The LongTail questioned - The Register says it's all bunk. I say they are wrong.

Update: Chris Anderson commented here (thanks to ricetopher) Andrew Orlowski at the Register (UK) just published an interesting opinion piece that basically says that Chris Anderson's LongTail concept is a bunch of Silicon-Valley utopia, and self-perpetuating hype. His main argument is that 'evidence' collected by MCPS's Will Page et al suggests that digital music sales don't display a longtail characteristic, at all - rather, they exhibit the very same top-heavy, hit-centric income patterns that we've had in content sales since... well, the advent of electricity and the phonograph, I guess: the few hits make most of the money. Here are some quotes from Andrew and El Reg, followed by my comments:

"They discovered that instead of following a Pareto or "power law" curve, as Anderson suggested, digital song sales follow a classic Log Normal distribution. 80 per cent of the digital inventory sold no copies at all - and the 'head' was far more concentrated than the economists expected. "Is the 'future of business' really selling more of less?" asks Page. "Absolutely not. If you had Top of the Pops now, you'd feature the Top 14, not Top 40. Anderson bet that the orange portion - the "Tail" - has more value than the red portion - the "Head". But it doesn't.

 

"The Long Tail's argument is that the pattern of consumption for media is bent out of shape by the limits of the shops selling them. Digital media lets the nature of people's demand flow free. Well, we now know what the shape of that demand curve looks like. Bud told the conference that the basic shape of consumer demand for digital music clearly fits the Log Normal distribution, "with eye-watering accuracy". That's no surprise, he says, because so many sales curves he's seen over the past ten years follow this distribution. "Now we've seen what happens when tens of millions of choices are thrown in the air and people can go pick them up. What was astounding was the degree of inequality between the head and the tail - by a factor of three. It's specifically the Log Normal shape that leads to a rather poverty stricken Tail. "There are Tails where the Tail lives as a kind of welfare state. Not this one. You starve in this Tail.... In another surprise, 80 per cent of the revenue came from 52,000 songs. What's eye-catching about the number? Well, the typical inventory of a conventional high street record store was around 4,000 CDs. Or ... around 52,000 songs"

To me, Orlowski's LongTail-shredding efforts are fairly typical of a recently rather prevalent, short-sighted pessimist's view of the world based on the process of crunching statistics and numbers - which admittedly feels much safer - but are totally skewed to begin with (quote "But he [Chris Anderson] didn't examine the numbers closely or critically enough, say the economists").  Isn't a journalist supposed to give us a viewpoint of what is coming, rather than what has been, and isn't he supposed to look beyond the numbers?

Why in the world would I use numbers taken from how digital music has actually been sold during the past few years, when every single aspect of digital music commerce has been flawed and - at best - represents 2-3% of the digital music potential, in total? Why would I want to make assumptions about a new, future model of music commerce based on the obviously abject failure of an old model? 6 Billion (or so) sold songs on iTunes and the various WMA-based services in the past 4 years will show me the patterns of FUTURE CONSUMPTION? Don't believe it.

Here is why the numbers and the research that (the otherwise smart and clued-in) Will Page et al, and now Andrew Orlowski, have based their 'longtail is bunk' assertions on, are ill-suited for any such conclusion:

1. Until just recently, there was no real easy way to obtain i.e. buy digital music online - unless you bought into the Apple or MSFT digital content schemes, or went all-indie with EMusic; and that is why very few consumers actually did it. All digital music was copy-protected with that wonderful snake-oil called DRM (which industry bodies such as Page's MCPS supported very strongly),  and you had to buy per-track which made any real engagement a very expensive proposition. So - no surprise - what do you think those very very very few people that would actually go though the trouble of legally obtaining music in this way (i.e. mostly via iTunes) would buy: yes, you guessed it, the Hit Songs, the stuff they know from the artists they know, because it is expensive and one cannot afford to experiment - and try longtail stuff you may not be sure about, yet. To assert that this is a realistic reflection of what people would select if in fact there was an open-format, very likely flat-rated and economically easy way of point-click-buying music is like saying that people really love Shell gas if there are only Shell gas stations within a 1000 mile radius! In other words, the economic model for digital music that the music industry has for the past decade tried to force on the consumers has obviously resulted in a total (and I would say, very welcome) reflection of their offline revenue model: only the hits make any real money.
2. Therefore, the question is not at all what the 'learnings' from those DigitalMusic1.0 statistics would be -because we already knew that the basis for these numbers was an artificial, limited and controlled environment before we read Orlowski's piece or Page's presentation- but what they WILL BE once we actually have a real Music 2.0 economy, where the users can click on, play and select any song they like, try out anything, anywhere, anytime, share, forward and link, without having to pay extra, without having to ask for permission, without having to buy into the MSFT or Apple club - and those possibilities have only recently emerged (at least in a legal way).
   

