Wednesday, January 07, 2009

Long Tail Fail Alert!

I've been an advocate of the Long Tail-theory - you know, Chris Andersons theory that if you have a near unlimited amount of virtual shelf space, you can offer all sorts of niched content, and the amount of niched content sold will exceed the amount of the most popular items sold. I.e., you can make money out of obscure stuff, as long as you have enough of it. This, to me, sounded entirely plausible.

Now, though, recent studies from the UK show that this just might not be the case. InformITV reports that the studies, conducted by the MCPS-PRS Alliance, showed that of all music sold in the UK, 0.4% of the songs made up 80% of the revenues. That's totally contradictionary to the long tail theory... On the other hand, might music be a species apart in this, seeing as people download, LastFM-listens etc, to the music they like? I don't know.. but read up on the report here, and be prepared to ditch the Long Tail from your next marketing-powerpoint, ok? :)

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