The Long Tail essay 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, so check this out). 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 "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 (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?

Public Relations quiz open

The Chapter 10 quiz on Public Relations is now open.

Look for posts on great moments in Public Relations, and great failures. We'll likely consider what's happening at Penn State, where, in addition to the great human tragedy that is unfolding, we are also witnessing a significant and important institution grappling with how to communicate to its various publics. This is of course a very serious topic due to the nature of the crimes for which Jerry Sandusky and others at Penn State have been accused. For our purposes in our Mass Media class I want to focus on how the institution has responded to this tragedy from a communications — or in this case public relations — point of view.

There have been a couple of situations in recent days in the GOP presidential race which have also required creative communication in order to control potential PR disasters. Herman Cain is facing charges of workplace sexual harassment when he was the head of the National Restaurateurs Association, and Rick Perry is trying to overcome gaffs in recent debates. So far Cain's approach has been to deny the charges and blame the media, and his accusers. His numbers have begun to drop after he took a lead over Mitt Romney in recent weeks. Perry has kind of taken the "Aw shucks, I guess I screwed up" approach. His numbers have been dropping like a rock for weeks.

So who's winning in all this? Don't look now but Newt Gingrich appears to be the beneficiary of his rivals foibles.

Extra credit

Sorry for the late notice but if you go to this event at the school tonight you can skip this week's quiz and I'll credit you for 10 points. You'll need to email me a brief paragraph as proof of your attendance.

It's about new media ethics, our topic for this week.

Midterm week

OK folks, since its midterm week there won't be a quiz or any discussion thread. I will open the exam this evening and it will be available for you until Sunday night. Review the material we have covered so far. If you have any questions before the test, shoot me an e-mail. Since I have a day job try to give me a little lead time so I have an opportunity to get back to you.

Also, some of you have missed earlier chapter quizzes and would like to make them up. I will allow that this week, but what I need you to do is email me to tell me which quizzes you have missed.

Finally, if you wonder why I consider the state of the American newspaper with such despair, take a look at this. Who cares about Wall Street? It's time to occupy the newsrooms of America.

The Bartman incident

I want to talk this week about the "Bartman Incident" in the 2003 National League Championship Series. If you haven't had a chance to watch the ESPN film "Catching Hell" about the game, here are a couple of resources to help bring you up to speed.

Wikipedia page on the game.

Short clips from the film.

A link to a plethora of You Tube clips about the incident.

What I want to focus on is the role television played in elevating the play into an ugly mob scene at Wrigley Field. If you were able to see the ESPN film you learned a couple of interesting things about the game. There is no big screen in Wrigley for replaying key moments as there is in every other big league ballpark. So fans at the game were not seeing the replays over and over as was the television audience. But outside the ballpark, where fans gather in the streets surrounding Wrigley Field during big games, one man was carrying a television. He held the set on top of his head while the fans in the street watched the same replays as viewers at home. The chants of "Asshole. Asshole. Asshole" directed by all 40,000 plus fans in the stadium at Steve Bartman began outside Wrigley with those fans watching the television out on the street.

Steve Bartman will never live down that moment at Wrigley Field. The replays of that play have seared the image of him deflecting the ball away from Moises Alou into the minds of Cubs fans forever. But what if that play had happened 50 years earlier? There wouldn't have been television cameras in the stadium as the game would have been broadcast only on the radio. The only way that play might have been recorded at all would be if some newspaper photographer had gotten really lucky. If television hadn't been there to record the play, and amplify it, would it even be remembered at all?

So I have two questions I'd like you to answer this week. Did the amplification effect of television make the "Bartman Incident?" And if so, what are the implications for subjects of more importance in society?

So digital didn't kill the music star

I think that as a group you have zeroed in on an important point: music isn't dead because of change, music is changed because of change. I'll admit a certain nostalgia for the old 12-inch vinyl package, but I still listen to music and I haven't bought one of those relics in nearly 30 years. I didn't care for aspects of the change from vinyl to CDs, but I did get that the practicality of the format made it a superior product.

So music has changed. Bon Jovi is probably being an alarmist, or at least a sentimentalist pining for the memories of youth. Interesting in that we had another reading assignment this week that described Steve Jobs as the enemy of nostalgia, which was part of his genius. I remember when the first iMac came out and it didn't have a floppy disc drive. People freaked out. Now they are making Macs that don't include a disc drive and iTunes may soon give way to iCloud.

Nice work this week. I'm going hunting in the morning and I will mull over a discussion point for the week based on "Catching Hell." I'll post tomorrow evening.

BTW, Molly gets extra credit for slipping in that Buggles reference. Click here for a look at the first music video ever played on MTV. Sorry for the annoying message that pops up at the start of the song. Just hit the play arrow and it goes away. Watching that video makes my a tad nostalgic the early 80s, when I was a young college boy working in a record store. But most of those memories wouldn't be appropriate for serious academic discourse.

Apple and the rise of digital music

There was a brief moment in the not too distant past when music was distributed for free on the Internet somewhat like news is today. Napster was the place where listeners downloaded and "shared" digital versions of their favorite music with other fans. The music industry took notice of all this free traffic and when to court to shut down Napster. iTunes rose Phoenix-like from Napsters' ashes to become the dominant music distribution system.

For newspapers grappling with a way to put the genie back in the bottle and figure out a way to get folks to start paying for their product again, the rise of iTunes may offer some hope: "Maybe we can get people used to getting something for free to start paying for it again?"

But were interested in the music story here, and from the business side of things, iTunes has been an unqualified success. Still, there are detractors. Jon Bon Jovi seems to think the move toward digital has diminished the discovery experience of music, going so far as to claim Steve Jobs is killing the music business. I wonder sometimes. Certainly my teen-age daughters experience music far differently from how I did when I was their age. I hung out in record stores, thumbing through racks of 12-inch vinyl, admiring the cover art and wondering how it represented the music inside. No need for that (either the record store or the experience of hanging out in one) when you have iTunes. My kids gather round the computer with friends, sample songs and buy the ones they like. I'm not sure my kids have ever put on the headphones and listened to an album from start to finish the way I did.

There are other criticisms of the digital model. For instance, does it give industry leaders, some of whom have "control" issues, too much influence over music they way they once did during the payola days? Or does the Long Tail Effect level the playing field, allowing more artists to get their music to their fans?

So our question for the week: How much is there to Bon Jovi's claim that digital killed the music industry? We've talked about the tactile experience of ink-on-paper media. Is there a similar experience that the old album cover and liner notes, as well as being grounded to a fixed-site device like a turntable, that changes music forever? Is that really a change, and if so, is it necessarily a bad thing?

I'll look for your comments by Friday. The Sound Media is open and ready for your test-taking pleasure.