Declaring the ‘Long Tail’ Dead | Hacker News Reader

Declaring the ‘Long Tail’ Dead

newstatesman.com

35 pointsrobg29 comments

I have this mental filter that I apply to all technohype. When I read someone saying "Invention X is going to change the way we do business forever!" it registers in my mind as "Invention X has some interesting consequences that will affect a number of business processes." And then I can read the whole article/book/blog through that filter and often feel like the author is making valid points.

Then someone else comes along and says "OMG did you see this guy claiming that Invention X will change the way we do business forever? What a fool!" and my first reaction is "oh, no, he didn't say that..."

It may just be because I have the same mental filter installed, but I see those two statements as equivalent. If something affects business processes, isn't that another way of saying that it changes, in some small way, the way we do business? (The "forever" is just fluff—every change is forever until the next change, in the opposite direction, that's also "forever.")

The article seems like nothing more but ramblings of someone who is feeling threatened by the chnges in the world around them.

I have to admit that I have never read Anderson, but I sincerely doubt that he even saw the long tail replacing the blockbuster as the article implies. They are the two sides of the same coin, and you can't really have one over another; the only thing that new technologies have provided is a way for a company to actually be profitable by focusing on the long tail part of the market.

It's been a little while since I read "The Long Tail", but I'm pretty sure that Anderson specifically says that the blockbuster isn't going away. The head will always be there. What's interesting is the development and lengthening of the tail.

Anderson is so incredibly misunderstood. He makes the same, single point over and over: interconnectivity makes niches easier to reach. That's it. No "the blockbuster is dead", no "throw away everything you've ever learned about running your business", nothing even all that profound. He simply points out that niches are easier to reach, that they function a little differently than blockbusters, and by the way, there is a long history of established business techniques to address them. I don't understand why anything he says is even controversial. He's not saying anything new, simply making an observation. Weird.

Andrew Orlowski is no hack. The Register (which he writes for) just holds a view against the U.S. mainstream, being a British publication.

I don't know exactly what a hack is, but the article uses a writing style that makes me think the author is short on evidence. For example: 'the Wired editor’s theories have no sticking power and the backlash against him has begun"

"have no sticking power" is an untestable claim, and "backlash" can be as little as one person writing a blog post that says "Chris Anderson's long tail theory is wrong, wrong, wrong." The only specific examples cited of evidence are a reference to Rupert Murdoch and the discussion of a study by Page and Bud.

To me, it's pretty unimpressive article, but I will confess to holding a previous conviction that Orlowski is a pinhead. I'd be glad to hear counter-arguments.

It might be more accurate to say that the Register just goes around denigrating everything popular, well-known, or well-liked...being a British publication.

Seriously, I've never read anything in the Register that wasn't an attack piece on something popular. It's the tech equivalent of the type of tabloid that that revels in airing the dirty laundry of the rich and famous, with some sub-par trolling added as "commentary".

Well, one man's hack is another mans journalist.

Unfortunately, after a reading various pieces by Andrew Orlowski over the course of the past decade, my conclusion is that he has low standards for fact, and poor taste in opinions. Ergo, a hack.

Note who the author is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Orlowski

His articles on The Reg often tend towards trolling.

His articles on The Reg often tend towards trolling.

Totally. He's like Ted Dziuba with added rhetorical cleverness. Here's "Angle bracket defenses breached" for example: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/17/web20_worm_knocks_ou...

I love the opening line: "It's been a rough weekend for Tomorrow's People."

"What is really puzzling is that the backlash against Anderson’s ideas has taken this long to happen."

Umm, it didn't. Almost as quickly as his book was published, everyone pointed out that the data sets he based his theory on were deeply flawed, and in fact proved the opposite. He admitted so on his own blog.

He admitted so on his own blog.

I remember him saying that the new data didn't really change anything and explaining why the long tail idea was still valid.

edit: This is what I was thinking of: http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2008/06/excellent-hbr-...

So in the data she cites, the head of the online music market represents 32% of the all plays, and the tail represents 68%. That's certainly no challenge to the Long Tail theory; indeed, it's even more tail-heavy than the data I cited in my book (probably because I used a more generous estimate of 50,000 tracks for Wal-Mart's inventory).

Isn't the success of Amazon, CD Baby, or Netflix supporting the long tail? Granted, there are additional dynamics contributing to the success of each, but...

