The Long Tail

I finally finished working my way through The Long Tail by Chris Anderson. I won’t even begin to attempt to explain what the Long Tail signifies in a powerlaw distribution. Watch Anderson’s presentation at Pop!Tech. It’s an interesting pulse check of this societal event horizon we seem to be living. It would be easy to dismiss the book as an Internet treatise, but the implications are much wider. Don’t just think Amazon making the bulk of its money on obscure titles; think of Al Qaeda moving mass violence down the scale from nation-state monopoly to “Super-Empowered Individuals”.

Companies like Amazon and Netflix make the bulk of their money by selling an abundance of non-mainstream titles. “As of early 2006, Apple had sold 42 million iPods and 1 billion tracks on iTunes…” Here’s the really interesting fact: At the time of writing the book every single track on iTunes had been downloaded at least once. It’s a niche consumer culture wonderland. This may look like materialist hedonism, but it expands our world and culture in ways we’ve just begun to explore. While there are no institutional checks and balances on the blogosphere it tends to have a better error-correction rate than mainstream media. (A visual display of blogosphere would look like an iceberg, with places like Instapundit, Boing Boing, and Engadget above the waterline. Your current location is far, far beneath the waterline. The above-water blogs are what Anderson’s referencing when he talks about error-correction.)

The transformation went from having our mediums structured for us (newspapers, broadcast TV, inventory in book and music stores) to having everything available to us (Amazon and NetFlix’s seemingly boundless and ever available inventories, blogs and news of every possible variety). And this transition was missed by every single traditional media and entertainment institution. In the face of enormous evidence and slow asphyxiation most traditional institutions are clinging to last-century paradigms. Interesting aside to this point: The toughest DVD to find is WKRP in Cincinnati. Why? They won’t license all the music played on the show.

This is one of the most tightly compressed cultural shifts in human history. Tectonic social shifts have traditionally moved people to extremes. This time is no exception. The difference here is that for the first time it's easier for people to opt in than opt out. I'm curious where this is headed, and where we'll be in another generation when this has sorted itself out.

Ares