Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Chopping the Long Tail down to size


Scott, from the SMM class at UCLA, submits this article for consideration. We recently talked about "The Long Tail" and this article presents a different view. Thanks, Scott.

Exclusive The most comprehensive empirical study of digital music sales ever conducted has some bad news for Californian technology utopians. Since 2004, WiReD magazine editor Chris Anderson has been hawking his "Long Tail" proposition around the world: blockbusters will matter less, and businesses will "sell less of more". The graph has become iconic - a kind of 'Hockey Stick' for Web 2.0 - with the author applying his message to many different business sectors. Alas, following the WiReD Way of Business as a matter of faith could be catastrophic for your business and investment decisions.

Examining tens of millions of transactions from a large digital music provider, economist Will Page with Mblox founder Andrew Bud and Page's colleague Gary Eggleton, looked to see how large and valuable the "Tail" of digital music may be. They produced a spreadsheet with 1.5 million rows - so large, in fact, that it required a special upgrade to their Excel software (and more RAM) - and the three revealed their work at the Telco 2.0 conference this week. More here

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