The Long Tail by Chris Anderson

In his book The Long Tail Chris Anderson, a business journalist who formerly worked at The Economist and now edits Wired magazine promises to answer the question: “Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More”.

 

This is a fascinating book that describes how we are now moving away from the hit, whether it is a blockbuster film, a bestselling novel or a chart-topping song and we start discovering the niche.

 

Anderson claims to have coined the term "Long Tail" to describe these niches for which we didn’t have room for on our shelves, screens and channels but we now do have room for thanks to the internet and the abundant distribution systems.

So from the perspective of a store like Wal-Mart, the music industry stops at less than 60,000 tracks, since an average record store needs to sell at least four copies of a CD a year to make it worth carrying. However, for online retailers like Rhapsody, with a library of over 1.5 million songs, the market is seemingly never-ending. Anderson, supporting his research with various graphs, proves that not only is every one of Rhapsody’s top 60,000 tracks streamed at least once each month but so are all the rest of the tracks in its library since every song will find an audience somewhere in the world. All of these sales of songs in the Long Tail, can be highly profitable which challenges the common business saying that twenty per cent of the products generate about eighty per cent of the revenue.

 

Another example the author give is of a Blockbuster store, where ninety per cent of the movies rented are new releases. His contrasts it with Netflix, a successful DVD-rental company that allows its customers to order films online and receive them in the mail, where about seventy per cent are from the back catalogue, and many of them are documentaries, art-house movies, and other little-known films that might never have had theatrical release.

 

But "Without filters, the Long Tail risks just being noise," Anderson writes. That is where filters like Google and Amazon come in. Where Blogs and recommendations can promote the niches to a wide audience with the power of the internet.

 

According to Anderson there are two keys here

• Make everything available.

• Help me find it.

 

Nevertheless he closes by acknowledging the fat that people like being with other peoples, shopping or going to the movies, “There's a comfort in numbers,"