Music and Pop Culture: The Long Tail Theory

The primary dramatic limitation on our entertainment in the physical world is a lack of variety being sold in stores. In order for a company to run such as a movie theatre, an average record store, DVD rental shops, video game stores, booksellers or newsstands, they need to earn a profit and make sales meaning each will only contain sufficient material to attract the public eye, keeping items sold mainstream.

The other dramatic limitation on our entertainment in the physical world is physics and how we are limited to only a certain number of radio stations, TV channels etc. There is also only 24 hours a day to fit in different segments meaning a large portion of other non mainstream music out there isn’t be played.

Robbie Vann-Adibe’s question (what percentage of the top 10,000 titles in any on-line media store will rent or sell at least once a month?) is often answered wrongly due to the misconception that 20 percent out out the 10,000 titles are sales, when they are actually hits and not sales of any sort. We believe only hits can make money and are therefore the only music we should keep, however Vann-Adib has found that non hits can also bring in money and create a larger variety of products to the audience allowing money to add up quickly.

Another reason people often get Robbie Vann-Adibe’s question wrong is due to the industries lack of knowledge of what the people want. Stores such as Wall Mart should be selling a minimum of 100,000 copies of a CD to make a profit and cover its retail overhead. Therefore, only mainstream films are sold leaving the public to shop elsewhere in search of non mainstream entertainment. We, the public, don’t want, on the surface familiarly advertised shows but in fact want something different and new.

‘‘The Long Tail’ is the name for a long-known feature of some statistical distributions. In “long-tailed” distributions a high-frequency or high-amplitude population is followed by a low-frequency or low-amplitude population which gradually “tails off” asymptotically. The events at the far end of the tail have a very low probability of occurrence.’ – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_long_tail

The ‘Long Tail’ is a smart idea as it it providing the audience with a large range of products and letting the people choose for themselves what suits them, which furthers creativity, understanding and individuality rather than everyone listening/watching the same main stream products being sold. It brings in money as shown in the graph below found on Wikipedia:

The tail becomes bigger and longer in new markets (depicted in red). In other words, whereas traditional retailers have focused on the area to the left of the chart, on-line bookstores derive more sales from the area to the right of the line. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_long_tail

Anderson’s three rules for the new entertainment industry are:

1. Make everything available.

Netflix, storage costs are cheap as they stock movies in centralized warehouses. Both popular and unpopular movies share the same distribution costs allowing the company to stock a much wider range of movies than the average movie rental store. As there is a larger selection of movies available for the public, ‘Long Tail’ is enabled and finds that ‘unpopular movies’ are rented as much or more than popular movies.

2. Cut the price in half. Now lower it.

3. Help Me Find It

I have taken advantage of Long Tail in the sense of downloading music. I try to find non mainstream tunes and movies which can’t be purchased at DVD stores, watched in cinemas, or bought elsewhere as I am always looking for something different. I think it is important to encourage a wider variety of non mainstream artists to the public to inspire creativity and individuality as mentioned earlier.

The ease of access to the products are straight forward and figures have already shown that non mainstream products sell the same if not more that mainstream, as shown in the graph above.