Week 7 Presentation – The Long Tail ConceptWill the long tail concept really change the future of entertainment distribution?

Phil Anable

The long tail graph does not cut off but extends infinitely

Top ten hits

Niche media

What is the long tail concept?

In short long tail means forget the fact that all the money is from the huge hits at the top of the charts.

The financial future in entertainment is in fact from millions of the smaller niche products at the lower sales end of the market.

An example that best describes this is called the Touching the Void phenomenon. A book called Touching the Void was released in 1988 which only had minor success and was forgotten. Then a decade later a book on a similar topic was released called Into Thin Air which became a publishing sensation and suddenly Touching the Void began to sell again.

This happened because Booksellers and Amazon.com recommendations promoted the books side by side, by word of mouth and other media Touching the Void ended up twice as successful as Into Thin Air. It gained success a decade after it was published.

How it is relevant to web 2.0 technologies and business?

These same situations are becoming very common and are due to clever grouping and recommendations by places like Amazon.com.

An important reason why people are purchasing more niche and non top-ten products is because of modern search facilities and databases enabling you to find items you would not normally have known existed, before the days of the web2.0.

These niche products are usually filtered out by a bottleneck effect in the distribution channel because of physical restrictions in Cinema screens, radio channels, retail shelf space and TV channels.

This will mostly leaves the big names and mainstream entertainment available to consumers, which is what happens on the high street mainly due to lack of shelf space.

But because of how web 2.0 technologies and internet business have merged the Internet does not have these restrictions. That’s why today half the sales are popular main stream and the other half niche entertainment products. Compared to before the internet and web2.0 where 80% of sales was popular main stream entertainment.

Web 2.0 logo’s

My Views on the long tail Concept

So back to the question, Will long tail change the future of entertainment distribution?

Yes I believe that long tail concept is having an increasingly but unnoticed effect on the entertainment industry and places like Amazon.com and iTunes which have taken such concepts into account have already benefited financially.

This means they will continue to be a fast growing competitor and one of the biggest distributors because of there research into social effects and marketing techniques.

What research and resources I have used ?long tail pichttp://blogs.idc.com/ie/wp-content/LongTail_01.jpg

amazon logohttp://www.knowledgebase-script.com/demo/admin/attachments/amazon_logo.gif

touching the void imagehttp://www.traditionalmountaineering.org/images/book_voidW.jpg

web 2.0 imagehttp://mejuke.com/out.php/i533_Untitled2.jpg

bottleneck imagehttp://www.labcentrix.com/images/bottleneck_diagram.jpgiTunes logohttp://www.gadgetell.com/images/2007/04/itunes7logo.jpg

Video Chris Anderson - Identifying “The Long Tail” U TUBE

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail_pr.htmlWeb review