Chris Anderson on The Long Tail... Researched large scale enterprises with enormous repositories of stuff and realised that 98% of things were being sold at least once. bottlenecks in distribution truncate what's available at the point of marginal cost. Because you have to be discriminating in what you make available, then anything under a certain amount of sales is not worth selling. If you don't have limited shelf-space or limited resources, then it's not a problem. Then you get a long tail distribution. Two things have changed since last year - generously gave Walmart as handling 39,000 tracks but actually enormously shrinking. On the other hand, the long tail is getting longer - now people have a million tracks. "The era of mass markets is moving to an era of millions of niches". History of the Long tail: 1890: Sears Catalog 1980: 800 numbers 1990: Supermarket shelves Two steps of abundance: 1990: Explosion of variety of products Now: Explosion of information about products Long-tail is dependent on more information and ways of navigating it. Resists the tyranny of choice that said that people don't like too much choice and are less satisfied with their choice when they've got more choice, "paradox of choice?" The three forces of the log tail:: * Democratise the tools of production * Minimise the transaction costs of consumption * connect consumers to amplify word of mouth The third bit is in filters - 'the most powerful opportunity of the long tail' Three broad opportunities: * long tail aggregators * niche suppliers * Filters - stuff that drives demand down the tail. The long tail without good filters is just noise. The whole thing is niche. The opportunity for more powerful features is the big one. Three types of individuals - anne likes mainstream stuff, chris doesn't like top end stuff so much, but slightly down the graph finds his stuff. John doesn't have any interest in music in the top 1000. Filters must work for each one of them equally well. Signal / Noise ratios. Down the tail you get a greater dynamic range of satisfaction. mainstream gives you reasonably good to reasonably bad, at the other end you get REALLY good / perfect to ENORMOUSLY SHIT. "post-filters" versus "pre-filters" Pre-filters: editors / A&R guys / Studio execs Post-filters: peers, recommendations, word of mouth, buyers. "Our sense of being a hit-driven culture is partly a reflection of human behaviour, but also a distortion based on the effects of limits on distribution" How will the Long Tail affect popular culture? The fall of the water-cooler effect - ratings of top-rated TV shows has collapsed over the years. Today a number one show wouldn't have made the top-ten a few years ago. Short Tails versus Long Tails? Hits // existing goods that haven't reached their full potential market // new goods made possible by new distribution and markets Incentives - pros / marketing & moonlighting / amateurs IP - all of this is about 'head thinking' - basing stuff on what's right for the very small group of people at the top - with Copyright head-thinking / no copyright in themiddle and creative commons at the other end The head is all about economics, the tail is all about economics AND psychology. Money vs. Ego/Money. 1970s - 'waste transitors' Now: "waste storage, bandwidth" music and television industries are the ones that will be affected most. Back catalogue - lot of demand for back catalogue stuff - rights clearance, boring but important Television is more important - the industry with the highest ratio of produced content versus available content. Most programming just disappears. Television you're getting off the internet is probably not going to be the same stuff that you get via the networks. Pushes viral stuff, really niche programming and civil war reenactments or something. There's a demand for everything out there, it's just distributed. You don't have to fit the broadcast model to the internet or the other way around. The two can co-exist.