   Image by gleonhard via Flickr

Orlowski then tops it all off by saying: "The propensity of journalists - even highly experienced journalists - to fantasize about the world rather than examine it critically is one of the defining features of modern technology coverage..." Andrew, never mind that you don't like Futurists, but please: where would we be if we could not fantasize about the world and its future, and look forward, beyond the oh-so-sacred numbers we have now, the so-called facts called from our painstaking research...? If you were to make decisions solely based on the obvious facts drawn from past actions you would be in deep trouble, indeed.

I am with Paolo Coelho when he stipulates the exact opposite:  "Whenever we need to make an important decision, it is best to trust impulse and passion, because reason usually tries to remove us from our dream, saying that the time is not yet right. Reason is afraid of defeat, but intuition enjoys life and its challenges" (Acceptance speech delivered to the Brazilian Academy of Letters)

Finally, I think Einstein has the perfect reply to Orlowski, Page et al:

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Comments

[Adrian]

Once again, Gerd, great post!
In addition to your reasoning for why the long tail might still prove accurate I would add the following point: something needs to be in place to drive users into the tail.
Simply 'making all this new stuff available' isn't going to cut it. For as long as users still develop their tastes and awareness through old media gatekeepers (i.e. MTV, VH1, terrestrial radio, "Rolling Stone", etc..) the fact they can GET music via iTunes rather than a record store is rather irrelevant if they're just getting mp3 files for the same artists they see videos for on MTV. Therefore, I believe what is lacking in the defense of the longtail is a discussion of the ways in which people need to be (and will be) driven into the tail, because they're unlikely to arrive there on their own. The question is not one of one's access to content in the tail but rather of one's awareness of content in the tail.

(p.s. my graduate thesis (in progress) deals squarely with the roll of tags and folksonomy in "feeding the long tail" ...the research might resonate with your own)

Cheers,
Adrian

[Zac]

Exactly Adrian.

If you are a fan of literate folk music like Bob Dylan, there is a young guy called Ryan Montbleau from the Boston area who writes witty, literate acoustic folk songs. If you like Frank Zappa, you might like an instrumental group called The Clarified Butter from southeast Michigan.

What's that? You've never heard of them? But they're on MySpace! And maybe on Rhapsody and iTunes as well! If you (randomly) plugged their name into Google and happened to listen to the available sound samples, you would've found them!

They're out there, and if you stumbled across them they just might be your favorite band ever, but without good tools to surface the really great stuff, they might just languish in the Long Tail forever.

Measuring via the same tools that have been in place since Anderson wrote The Long Tail (iTunes, MTV, Radio, major label marketing) is not going to yield new data.

Sure the best sellers are still the monster hits from the big labels with the marketing engines and the deals with the big distribution sources, but my gut feel is that if we could help people find the gems in the Long Tail (Eva Cassidy, Solomon Burke, Shuggie Otis, and ?who is next?) without using the marketing systems that are currently in place, the curve would level out at least a little.

[Andrew Goodrich - Artists House]

Thanks for this post.

I completely agree with you that basing arguments in numbers can be reassuring, but just as dangerous as baseless speculation.

Digital numbers are inherently skewed because every approach to digital sales so far has been either a failure, or at best a temporary solution.

Andersons' argument isn't based solely on the existence of the long tail of products, but also necessarily relies on parallel advances in aggregators/rec engines and tools of production.

So far, the tools of aggregation aren't there yet. Thus why the products at the end of the tail aren't selling as well. If no one can find them, they won't sell.

[TonsoTunez]

Gerd ... This missing component in your assumption about the future of music in the ‘long tail' is ‘time' - the time consumers have to devote to the pursuit trying to find music that they enjoy.

