consume them while you're doing something else. For instance, some explanations of the rise of average hours of TV watching in the 70s and 80s were because a generation had grown up used to television on in the background of their lives; as the novelty wore off it went from a rivalrous to a non-rivalrous medium, and thus we consumed more of it. 

Other media, such as text, can be consumed more efficiently and with higher quality through better pre-selection. Indeed, it’s quite extraordinary how much we’ve been able to increase our consumption bandwidth of information, speed-reading pages of Google search results and custom RSS feeds. I may not read any more words than I once did, but they're more likely to be meaningful to me, thanks to much better filters (better at suiting my own interests than, say, the editors of the New York Times) pre-selecting what I do read. So because the words are more relevant, my meaningful bandwidth has increased; I have, in a sense, compressed human attention.

But once you combine the scarcity of disposable income with the scarcity of time, some non-rivalrous media may become rivalrous. The reason people have the television on in the background is because it doesn't cost them anything to do so. But if that were pay-per-view video, you can bet it would suddenly have become the center of their attention. This then favors all-you-can eat subscription services in the Long Tail stakes. You're likely to consume more if it doesn't cost you more to do so.

So, bottom line: human attention is more expandable than money. The primary effect of the Long Tail is to shift our taste towards niches, but to the extent we're more satisfied by what we're finding, we may well consume more of it. We just won't necessarily pay a lot more for the privilege. I hope that doesn't screw up anyone's business model.

Long Tail FAQ: What about producers?

I've been planning to start a Long Tail FAQ, beginning with a question I get all the time:  " I can see what the Long Tail offers consumers and distributors, but are there equal advantages for producers?" The answer to that will be at least one chapter of the book, so it's a lot for a FAQ. But the short form is "Yes". The supply side of the Long Tail is a rich topic that neatly compliments the demand-side focus of most of my writing to date.

Kevin Kelly has now prodded me into FAQ action with a great production example--how to self-publish on Amazon. It's a comprehensive, step-by-step guide, and it begins by answering the "why?":

I began listing self-published material on Amazon because I wanted a way to reach the wider public with my stuff but I did not want to have to deal with shipping out copies to each customer who ordered on my website. For a small-timer like me, mailing out, and keeping track of onesies and twosies is very disruptive for my day job. By having my stuff on Amazon, Amazon's mighty enterprise became my shipper (they are very good at this), so the only place I have to ship my copies to is to their warehouse.

More importantly, as popular as my website may or may not be, it doesn't compare to the traffic headed to Amazon to search for books and DVDs. By having my stuff pop up among the big publisher's offerings for "similar books" or even in reader's lists and guides, my titles gain a greater chance to be seen and ordered. In a certain way, unless your stuff is available on Amazon, it ain't available.

This example encapsulates two big Long Tail advantages for producers. The first is access to market.  Only a distributer/retailer with effectively infinite warehouse and shelf space would be willing to carry Kevin's self-published books (as distinct from his very successful commercially-published books, Out of Control and New Rules for the New Economy.) Even then, the process has to cost the retailer as close to nothing as possible, something Amazon accomplishes by making the entire transaction self-service.

The second advantage is low-cost marketing. Recommendations, whether by software filters or network-amplified word of mouth (from blogs to viral emails), can be far more powerful than traditional advertising, especially for niche products aimed at narrow markets. This isn't a cure-all for obscurity: much of what's produced far down in the Tail just isn't very good. Other products are good but simply aren't for everyone, and the people they are for aren't easy to find.  And there recommendations can make all the difference in connecting niche producers and niche consumers.

Two other quick points about how the picture is improving for the producer: As Kevin notes, the tools of creativity--from cheap digital video gear to GarageBand--are being democratized at a dizzying pace. Every Mac now ships with music, video and photo editing software that rivals the professional tools of just a few years ago. If you have talent, there's little stopping you from doing something about it, and millions are. Although this isn't a consequence of the Long Tail (it's just a function of the spread of digital technology), it does have the happy effect of populating the Tail at a pace never before seen.

Finally, it's worth noting that commercial success is not the only (or even main) reason to be a Long Tail producer. Most authors write books not to get rich but to reach a readership, whether it be to enhance their academic reputation, market their consultancy, or just leave a mark on the world.  The Long Tail effect may not pay their rent, but it will find them a bigger audience, and if what they're offering is really good it may be dramatically bigger. As Kevin puts it, self-publishing on Amazon "is not a way to make money; it's a way to distribute your message." As powerful as the Long Tail is for commerce, it's potentially even more powerful for communications. And for producers of all sorts, that's good news.

Objection #1

"57% of Amazon's book sales are of books not available in stores"? That sounds high.

Response: This is based on the work of Erik Brynjolfsson, an MIT economist, and his team at the Sloan School. They fit a standard Pareto power law distribution to Amazon sales rank and summed the total above 40,000 (the amount of books stocked by the average bookstore). As you'll see in the paper above they did a really interesting job of forensic economics, buying multiple copies of books deep into the tail to see how it changed the sales rank and then using those figures to extract absolute sales figures from the rank numbers.

However, their research assumes two things: first, that the research they based their work on measured sales of the head (bestsellers) accurately; and second, that the Amazon sales rank algorithm is accurate. I'm told that in fact neither are quite right. Most analyses (such as this) tend to undercount sales at the very top of the list, and Amazon's calculations are still imperfect. This may account for some overcounting of the tail.

UPDATE:

I've now spoken to Jeff Bezos (and others) about this. He doesn't have a hard figure for the percentage of sales of products not available offline, but reckons that it's closer to 25-30%. That would put it in line with Netflix's and Rhapsody's figures. This is still a large fraction of their business, and the fastest growing segment. I've updated the version of my article on ChangeThis accordingly.