Reminds me of this from Eric S. Raymond:

    ...the idea that the most valuable gift you can give 
    your users is the *luxury of ignorance* — software that 
    works so well, and is so discoverable to even novice 
    users, that they don’t have to read documentation or 
    spend time and mental effort to learn about it.

Convenience is the luxury of ignorance! We live in a period of time when life is rife with complex information and complex choices. Mental effort itself has become a precious commodity. This explains a lot. It also works against the Long Tail. In order to cultivate esoteric tastes, you need time and you need to pay attention. The Internet makes that easier, but it also makes it easier for the mainstream to coopt what's out there on the Long Tail.

"We live in a period of time when life is rife with complex information and complex choices. Mental effort itself has become a precious commodity. This explains a lot. It also works against the Long Tail. In order to cultivate esoteric tastes, you need time and you need to pay attention."

You need time and attention to cultivate popular tastes, too. Once you discover a taste for jazz fusion or progressive metal or Japanese pop, though, you can safely stop paying attention to the rest of the music industry.

"You need time and attention to cultivate popular tastes, too."

Nope. I can just walk into Borders or B&N on the way home from work, and buy whatever's bestselling in the CD section. Done in a minute or two. (I walk to work.) What's featured or popular on iTunes? Done in a minute or two. I can just listen to what's on the Radio. Heck, I can just go to retail outlets, and they're playing this stuff for me.

The mainstream is still the most convenient, because it has the most resources behind it, because it's still the most profitable. Additionally, the mainstream is an enabler of uncultivated taste -- the ultimate convenience, the ultimate luxury of ignorance.

(In the interest of disclosure, I have played Irish Trad music for over two decades, and my preference for entertaining myself musically is to make it myself!)

You know, you'd be surprised but I don't have the slightest damned idea what the best selling music is right now. A pop song can come out and I don't hear it for weeks. And I don't own a radio outside of my car.

There's a slight bump when you get into something esoteric for the first time, but afterwards, you just kind of naturally lose touch.

There's a slight bump when you get into something esoteric for the first time, but afterwards, you just kind of naturally lose touch.

Not only have I been doing Irish Trad for 20 years, I've also taught it in a music school and competed overseas in it. Thanks for letting a newbie like me know what it's like to get into something esoteric for the first time.

To be fair, you edited your post after I replied to it. I didn't mean any disrespect; I was simply stating a point.

Are you saying it's more difficult for you to keep up with Irish Trad than it is for you to keep up with pop music? (It obviously takes more time and effort to be a practicing musician than to simply listen to music, but that is a separate question, one that rather confounds my original question.) In other words, are you disagreeing with me, or simply being disagreeable?

Recently, as in the past 2 weeks, I've been listening to more J-Pop.

Yes, it takes more time to enjoy a 3 minute Irish tune you play yourself than bringing up iTunes and hitting an internet radio station.

Sorry for the disagreeableness. I'm going to go and brew more coffee.

But that's my point--playing it yourself is what takes more time, not the obscurity of the music.

It's possible to listen to J-Pop, outside of Japan, for almost as little effort as it takes to listen to local pop on the analog radio. I'd count that as part of the long tail (at least from an American perspective).

Even if you just take the obscurity into account, there is a bit more effort involved. But it's true that we denizens of the Long Tail have used the Internet to make things easier for each other.

My point is that Pop music can get to the point of ubiquity where it takes less than zero effort to get exposed to it. It's just floating out there. The economics drives this.

That really depends what the individual shops are selling - I remember reading that almost all Amazon's revenue for CDs came down to a collection the same size as you'd find in a large high street cd library.

No. All of them get the vast majority of their success from the same crap you find in Best Buy or WalMart. Their success only supports the theory that people prize convenience.

Sites like Etsy are probably a better example.

> Page and Bud found that most of the songs available for purchase had never been downloaded, and that the concentration of hits was more pronounced than ever before.

The question not answered by this statement is whether the concentration of hits produce more revenue than the larger tail. The hits might be even more concentrated in a digital world, but do they compete with the huge back catalog?

Yeah, most of those songs available for purchase would not have been available at all to most consumers in the pre-Internet era. With online shopping, small producers may not be dramatically better off (as some Long Tail hucksters would claim) but they're not worse off and they might be marginally better off.

Not just more revenue, but more revenue relative to the pre-Internet tail.

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