Review: The Long Tail

The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. Chris Anderson. New York: Hyperion, 2006. 226 pp.

A local journalist recently interviewed my indie rock band. “What are your aspirations for success?” she asked. “We don’t expect radio play because we don’t sound like what’s on the radio right now,” our drummer replied. “We just want to get our music out there because a lot of people don’t want to hear what’s on the radio,” I added.

Using online tools like MySpace, Pandora and Last.fm, my band is hoping to capture what Wired editor Chris Anderson defines as the Long Tail – the niche market.

The Long Tail is an extension of an article Anderson wrote for Wired in late 2004 and explains the economics of abundance. “The theory of the Long Tail can be boiled down to this: Our culture and economy are increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of hits (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve, and moving toward a huge number of niches in the tail,” Anderson says.

Long Tails, according to Anderson, are enabled by digital markets democratizing the tools of production, cutting the costs of consumption by democratizing distribution, and connecting supply and demand via increasingly intelligent filters. In the case of my indie band, the costs of recording and producing technologies are so low that we can create an album for just a few hundred dollars and make the music available for free via MySpace. People can find our music using search engines like Google. We’re riding the Long Tail economy.

Anderson supports his thesis by analyzing data from Amazon, Rhapsody and Netflix among others. He shows that their demand curves are similar. A few blockbuster titles are in high demand, and the rest are in low demand – but those low demand titles are the majority of the total market, and their sales add up to a significant proportion of total demand. Anderson justifies that these low demand, niche markets are growing due to digital efficiencies and people’s innate desires, supported by culture, for increasing choice. Anderson credits Sears, Roebuck and Co. for its 1897 “Wish Book” mail order catalog – 786 pages containing 200,000 items for sale – for hooking America on abundant choice and paving the way for digital models today.

The Long Tail works because Anderson speaks to the economic plebeian. The only prerequisites for reading the book are understanding basic supply and demand curves and familiarity with the major Internet consumer retailers. Even when he delves into identifying the Long Tail as a “powerlaw,” he avoids treading formulas and graphs and simplifies the definition of a powerlaw to the lowest denominator: “…Powerlaw distributions occur where things are different, some are better than others, and effects such as reputation can work to promote the good and suppress the bad.”

The Long Tail excels where Anderson provides interesting examples of Long Tail elements. He provides especially colorful examples of “new producers” – amateur astrologists help to identify a supernova; small-time comedians landing roles on Saturday Night Live based upon low budget, viral videos. He makes a compelling argument for how Wikipedia is the most comprehensive encyclopedia ever created and, equally impressive, built by volunteers.

However, not all of Anderson’s case studies of Long Tails economies succeed. In his example of how blogs and mainstream media comprise the Long Tail for online media, he provides a Technorati chart measuring popularity by incoming links. Four blogs – Boing Boing, Engadget, PostSecret and Daily Kos – are present in the chart’s top 48 Web sites. Thus, these blogs are actually part of the “short head” of the curve, and likely even more blogs have entered this list in the two years since The Long Tail was published. The chart is a better argument for the success of blogs than for how blogs extend the Long Tail of online media. Anderson could have improved his argument by providing evidence for the number of new media blogs Technorati records daily.

The Long Tail also falls short where Anderson asserts the Long Tail extends beyond the economics of online businesses and into culture. His example of the rise of house music in Chicago is ineffective because he focuses on a music genre that has no mainstream and therefore does not have a Long Tail demand curve.

Though Anderson provides unsteady evidence to identify the Long Tail in culture, his assertion can be supported with alternate examples: People can choose from the thousands of niche groups on Facebook or recreate themselves as avatars in Second Life and become part of niche online communities within that virtual world. Chris Anderson himself participated in Second Life for a discussion with a niche audience – those interested in The Long Tail.

Looking back, I can see Long Tails in social environments, too. A small number of students in my high school were popular, “the cool kids.” The rest of us didn’t command the same attention but still made the majority.  Niche interests and activities defined us. Four of us that wanted to make rock music formed a band. Today, the same four of us have access, via Internet distribution channels and aggregates, to a broader audience that shares our niche taste for music. Vying for acceptance with “the cool kids” – the mainstream – is less important than ever.

The Long Tail is profound because it articulates what we can easily see in digital markets and increasingly in culture. The theory of abundance isn’t revolutionary – Sears, Roebuck and Co. recognized it more than 100 years ago – but it has never been presented in such a digestible form. Anderson’s book is a valuable addition to the public discourse about digital marketplaces and the impact of the Internet on consumers and culture.