Heads or tails? The editor-in-chief of the Silicon Valley bible Wired, and the man who has written the clearest explanation yet of the shift from the one-size-fits-all, mass-media world to a diverse, complex world of millions of niches, is keeping both options covered. Fresh from appearing on a very much mass-market radio programme, Chris Anderson is also blogging on his progress towards publication of his book, The Long Tail, which expands on a seminal article he wrote in Wired two years ago. ”One of the challenges is to blog and do a book tour at the same time. It may involve no sleep,” he says.
That essay, which coined the phrase that is now the title of his book, has become required reading for every executive struggling to understand the way the media world is changing from one where the means of production and distribution rested in the control of the few, to one where anyone with a Mac and a broadband connection is a mini media mogul.
The Long Tail is an eloquent exposition of a simple idea, but one that has huge ramifications for our media and culture if followed to its logical conclusions. Essentially it describes the elegant line of the demand curve that shows the ”short head”, the big hits that have traditionally sustained record companies, Hollywood studios, broadcasters and publishers, petering out into the long tail, the never-ending cornucopia of a million niche products that will all appeal to someone, somewhere.
In music that could mean rare 1960s psychedelia, in film, Russian cinema of the 1930s, in publishing, the anarchic explosion of blogs, or in broadcasting, a video of a duck skateboarding. ”Broadly, the long tail describes the shift from mass markets to millions of niches, the low sellers that we traditionally haven’t had room for on our shelves, screens and channels, but which we now do have room for thanks to the Internet and abundant distribution systems,” says Anderson.
When you can offer anything at marginal cost, the collective demand for those niche products approaches, or even overtakes the traditional demand for the heavily marketed hits, he demonstrates.
Anderson’s first eureka moment occurred when he was talking to the head of Ecast, a service that provides digital jukeboxes with a huge catalogue of songs, who told him that 98% of all its 10 000 tracks were bought at least once in a three-month period. With marginal cost of storage and distribution, all those single tracks started to add up.
Before long, he was seeing the long tail in action everywhere — in the success of Netflix, an online DVD rental service, in the popularity of amateur video aggregators such as YouTube and Digg, and in the success of Amazon, eBay and Google AdWords.
”While we were thinking about the potential of the Internet, we hadn’t noticed this dramatic shift in demand. The long tail started in 1994, I suppose, with Amazon. But it wasn’t until the rise of iTunes and the iPod that you were able to measure the size of the tail,” he says.
Good long-tail businesses have effective filters to help you navigate a broad catalogue of both hits and the most specialist niches, he argues.
MySpace, for example, has succeeded where MP3.com failed because the big bands are on board and because the community aspect turns the former into a voyage of discovery, while the latter was a jumble of unknown bands.
Anderson’s theory is not exactly new. Since the early 1990s digital seers have been hailing the Internet as a democratising force for musicians, filmmakers and writers. But his rational style of explanation, logical delivery and snappy writing make it palatable for mass consumption.
”Because my background is physics and economics, I tend to go for data rather than speculation and hand waving,” he says, referring to his background as a scientist.
He subsequently moved into journalism with Nature and Science, then had seven years at the Economist, including stints as technology editor and US business editor, before taking over at Wired just after the crash in mid-2001.
Having spent two years researching the idea, Anderson says the idea of the ”paradox of choice”, the argument that if presented with an overload of different choices we will retreat to the familiar, is outdated in a world where dozens of different filters and ”tastemakers” help us move seamlessly between the mainstream and the niche.
‘Choice is oppressive unless you have help making that choice. Then suddenly, it snaps into shape and becomes liberating,” he says. The Internet was a confusing, forbidding place for many until search engines came along and ordered it.
All this, of course, has huge ramifications for the big media colossi that bestrode the second half of the 20th century and perhaps reached the height of their powers in the 1980s when a few global companies governed the cultural tastes of the world. Think ET, CNN, Dallas and even McDonald’s.
”The mass market is really an anomaly, an outgrowth of this extraordinary broadcast technology,” argues Anderson. ”Suddenly, we had radio in the 1930s and TV in the 1950s. We snapped into cultural lockstep overnight — watching the same shows at the same time — and we thought this was the natural state. We were homogeneous in a way we’d never been before.”
Now, high-speed broadband and the low cost of digital storage and distribution are fundamentally changing our consumption habits again, particularly among those who have grown up with them.
These seismic changes hit the music industry first, and Anderson believes that it has started to grapple with what the changes mean but needs to go further in clearing rights to archive recordings, loosening pricing structures and continuing to innovate with ”digital only” labels that lower costs.
Hollywood bought itself some time with the success of the DVD, but is starting to see the first effects of the long tail in falling box office admissions. But it is in broadcasting, an industry that has relied on controlling a limited spectrum to aggregate millions of viewers for advertisers, that Anderson believes the effects of the long tail could wreak the most havoc.
”They’ve been charging more and more to reach smaller audiences. That’s got to change. As advertising shifts, I suspect there is going to be a mini-crisis,” he predicts.
”In many ways it’s the best of times for producers because they can find markets without compromise. It’s a fantastic time for consumers because there’s more diversity,” says Anderson.
Some have difficulties with Anderson’s relentlessly upbeat prognosis. He is optimistic that these changes will result in greater engagement with media and a larger overall cake. The contrary view might attest that if large media owners crumble and die, all we will be left with is videos of ducks skateboarding.
Anderson insists that the effect is more complex than that. ”One of the biggest misunderstandings of the long tail is that it will mean the end of the hit and the rise of a million niches,” he says. ”But we’re not seeing the end of the hit, we’re seeing the end of the monopoly of the hit.”
All the Internet does is democratise the hit-making process. It means ”the decline of the top-down hit, hits that are manufactured, the crappy summer blockbuster that seduces you with its marketing”.
The impact of all this, predicts Anderson, will take a generation to fully emerge but will produce a more diverse, global network of millions of niches that intersect at various points. He dubs it ”tribal culture”.
”The richness and variety in our culture, suppressed by limited distribution over the last hundred years ,is now going to emerge. A richer culture is a stronger culture and leads us to be more satisfied consumers.” — Â