The Long Tail

by Chris Anderson

  Online, however, the consumer has a lot more help. There are a nearly infinite number of techniques to tap the latent information in a marketplace and make that selection process easier. You can sort by price, by ratings, by date, and by genre. You can read customer reviews. You can compare prices across products and, if you want, head off to Google to find out as much about the product as you can imagine. Recommendations suggest products that “people like you” have been buying, and surprisingly enough, they’re often on-target. Even if you know nothing about the category, ranking best-sellers will reveal the most popular choice, which both makes selection easier and also tends to minimize post-sale regret. After all, if everyone else picked a given product, it can’t be that bad.

  The problem with the jam experiment is that it was disordered; all the jams were shown simultaneously and to guide them the customers had only their existing knowledge of jam or whatever was written on the labels. That’s the problem on the supermarket shelf, too. All you have to go on is your domain expertise, whatever brand information has been lodged in your brain by experience or advertising, and the marketing messages of the packaging and shelf placement.

  Most of the information that online retailers use to order their massive variety and make choice easy—popularity, comparative prices, reviews—is available to supermarket owners, too. But they typically don’t share it with you, the customer. That’s because there’s no good way to do it, short of a mini-screen on each shelf. The paradox of choice is simply an artifact of the limitations of the physical world, where the information necessary to make an informed choice is lost.

  The conventional wisdom was right: More choice really is better. But now we know that variety alone is not enough; we also need information about that variety and what other consumers before us have done with the same choices. Google, with its seemingly omniscient ability to order the infinite chaos of the Web so that what we want comes out on top, shows the way. The paradox of choice turned out to be more about the poverty of help in making that choice than a rejection of plenty. Order it wrong and choice is oppressive; order it right and it’s liberating.

  Virginia Postrel, a writer on the economics of variety, explains why so much academic research in choice seems to contradict the lessons from decades of real-world business experience:

  For good scientific reasons, psychology experiments systematically screen out the habits and business practices that make real-life choices, especially shopping decisions, manageable. This is because the experiments are designed to understand the mind, not the market…In reality people don’t dislike choice, even overwhelming choice. They have mixed feelings about it. And in the real world, especially the real marketplace, they often have help making decisions.

  Writing in her New York Times column, Postrel points out that real estate agents, financial planners, search engines, and the recommendations services at Amazon all do the same thing. “Each knows something about us and something about what’s valuable. They don’t just reduce the number of options. They do so intelligently, with an eye to what we’re most likely to want. They help us be ourselves.”

  Hence the rise of wedding planners, a profession that barely existed twenty years ago. “As the constraints of tradition have loosened and the bridal market has produced more alternatives for everything from invitations to limousines, weddings have gotten more complex and personalized,” Postrel explains. Membership in the Association of Bridal Consultants had grown to 4,000 in 2004, from 27 in 1981.

  Adds John Hagel, a management consultant: “The more choice we have the more we have to decide what it is we really want. The more we reflect on what we really want, the more involved we get in the creation of the goods we buy and use [via customization]. The more we participate in the creation of products and services, the more choices we end up creating for ourselves.”

  THE ECONOMICS OF VARIETY

  Does more choice encourage consumers to buy more? Anecdotally, we all know of instances where increased variety and better ways to find things encouraged people to consume more. I know, for instance, that Napster reawakened my interest in exploring new music, a passion that continues more easily (and legally) with Rhapsody, which has probably doubled my music spending. And my family certainly watches more DVDs thanks to Netflix.

  The multitude of white-earbud-wearing New Yorkers are surely listening to more music than they were before the iPod, extending the effect created by the Walkman a generation before. But are they buying more music, too? The hard numbers are, unfortunately, inconclusive. As of spring 2007, Apple had sold 100 million iPods and 2.5 billion tracks on iTunes, for an average of twenty-five tracks per iPod (an average of less than three CDs’ worth) over the six years the iTunes music store had been in business. That is not impressive.

