Another perspective on the matter

I've long been interested in the idea behind the Long Tail, because of the possibilities it seems to offer to those who implement it. However, I have the impression that the Long Tail for retailers and the Long Tail for creators are two different things, and that may be muddying the water further.

Case in point: webcomics. There are significant numbers of artists out there making daily or several-times-weekly comics and making a living out of it. Not even close to all of them, of course, but then again not everyone who plays in a band makes their living out of it. The point as I understand it with most of the high-profile and successful webcomic crowd is that they find ways to get paid for the same thing multiple times. So the comic shows for free on the website on the day (but money comes in from ads). Then the comic is collected into a dead-tree-edition and sold. Then the original art for the strip is sold (assuming someone wants to buy it, that is). If the largest part of the work is creating the original artwork, that's 3 revenue streams for the same piece of work (over enough time to make them all viable). Not to mention the possibility of special editions of books, sketches sold at conventions, and merchandise.

This all relies on the cartoonist being able to establish the comic and find an audience, but that's a pretty universal issue for entertainers. While it may not be possible to find exact analogues for these revenue streams for musicians, I would be interested in seeing someone write up a detailed analysis, and particularly to find out whether there are singers/musicians out there working to the same model and making a living out of it.

Thinner and thinner tail?

Seems to me that the tail may well have ben getting longer, but also thinner and thinner, thus thinner and thinner are the chances of making a living from it. The whole celebrity/star thing that's so popular with contemporary media things down the tail yet further. Top football players and clubs make more and more money, second division makes less and less. Although I know **** all about football I get the impression that fewer and fewer clubs start the season with a realistic chance of winning... Before recorded music there were probably many more musicians making a half decent living, now there's a few making gigabucks and many more subsidising usic from the dole or the day job...

Not really 2.0 is it?

Surely the niche aspect of internet selling was established when Jeff Bezos got his spreadsheets out after Amazon's first couple of years. Here's a case in point: I wanted a thermometer to measure room temperature in my house. I spent a fruitless Sunday afternoon driving around my local DIY and hardware stores and came up with nothing. I got home, did a search and found not one but two specialist thermometer shops, one of which furnished me with a handful of LCDs for a few quid.

I don't see that as having anything to do with the social aspect of Web 2.0 or the mechanical aspect of it. It's just commerce expanding in the way it does well. What is perhaps different from the halcyon days of 1998-9 is that the niche has remained niche because someone who sells thermometers knows that he's selling something that no-one else is. The growth of dropshipping means that a niche store doesn't even have to have stock, which is where Walmart or HMV or indeed Amazon hits the buffers. Even the model of home delivery learned its lesson after the debacles of Webvan or Peapod in the US, or the hopefuls who let people have bags of jelly babies be delivered by courier in London at the end of the decade.

In retail, the principle still seems to be 'if you build it, they will come'. Online it's 'if you build it and get yourself on Google and spend a bit on getting into the right places, your niche might not make you rich but it should turn you a living' *breathes*. The social aspect is that there is generally someone else out there who is interested in that same things that you're into and who might want to buy things from you, so shops arise out of collective interests (witness the trade in World of Warcraft items - that's an online market that only sells things that exist online) or a perceived niche - 'I can't buy one My Little Hentai doll in this country but I can buy a hundred and sell them to other people'.

As the first bubble burst in around 1999, the backlash had begun: I have a bunch of stickers somewhere that say things like 'I don't want to buy toothpaste online', comments on the ideas that had ridiculous sums of money thrown at them and crashed and burned on average in about 18 months. The lessons have been learned: even Walmart, or Asda in the UK, understands that the value of their online business is to sell what they stock, either through getting people into the shops or through home delivery, and not to sweat the minority requirements as someone else will stock them until, as with something that Deliah or Jamie uses on TV, they need to stock them - another advantage of linking stock management with a customer website - why is everyone suddenly looking for smoked paprika?

Falling asleep with this stuff...

Is anyone else getting sick of this Us vs. Them douchebaggery the long tailers always seem to clinging to? Why can't the audience unite and produce big hits (Sopranos, Macarena, Merlot) AND still develop niche interests?

Yes the Internet will provide the world with far more niches of interest than before. Yes some niche players will make some cash out of it. No - Wal-Mart, Britney and Starbucks aren't going anywhere. Oh their names will change but the mass players will always be there as there is such a thing as a Mass Market.

And no... none of this makes it OK to steal shit off the Internet.

apples and oranges - books and tunes

The big difference is whether you need to physically store something, or if it's merely bits. Warehousing needs floorspace, floorspace costs money. You also need security guards, inventory management and people to package your sales. Contrast with selling (or renting) bits on a disk, practically free costs of storage, fixed costs for internet security, no packaging (tho' you have to maintain a website - same for internet book sales) and somwhat higher bandwidth costs to push the product to the buyer.

