By Jim McCarthy Oct 8, 2009 0 comments

Can We Stop Chasing Our (Long) Tails Now?

Wasn’t I just talking about how Chris Anderson’s “Long Tail” concept, while elegant and attractive and technically true, was not especially relevant to most decision makers?  Why, yes, I was.

My point at the time was, and I quote: “the Long Tail may be a perfectly valid observation of reality, but for you, it could be either unimportant or deceptive in its implications.

I don’t have any iTunes sales data.  For some crazy reason, Apple doesn’t share that with me regularly, but I would be willing to bet just about anything that if Apple had to sacrifice either the top 1% of titles (let’s say, for argument’s sake, the 10,000 most popular albums or 100,000 most popular singles) or the bottom 50%, they’d cut the bottom 50% loose in a laugher.”

Well, as it turns out, it was even more extreme than I thought.  Here’s the NY Times’s Charles Blow quoting a PRS study on the sale of digital music tracks:

“A study last year conducted by members of PRS for Music, a nonprofit royalty collection agency, found that of the 13 million songs for sale online last year, 10 million never got a single buyer and 80 percent of all revenue came from about 52,000 songs. That’s less than one percent of the songs.”

Wow.  52,000 songs is less than one-half of one-percent of songs, and yet this tiny sliver of songs accounts for 80% of sales.

And the bottom half?  The so-called long tail?

Well, according to this, they account for a whopping zero percent of sales.

Zee

Roh

Here’s how Seth Godin put it:

“The internet has allowed ease of entry into the market. You can advertise anything, any service, any good, any piece of junk in your garage–essentially for zero. You can go into business effortlessly, telling yourself you’ll just hang out on the long tail and do just fine.  Understand that zero is a very real probability, perhaps even a likelihood.“

Or as I put it a couple months ago:

“But what about you?  Can you make a business out of the Long Tail?  Should you take your focus off the top half of all the products you sell and chase the bounty of the Long Tail?

I think not.”

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