Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired magazine and author of the soon to be released book The Long Tail gave a presentation at work today. The book is a full-length treatment of the article Anderson wrote on the subject back in October 2004.
Anderson reckons that the age of big hit, mass audience, blockbuster media events is being challenged by the long tail of niche producers catering to niche audiences. His evidence includes:
- the March 21, 2000 album release by boy "band" N-Sync which sold over 2.4 million copies in a WEEK – more than any album previously and, key to Anderson’s model, more than any album since
- in multi-channel households, that is houses with more than just the usual four channels or whatever of standard terestrial television, the share of (US) viewers watching the top network programmes has fallen from a 1950’s high (I Love Lucy with 70%) to today’s figure of around 15% for CSI
- there are enough mega-plex screens in the US to show around 250 film titles per year yet there are 13,000 films created (so there must be an audience for the other films, even if it isn’t the mass multi-plex audience)
- the same is true of DVD’s, with a typical Blockbuster branch stocking around 3000 films (around 79% of the rental market) and sites like NetFlix offering 60,000+ films (around 21% of the market)
- Walmart, which sadly accounts for 40% of US CD sales, carries around 4200 albums on it’s shelves (55,000 tracks). Of the 65,000 albums released in a year, they will stock 700 of them. Sites like itunes can stock and sell millions of tracks (around 50% of itunes sales are of a single copy of a particular track that they won’t subsequently sell to anyone else in that month)
Some interesting facts gleaned from the net and Anderson reckons that this so called "powerlaw" can be seen in biology, nature, and human affairs as well economics.
Ian, who is CubicGarden, took a shot of Anderson’s Ten Fallacies of Hitism so I won’t bother typing them in here. The point of the talk boiled down to a final powerpoint slide – oh yes, thank you Chris:
Small is the new big. Many is the new few.
Think ClueTrain Manifesto 2.0 and you’re pretty much there.