Today, with all of the entertainment options consumers have, music is getting a smaller and smaller slice of their attention pie.

Top 40 radio came into being when music was a major part of the younger consumer's limited entertainment menu, because, even then, time was an important factor. It was determined by extensive research that only so much music could be absorbed, shared and conversed about in a socially pleasant way with piers. Throw too much music at the average music enthusiast and they tune out.

Because the time available to devote to music is even more limited today, the situation is more acute ... so, the degree of popularity of a piece of music is more important than ever before... most people make their selections from what appears to be popular with everyone else so they can get back to their games, twitters, cell phone conversations, internet surfing, illegal downloading, etc..

P2P usage clearly demonstrates that perceived popularity attracts the most attention, and, therefore, results in the highest number of downloads. Ask Big Champagne ... ask me, I'm an aggregator ... The hits make 90% of the tiny amount of money currently being generated on the net. The ‘long tail' tunes, while there are more and more of them earning income, are almost irrelevant because the income is so minuscule that it literally costs more to process the money than the amounts received.

These ratios are never going to change in any meaningful way because the public just doesn't care ... In fact, I believe I recently read that the head was becoming even more important than the tail as time goes on.

Take the middle men out of the process and nothing will improve - in fact, it will only get worse. With all of the unknown one-offs running around saying, "Pick me, me, me," who exactly will be there to enforce their rights, set their rates, negotiate their fees and, in general, take care of business.

Your dream, and the dream of so many artists, that digital democracy will provide middle class livings for everyone with a modicum of talent will never be realized because the music consumer doesn't have the time, or the interest, to share those dreams.

[Gerd Leonhard]

Dear Tonso, point taken, and well under consideration. Here are some thoughts: 1) To me this is not a question of IF the longtail can generate a good income but WHEN. Right now, only ~ 3% of the world is on broadband, and most access is pretty expensive, and so are the devices. That WILL change quickly within the next 18 months - estimates are varied but go up to 10% of the world's population on high speed Internet. This will have significant implications on this question - for I only need to FILTER what I have access to, to begin with. Right now all of this is a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of people and that's why we don't see enough action in the longtail of things. We are also missing good filters and trusted curators (there are some but not enough), and the commercial model for content is still way too traditional. Those are the factors that make it hard to envision the commercial relevance of the Longtail. But this is another post -- I promise!

[Gerd Leonhard]

Adrian: thanks for the comment. I think what drives people into the longtail is stuff like a) ease of use (i.e. not having to be content-mining expert) b) build-in payment (i.e. not having to pay per copy but enjoy flat rate access) c) better filters and curators (yes... give me more hypemachines and elbows and boing-boings) --- and more --- yet another blog post!

[Shawn Murphy]

The gentleman from Tonsotunes absolutely nailed it. The fatal flaw in the long tail theory is that consumers simply don't have the time to troll through terrabytes of garbage to find a single gem. I run a music company, and I have an entire staff that is constantly poking around the interweb trying to find good stuff. Sometime they go for days without turning up anything. I can't imagine a consumer wanting to devote anywhere close to that much time to searching for music. Not to mention pay for it once they've found it. Nor will they have to since most budding artists have been led to believe that they should give their music away in order to cultivate a fanbase. Easy will always beat hard and free will always beat pay. The internet as it is right now will destroy our culture because there is no way for us to monetize copyrights and compensate creators when we have to compete with Bittorrent (who just laid off half of their staff because everybody loses in a free marketplace). That's my prediction, and I saw Obama coming back in 2003 so hold onto your hats.

[Teed Rockwell]

It's true that few consumers are going to have the time to wade through all the material in the Long Tail. However, that is where the new best talent will always be. Consequently, what is needed are professionals who search the long tail for gems and then compile them in downloadable podcasts. Some people are starting to do this, such as the Soupygato show, and sixty second hero. This was the function once performed by Radio, when DJs actually played what they liked. There is always a need for that service. Whoever performs it today will be the new Musical Starmakers.

[Gerd Leonhard]

Shawn, this is NOT about 'monetizing copyrights' - that was a fluke that worked well for 50 years but not going forward. It's about turning attention into remuneration, trust into money. And the Internet will PROPEL that not destroy it. Think forward!