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A New Twist on The Long Tail

In 2004 Chris Anderson popularized an Internet merchandising theory known as The Long Tail. He concluded that the potentially gigantic inventory of Internet merchants would considerably increase sales on items that are seldom stocked by terrestrial competitors. Presumably, the point is even more applicable to Digital Media since there is no physical stocking required and the inventory can theoretically be almost infinite. In mid-2006 Anderson followed the article with a more complete analysis in his book entitled The Long Tail. About the same time, Lee Gomes of The Wall Street Journal challenged the theory’s legitimacy. Gomes contacted some of the original merchants cited by Anderson and found that their sales were actually being evermore concentrated at the front of the inventory distribution, and not at the tail. I’ll let Anderson’s response speak for itself. However, recently I had my own Long Tail epiphany. The experience led me to conclude that the Long Tail is a powerful weapon for Internet merchants, but not for the reasons emphasized by Anderson. Specifically, after Christmas I used an iTunes gift card and also bought my first MP3s from the Amazon.com download store. About half of my purchases were in the Long Tail and half in the popular repertoire. I first started searching the tail for tracks that I have long wanted, but have never found to be available. Next I turned to the popular end of the distribution where I discovered more items that I wanted but was previously not sufficiently motivated to initiate a shopping experience to get them. At that point, about two-thirds of my purchases were at the head of the distribution and only one-third in the tail. Finally, I returned to the tail with no particular tracks in mind but only a hankering for some unpopular genres. For example one category of interest was orchestrated versions of Christmas Carols without voices. Pleased with the depth of the iTunes catalogue, the nagging annoyance of DRMs nevertheless led me to try the Amazon download store. I was favorably impressed for two reasons. First, the MP3s were automatically placed into my iTunes library where there are conveniently available to my iPod. Second, while not yet up to the iTunes standard, Amazon’s MP3 inventory is large.