Long Tail
I’m stuck with about five working channels in my London hotel room (and there is nothing but news, bad English reality TV and terrible American movies). I like TV and like to watch a few favourite shows, and just generally like the background noise. It annoys me that I still can’t easily get the shows I want to watch mailed to me or available to me easily online. Lately I’ve been using bittorrent to grab some of my favourit shows to watch at night (usually leaving the computer on overnight at the hotel to grab them). Entertainment industry please hear this… I will pay you for these shows if you give me an easy and reliable way to receive them… and not just current shows but ones you thought were crap and cancelled after three airings.
Wired sums it up well in this recent popular article, The Long Tail.
“To get a sense of our true taste, unfiltered by the economics of scarcity, look at Rhapsody, a subscription-based streaming music service (owned by RealNetworks) that currently offers more than 735,000 tracks.
Chart Rhapsody’s monthly statistics and you get a “power law” demand curve that looks much like any record store’s, with huge appeal for the top tracks, tailing off quickly for less popular ones. But a really interesting thing happens once you dig below the top 40,000 tracks, which is about the amount of the fluid inventory (the albums carried that will eventually be sold) of the average real-world record store. Here, the Wal-Marts of the world go to zero - either they don’t carry any more CDs, or the few potential local takers for such fringy fare never find it or never even enter the store.
The Rhapsody demand, however, keeps going. Not only is every one of Rhapsody’s top 100,000 tracks streamed at least once each month, the same is true for its top 200,000, top 300,000, and top 400,000. As fast as Rhapsody adds tracks to its library, those songs find an audience, even if it’s just a few people a month, somewhere in the country.
This is the Long Tail.”