The author of The Long Tail talks about his new theory

In an October 2004 story, Wired Magazine Editor Chris Anderson introduced a new trend he called ‘The Long Tail’ and explained how this new economic model based on digital technology was changing our world. Nine months later, the trend has a devoted and growing following, and Anderson has a lucrative book contract for a more in-depth treatment of The Long Tail.

Chris Anderson

What led to The Long Tail? How did you come up with it?
At Wired, we are constantly looking at underlying technological trends and the next cycle of change. The Long Tail was an insight I had studying TiVo, Rhapsody, iTunes and Amazon and interpreting new data from their Internet sales of music and books and movies.

Why should libraries be interested?
They are increasingly connected through shared databases and interlibrary loan networks. Thus, they are able to effectively extend their shelves manyfold, connecting their individual collections into a vast supercollection that can go far further down the Tail than any single institution could afford. In other words, networks are turning individual libraries into what amounts to one huge virtual Long Tail aggregator.

The Long Tail isn’t new, many people claim. How would you respond?
One of the signs of a great idea is that people feel like they’ve known it forever. That, at least, is what I tell myself when people suggest that the concept of The Long Tail predates my article of the same name. It is not new that powerlaw and other distributions have “heads” and “tails.” It is also not new that some tails are longer than others.

To be precise, what I coined was the notion of looking at the tail itself as a new market. The use of the proper noun (including “The”) is not incidental, but is intrinsic to the observation that we have historically looked at the market at the head of the curve in isolation, and we can now shift our gaze to the right and see that the tail is another market. The notion of two markets—The Head and The Long Tail; one familiar, the other long ignored but now emerging— is at the core of the thesis and explains the initial caps TLT construction I’ve used.

What about digital rights management and The Long Tail? Won’t content owners be hesitant to make so much available electronically?
I believe in the value of protecting intellectual property rights, but I’m opposed to overzealous extensions and implementations of those protections. Copyright good; infinite copyright bad. Piracy bad; treating everyone like a pirate worse.

But equally, I believe in putting the consumer first. Consumers want more content, easier-to-use technology and cheaper prices. If some form of DRM encourages publishers, consumer electronics makers and retailers to release more, better and cheaper digital media and devices, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. This is just being realistic: much as we might want it to be otherwise, content owners still call most of the shots. If a little protection allows them to throw their weight behind a lot of progress towards realizing the potential of digital media, consumers will see a net benefit.

The real question is this: how much DRM is too much? Clearly the marketplace thinks that the protections in the iPod and iTunes are acceptable, since they’re selling like mad. Likewise, the marketplace thought that the protections in Sony’s digital music players (until recently, they didn’t support MP3s natively) were excessive and they rejected them.

Tell us what The Long Tail isn’t?
There are many distortions of the term, but the most common one is to use it as a newly-positive synonym for“fringe.” Invoking The Long Tail is not a magic wand to explain away the apparent lack of demand for what you’ve got. The fact that something isn’t popular doesn’t mean that it’s just a matter of time before it will benefit from all sorts of powerful demand-creation Long Tail effects. More likely, it’s just not good enough to be commercially interesting, and probably never will be.

As I’ve mentioned in the original article, for Long Tail effects to work, you need both a head of relatively few hits and a tail of many niches, so that recommendations and other filters can lead consumers from one to the other. A tail without a head is too noisy and apparently random to get consumer traction; people need to start with the familiar and then move, via trusted recommendations, to the unfamiliar. Likewise a head without a tail is too limited in choice; the odds of finding a niche you want are too low to bother exploring much beyond what
you already know.

If what you’re selling is fringe, it may well enjoy Long Tail benefits, but only if it can fit nicely into an existing market that has the capacity to drive demand. If that market doesn’t exist, it’s unlikely that throwing some niche products out there is going to create it. Even if it does exist, those products will reach their audience only if the filters and recommendations are good enough to find them.

Does the rise of the Long Tail mean the fall of mass culture?
The short answer is that mass culture will not only get less mass, but that this is a trend that’s already well underway. Let’s start by defining mass culture. The usual test is the“watercooler effect,” the buzz in the office around a shared cultural event, be it the finale of The Apprentice or the opening of the last Star Wars. The number of such events has been shrinking for years, driven mostly by the fragmentation of the television audience. Cable TV started this with its explosive increase in the number of shows broadcast at any one time, which soon resulted in half of American viewership moving to cable. The arrival of TiVo and other DVRs amplified this by taking the time component out, too.

The result is that the day when most of America watched the same things on the same night is long gone. Today’s top shows have Nielsen scores that wouldn’t have put them in the top 20 two decades ago.

Likewise for music. By my count only ten of the top 100 best-selling albums were released in the last decade, and only four of those were in the last five years. So instead of the office water cooler, which crosses cultural boundaries as only the random assortment of personalities found in the workplace can, we increasingly have our own tribes. My tribe may have all picked up the “all your base” meme at the same time, but your tribe was into the steroid scandal. These days our water coolers are increasingly virtual, there are many different ones, and the people who gather around them are self-selected. We are turning from a mass market into a niche nation.

About Chris Anderson

Author of The Long Tail, Chris Anderson has been Editor-in-Chief of Wired Magazine since 2001. Under his leadership, Wired has been nominated for National Magazine Awards for General Excellence in 2002 and 2004. Previously, he was U.S. Business Editor, Asia Business Editor ,(based in Hong Kong); and Technology Editor at The Economist. While at The Economist, he initiated its Internet coverage and directed its initial Web strategy. Anderson’s career began at the two premier science journals, Nature and Science, where he served in several editorial capacities. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics from George Washington University and studied Quantum Mechanics and Science Journalism at the
University of California at Berkeley.

The “Library Tail” on the Web | Fellowship of Fellows