The Long Tail extra credit assignment

This graphic illustrates the Long Tail Effect. The y axis (that's the line the runs up and down) shows how popular a product is, or how great its sales. The x axis (the horizontal line) shows the distribution of sales of all of the products in a category. If we were considering movie ticket sales this weekend, the latest Harry Potter release would be represented by a place on the x axis very near its intersection with the y axis. In other words, Harry Potter ticket sales are in the red area designated as the "Head," as ticket sales for that movie are quite high. Some art house movie only showing on a few screens, primarily in big cities near universities with a concentrated population of pretentious intellectuals would be represented by a point on the x axis far to the right of the Head. Our art house movie, let's call it "Jacques Confronts the Meaninglessness of Existence While Drinking Pinot," would be placed somewhere out on the orange "Long Tail."

Why is this Long Tail important? Consider for a moment a different type of product: music. When I was a young lad in college I worked at a record store, Licorice Pizza (Get it? if you've never seen a vinyl record you might not, but don't get hung up on that distraction). Record stores where the place were everyone purchased their music back in the prehistoric 1980s. Record stores were a great place for distributing music, but they had a significant limitation: space. That limitation meant that we could only carry the best sellers, or records that sold well enough to fall in the Head section of the x axis.

What that meant was that if you were looking for the latest Phil Collins album (he was big back in the day) we had plenty on hand. But if your tastes ran more in the direction of "Echo and the Bunnymen," an arty New Wave act of that era, we might have had a copy stuck in a bin with the latest releases by "Agent Orange," "X" and "Magazine," other New Wave/Punk bands with considerable talent but sales that never climbed beyond the Long Tail into the Head.

But today my 16-year-old daughters have never purchased music in a record store, and have only been in Rockin Rudy's in Missoula a time or two. They purchase all of their music online in iTunes and load it directly on their iPods.

So, for extra credit I you need to answer the following five questions. Each answer should be 50-100 words (one or two paragraphs). If you answer all of them correctly the score on your Kindle paper will be increased a letter grade. I will consider this extra credit through Dec. 13 (that's the Sunday before finals). If you complete the extra credit early and would like to have it reviewed by me before final submission, you can e-mail it to me and I'll let you know what you need to improve.

Before you try answering these questions a little research is in order. I'd start here if I were you.

You may also find this helpful.

Your questions:

1 — Music on iTunes is distributed digitally. As the cost of digital storage space (memory) has declined, how has this affected digital music distribution?

2 — Retailers once focused their efforts on the few top products in the Head. What are the implications for profit making when products in the Long Tail can be distributed at virtually no cost?

3 — It you were an independent producer of low volume product, be it music, video or a manuscript, how would you seek to exploit the Long Tail to maximize sales and exposure?

4 — Has the distribution of intellectual property changed permanently, and if so is this good or bad (you may steal some ideas from your Kindle papers for this one)? If we lose the communal space of bookstores and record shops forever have we lost something of value?

5 — Do you expect the forces of the Long Tail to play out for books the way it did for music, or do you expect something different to happen?

Don't kill yourselves with these. Just give me a short graf or two on each that shows me you understand the concept. If you'd feel more comfortable answering one of the questions with five to 10 grafs instead of all five with one or two, that's find as well. Whichever approach is most comfortable for you.

I'll get some review material for our final chapter quizzes out tomorrow.