The Long Tail

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 last weekend, "The Vow," which was the No. 1 movie in theaters last week, would be represented by a place on the x axis very near its intersection with the y axis. In other words, "Vow" 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, so check this out). Record stores were the place where 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 "The Jam," "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 17-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.

Your assignment is to write a 1,200 word essay examining the Long Tail and its impact on Mass Media. Your essay should answer to the best of your opinion, an opinion formed by research of course, the five questions listed below.

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 ? 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?