Posts Tagged ‘long tail’
culture war? the head vs the long tail
19 Jan, 2010 • posts i've written • 2 comments
I’ve been mulling over a lot of converging lines lately: Jay Leno’s rating dominance and bland middle of the road humor, Conan’s weak support in the middle of the country but ardent support online, Avatar’s massive success at bolstering the old model of theater cinema, Paranormal Activity as a wildly vibrant word-of-mouth hit (with very little traditional advertising), the huge amount of cash a Dan Brown novel can rake in while almost any book title, even a best-seller, struggles in volume… and so on.
We keep watching the hit, or the head of the curve, flabbergast us at how it can still continue to climb in sales (the blockbuster is only getting bigger – at least in cinema this is true). And yet, at the same time, the variety of the long tail continues to expand; and along with it, so seemingly does our ability to consume more titles, too. It’s as if the curve, overall, is expanding.
Production and distribution for both ends of the tail seem to be getting smarter: we’re perfecting the launch of the hit, and we’re getting better at identifying small, tightly connected groups, and serving them products they can use (and those groups are much better these days at sharing information).
That means we’ve got plenty of hits for the masses (and for us to enjoy as members of their shared society), and an abundance of diversity in the long tail to strengthen bonds, define our collective identity, and give us status among our social networks.
From The Economist article,
“Both the hits and the tail are doing well,” says Jeff Bewkes, the head of Time Warner, an American media giant. Audiences are at once fragmenting into niches and consolidating around blockbusters. Of course, media consumption has not risen much over the years, so something must be losing out. That something is the almost but not quite popular content that occupies the middle ground between blockbusters and niches.”
Utopia, then?
Afraid not.
Aren’t resources fixed? Meaning, isn’t there a finite amount of material (capital, supply, demand, etc) to generate the entire tail? Once we exhaust a certain amount of technology-instigated productivity (and the middle ground is gnawed away), won’t there be a struggle between how many hits can be created vs how much diversity overall can be supported?
That seems to be the central conflict: the head subsists on the ever-increasingly popular hit while the tail thrives on diversity – or to look at it another way, try to juggle a bio-diverse ecosystem with a small handful of super-predators and you’ll quickly realize the two represent competing demands – as humans have already proven (or as Avatar demonstrated, if you want it that way).
Ultimately, we could assume the system will find equilibrium, but will the hand of the market be both invisible and silent?
Did the culture war already begin? Is it coming to a theatre-near-you soon? Or is it hogwash?
Don’t worry your pretty head, watch this montage of the films of 2009 instead.
to have and to hoard
15 May, 2009 • posts i've written • 4 comments
As reported on the Wired Epicenter blog, a recent research study by BigChampagne Media Measurement and music rights organization PRS for Music may call in to question Chris Anderson’s theory of the Long Tail.
From the study: “The most swapped files were also the most downloaded on legal music sites, indicating that what’s popular is popular.”
Anderson responded to the study with a few salient points about P2P itself, “File-trading clients like BitTorrent are optimized for ‘hits,’ in that you’re more likely to find someone (or many people) sharing popular files locally, and thus have a better chance at a successful download.” His long tail theory applies to distribution platforms like Rhapsody which make a larger breadth of content, both hits and non-hits, instantly available. On a P2P network, the more people that have a file, the easier it is to find and the quicker it is to download – which means you’re likely to go elsewhere for that obscure number from 1972.
But this isn’t the first report to question Anderson’s theory. Last November, MBlox published findings that demonstrate a much more ‘head’ heavy distribution of sales (and then eMusic published its own report supporting Anderson). This recent report does point out that P2P networks contain about 22 million more songs than you can find on something like iTunes, and all songs receive a swap; so those files may represent a much longer, and therefore substantial tail.
While flipping through the study, this old quote from Ian Condry (2004) came to mind, “Unlike underwear or swimsuits, music falls into that category of things you are normally obligated to share with your dorm mates, family, and friends.”
I also remembered this quote from Bob Lefsetz, music industry ranter, “despite the long tail, most people are interested in hits. Even if that hit is a ten minute track on a rock station. Yes, people want songs that not only affect them emotionally, but that OTHER people are listening to. People want to be a member of the group.”
Music is inherently social, and how we collect music says a lot about our interaction with others. As someone with hundreds of gigs worth of music sitting on several hard drives, I think many of us feel compelled to hoard music for the very reason Lefsetz argues. We collect those mainstream hits simply to have them; to feel a part of culture, to share, and to shape our identity.
Three structural changes have also influenced how and why we collect music:
1) more people are sharing music and it’s gotten a lot easier to find music
2) which means music is mostly free through our peers
3) there’s almost no barrier to collecting tons of music (our hard-drives are enormous)
It’s interesting how we hoard digital files that can be queued up almost instantly at our whim. But having that collection and bragging about its size and diversity is important among our other music obsessed peers; and there’s almost no variable cost in downloading that next song these days.
Question: what else digital do you hoard that you could easily get within a few clicks? (for me it used to be music videos)
But conflicting with these structural changes is the erosion of the mainstream. Try to name the number one record this week. Try to name the one source of music recommendation for teens and young adults. Try to name more than a few that share the same top picks. It used to be a helluva lot easier collecting the hits. Sites like We Are Hunted attempt to glean what people are actually listening to and talking about – and although the usual suspects do appear, their total sales (and even downloads) aren’t anywhere near what mainstream acts used to garner. This is why the eMusic data looked more like Anderson’s Long Tail.
From the Wired article, “eMusic is the long tail,” reiterated Madeleine Milne, managing director of eMusic Europe. “Our customers buy music beyond the mainstream top 40 because we provide them with more context than any other major music retailer through Web 2.0 features, insightful editorial content, a passionate subscriber community and an easy-to-use and effective recommendation engine.” This also demonstrates that people still want a nudge in the right direction, to let them know how to enjoy the collective experience of sharing similar tastes, and to make sampling easier. Digital has taken over where mass media fell off; allowing small sites like eMusic to let likeminded fans congregate and share the collective experience over a subset of music in general. TV is the same; those people watching and twittering together are recreating a once communal activity – Heroes, and Lost are simply the vehicle for that social experience.
But I also wonder about how people are interacting with the hits versus the tail. It’s the same argument between impressions and expressions – beyond purchase, which songs are getting the most ear time? Which songs get ported from the computer to the device most? Just because labels haven’t figured out a way to make money off of repeated plays, doesn’t mean they aren’t important.
Whew, this was a long one.