This makes the cost model for a physical "good" different from that of an internet good. As a consequence, long tales are pretty much cost-free on the 'net. However, try to apply the same model in real life and you can expect to go bust.

Poor Scientific Method?

A theory's scientificity is, by ample consensus, associated with its falsifiability.

The original theory of the Long Tail was an scientific proposition (because falsifiable) about the shape of demand for large online retailers - it posited, that empirical demand for online goods was fat-tailed. (in fact it posits that the availability and "searcheability" of goods generates demand in the tail). It was falsified.

The Modest Theory of the Long Tail is the original theory with adhoc hypotheses attached to try and save it. It was falsified again.

The inspirational theory is not an empirically falsifiable proposition, and therefore not a scientific statement.

As such, the theory of the long tail may continue to exist in the realm of metaphysical/motivational propositions of new age culture, and may, one day, be shown to have engendered all manner of positive spillover effects on the industry (something like a cultural looking-glass) - for the moment I feel it is of very little value but to boost the ego of Mr Anderson and all those who religiously read wired magazine.

Unclear logic

There is clearly a lot of very shonky logic being used. But the logic debunking the long tail is not fully watertight either. The mass market; kids downloading the latest music, is clearly, almost by definition, not long tail. There are some neat efforts that show that the very nature of musical trends always yields a small number of very popular items. But looking to iTunes to provide statistics for the effort is self limiting. iTunes by its nature is also mass market. For a number of reasons. First and foremost, it isn't good enough audio quality. It is only good enough to listen to with a basic iPod with its cruddy earphones. Even a small step up in fidelity soon reveals the limitations of the format. People who enjoy music (as opposed to immersing themselves in a sort of background to life's activities) don't buy from iTunes. Ever. Yet these are the people that will make up the long tail.

Further, iTunes presents some unfortunate barriers to many modern, non-mass-market musicians. It is a pain to provide music through the store, and due to the quality issue, there are not enough sales (versus sales on CD) to warrant the effort.

Sales of CDs through alternative vendors (most of whom are on-line) remain reasonably strong. No-one is going to make their fortune, but that is the whole point. Of the last 5 CDs I bought, only one is available for paid download from anyone anywhere.

Analysis of the validity or not, of the long tail argument must take into account a long tail of sales mechanisms. Just using a mass market vendor to reveal a mass market trend of sales is invalid. This isn't to say that the long tail is real - that is still to be proven, or not. But fighting bad logic with more bad logic is not a good answer.

I'm a long term long tailer in music. I have never bought a download, never downloaded ripped music, and have a very healthy CD collection which continues to grow. Buying music via download simply makes no sense. It is not cheaper, is poorer quality, and often laden with idiotic DRM issues. Using this market as the exemplar is not smart.

ok, so the "long tail" may not exist

.. but a more interesting question is: now that many tail-ish products can be sold more easily and cheaply, will the distributions involving such products shift towards a Pareto distribution, away from the log-normal?

Just looking at the wrong tails...

Perhaps the original notion of the Long Tail simply came from looking at the wrong dataset. There are indeed places--or, at least, one place--where all this Long Tail nonsense actually makes sense, and that's th world of pr0n. In this day and age, a pr0n movie is considered a 'hit' if it sells four thousand copies; the tiny handful of wildly successful grumble flicks* out there are a very unusual aberration. Pr0n is all about the niche.

So it's entirely possible that Mr. Anderson is merely looking at the wrong tails, and attempting to generalize from those tails to other industries? (I know there's a pun lurking in there somewhere.)

Point being that the notion may have some merit in certain highly select industries, even if it is utter hogwash if applied more generally.

*God bless you Brits and your contributions to language. Seriously. British vernacular is a thing of beauty. I'd dearly love to know the etymology of the expression "grumble flick."

What, it this a religion now? Give it a miss already.

The people selling "long-tail" stuff are the same ones who were selling it years and decades ago. It's a skill/knowledge/trust and reach occupation that is thousands of years old.

I fully understand how a random Wired twit could hyperventilate himself after stupidly and poorly rediscovering something - what I don't understand is why so many columnists bother to similarly poorly criticize it.

If Orlowski and Slee really like to cover hogwash, they should switch to interpreting the bible or something else equally distant from the tech field.

Where are the data coming from?

You cannot draw the conclusions that this article does without adequate data. Long tail niche products are sold primarily by long tail niche websites, not Amazon. There is absolutely no way to collect enough data on these websites (there are nearly as many of them as there are long tail keywords) to state anything conclusive at all about their revenues.

Oh well, academics are never bothered by reality. Remember the Efficient Market Theory? It states that you can't make money speculating in the stock market. It is favoured by academics, but not widely accepted by millionaire stock market speculators.

The reason why the data to not match the expected curve is simple: the data set is incomplete.