Challenging the 'Long Tail'

When the concept of The Long Tail was published by Chris Anderson in October 2004 in Wired Magazine, it immediately hit a nerve. It addressed a new phenomenon in the music industry, overloaded with easily stored digital music files, but with no means to promote all of them. Anderson proposed that lesser-known artists, who sell few copies of their recordings, are still economically viable in large numbers. This creates a 'Long Tail' of consumers, each a fan of a virtually unknown, 'hard-to-find' or 'non-hit' artist.

In order to benefit further from the Long Tail phenomenon, marketing relies on a crucial element of social behaviour: recommendations. Witness the following proliferation of social networking, each avidly encouraging personal recommendations. Marketing directors' work has been delegated to the general public and peer-to-peer networking.

It would be quite outside the remit of this grant to prove the direct relationship between the publishing of the Long Tail and the subsequent success of MySpace, Facebook and Bebo. However it will be very interesting to observe the impact of a tool like mHashup on those social networking platforms. When all music becomes accessible via sound similarity rather than recommendations, the famous phrase customers who bought this item also bought.. becomes virtually redundant.

TEST

-- MichelaMagas - 31 Oct 2008