Kalu Kalu’s visualization script unveils the (more or less) long tail of your listening habits using attention-data recorded on Last.fm (found on Rocketsurgeon, which is a good read for all things Music 2.0).
IPTV Evangelist pre-published a Video Age Magazine-interview with Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief at Wired Magazine and author of “The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More”. Anderson updates his theories of a diversified, yet profitable marketplace for digital goods in regards to the online-video revolution that brought us countless social video-websites & the breakthrough of video-blogs in 2006. “leveraging lower distribution [and production] costs to reach a specific niche and audience” (Anderson) is what drives video-blogs, or ‘Sliver-Casts’ as another pregnant term of Anderson puts it.
one of the most popular ‘Sliver-Casters’ (and a personal favorite) is Kent Nichols, with his highly successful guerilla-comedy Ask a Ninja, a semi-regular vlog featuring Q&A-sessions with the typical “ninja-next-door”. with 20mio downloads in 2006 and a DVD-release pending, the no-budget show is the living prove to Anderson’s long-tail concept. NewTeeVee (a online tv/video-focused blog recently launched by GigaOM) featured a short interview with Kent on the business-side on sliver-casting earlier this week.
Today I started reading ‘The Long Tail - Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More’ by Chris Anderson (editor in chief at Wired magazine). the ‘long tail’-meme, very popular especially among media- and internet-economists, is a metaphor for all products not found in bestseller-lists, but still accountable for a reasonable part of sales numbers. Anderson, who coined the term, basically describes how markets are reshaped by digital distribution, and how combined sales of lesser-popular products can equal or even outperform the sales of top-hits.
the most apparent examples of long-tail-economies are music, books and videos. while brick-and-mortar shops, with their finite amout of shelf-space, have to limit their available selection to products which are most likely to be big-sellers, digital distributors like iTunes, Rhapsody or youtube don’t face such restrictions: since the cost of storage is ever decreasing, they can offer virtually any song or video ever produced. Anderson’s studies show, that almost all products, how obscure they may be, find at least a small audience. together those niche-products are responsible for up to 50% of total-sales. based on a Wired-article and publicly developed on Anderson’s blog longtail.com, the book backs this claims with empirical studies.
after reading the first chapters of ‘The Long Tail’, I couldn’t resist to test its basic assumption against real-life data, namely PLAY.FM’s access-stats of july 2006 (disclaimer: I’m founding member of PLAY.FM and currently responsible for website-development). PLAY.FM is a web-radio & audio-archive focussed on electronic music, currently hosting more than 4.000 DJ-mixes which are freely available for on-demand-access. receiving about 2mio pageviews per month, PLAY.FM is aimed towards the global community of electronic music-lovers.
analysis of PLAY.FM’s access-logs approves Anderson’s thesis: during the last 29 days, almost all sets available were accessed at least one time - this is especially remarkable as there are many live-recordings dating back several years - still these rarities got some ‘air’play. furthermore, PLAY.FM’s ‘body’ (like visualized above) consists of only 5% of all DJ-mixes, while the other 95% generate an equal amount of playing time.
further information on ‘The Long Tail’ can be found at Squidoo.
