The Long Tail

In my first post I mentioned and linked to the mathematical concept of the long tail. The simplified explanation of which, as I understand it, is a statistical distribution where the less frequent events make up a greater portion of the distribution than the high frequency events.

So that may not have made sense within the context of my post. To laypeople like myself, the long tail concept is immediately recognizable in many areas common to modern life. The Google search engine is an obvious example: the top sites represent a large allocation of hits, but the long tail of less popular sites, in aggregate, are a greater portion of the whole.

In some circles the long tail concept has taken on a life of its own and usually refers to the fragmentation of modern culture. In his oft-cited article "The Long Tail" for Wired, Chris Anderson speculates that "the emerging digital entertainment economy is going to be radically different from today's mass market." Because we now have a seemingly infinite variety of choice, we develop niche tastes, which give rise to a statistically significant portion of the economy driven by niche markets.

This is more the meaning I intended in my blog post. I see myself as one of the billions, swimming around aimlessly in the long tail, terabytes of information at my beck and call 24 hours a day, simultaneously developing and discarding tastes, desires, memes.

Once you begin to think about the long tail concept, it makes you wonder how the big businesses of the world will adapt. The music industry certainly seems to be thrashing about in mostly misguided and stupid attempts to deal with the new economy. From Chris Anderson's article:

For too long we've been suffering the tyranny of lowest-common-denominator fare, subjected to brain-dead summer blockbusters and manufactured pop. Why? Economics. Many of our assumptions about popular taste are actually artifacts of poor supply-and-demand matching - a market response to inefficient distribution.

That is at once obvious and prescient. In the digital economy scarcity is mostly artificial (and will be purely artificial once big-pipe bandwidth is both free and ubiquitous), and distribution costs are negligible. It costs a few cents of bandwidth for most people in the US to transfer an entire modern production music CD, including high-resolution scans of the liner notes and bit-for-bit identical compressed audio to another entity.

And if having it in digital form is not good enough for you, all you need to do is conjure a physical manifestation of this work of art: burn the music to CD, print out the liner notes, and pop it all in an empty jewel case, and for less than $2 you have a product functionally identical to the $17 version the music store wants you to buy.

Compare this to the times when the best way to hear new music was to listen to the AM radio station broadcasting in your town. You now have the opportunity to become exposed to all different kinds of music. The same goes for literature, technical documentation, video, etc. We're all different, and we no longer have to listen to what the top 40 station is playing if we don't want to.

So the long tail develops.

For further reading: Accelerando! by Charles Stross. (digital version available for free)