  CD sales are down nearly 20 percent since the launch of the iPod. So how are consumers filling their capacious portable hard drives and flash memory chips? Exactly as you’d expect: ripping CDs from friends, downloading them for free from peer-to-peer services (whose traffic continues to rise, despite occasional legal crackdowns), and trading them across dorm LANs on college campuses.

  Indeed, although there is a general presumption that more availability leads to more sales, there is precious little statistical work that proves this is the case, especially for large numbers of products. The small-number consumer psychology work, however, does suggest that when the choice is meaningful, more is better—it simply improves the odds you’ll find what you want, or at least something that strikes your fancy.

  There are a few studies that look at examples such as the effect of increasing the number of yogurt flavors on offer by one or two, which does help sales. One of the better-known bits of “more is better” research is a paper entitled “The Lure of Choice,” which analyzes bank, nightclub, and casino experiments to show that consumers picked options more often when they were accompanied by many other choices. Consumers preferred movie theaters with more screens, and casinos with more tables; the more options they were given, the lower their perceived risk of being stuck with something they didn’t want.

  Likewise, Malcolm Gladwell has highlighted the case study of would-be spaghetti sauce competitors who learned not to out-Ragú Ragú in making the platonic ideal sauce, but to instead celebrate diversity—chunky, homemade, spicy—and expand the market through multiple niche sauces and market segmentation. Partly because of this introduction of more variety, which pushed buttons consumers didn’t even know they had, spaghetti sauce is now one of the top six growth categories in the dressing and sauce market.

  Francis Hamit, a writer on publishing topics, explains that the link between variety and the volume of consumption is best seen as a trade-off, as found in basic economics:

  One of the classic examples was the chart in my old Economics textbook that demonstrated the trade-off between long-range bombers and new school buildings. There the constraint was money. Here, the constraint is time. It takes time to find the items you want, and most people will buy what they are looking for the first place they find it rather than look for a lesser price.

  This is why retail stores place all those little items next to the cash register. Availability and convenience equals more sales. For that matter, so-called “convenience stores” like 7/11 make most of their money from milk, bread, beer, and soft drinks, which they sell for far more than the price at the local supermarket. What is sold is not so much the product as the fact that it is available, right now.

  Digital distribution has two effects on this model. It widens the field of possible customers and shortens the search time. Over time, this should increase sales and grow the overall market. As we saw in Chapter 8, longer tails can be thicker, too.

  11

  NICHE CULTURE

  WHAT’S IT LIKE TO LIVE IN A LONG TAIL WORLD?

  In the early 1980s, in the dark days at the very end of disco, a proto–Long Tail music culture emerged in a former industrial strip in Chicago. A half decade aft
er the release of Saturday Night Fever, the craven commoditization of clap tracks and R&B had reached the end of its run and consumers were rebelling. They’d had enough of the bland and formulaic output of a music industry trying to clone its previous hits. People attending a baseball game in Chicago’s Comiskey Park were invited to bring all their unwanted disco records, and after the game they tossed the vinyl refuse into a massive bonfire to the chant of “Disco Sucks.”

  But in a nightclub called the Warehouse, the resident DJ, Frankie Knuckles, was doing something new. He was wildly remixing, mashing up different genres of music into something brand-new. Knuckles took old disco classics, new Eurobeat pop and synthesized beats, including those produced with then-new drum machines, and turned them into a frantic, high-energy amalgamation of recycled soul. Taking its name from the club, this new sound became known as house music.

  In The History of House Sound of Chicago, Stuart Cosgrove describes the scene:

  Frankie is more than a DJ. He’s an architect of sound who has taken the art of mixing to new heights. Regulars at the Warehouse remember it as the most atmospheric place in Chicago, the pioneering nerve-center of a thriving dance music scene where old Philly classics by Harold Melvin, Billy Paul and The O’Jays were mixed with upfront disco hits like Martin Circus’ “Disco Circus” and imported European pop music by synthesizer groups like Kraftwerk and Telex.

  The sound spread to another Chicago club called the MusicBox, where DJ Ron Hardy took it up several notches with massive volume and a frenetic pace, something, it was said, that was inspired by his heroin use. Then, eventually, the sound traveled to the north of England, where house became the foundation of what would later emerge as the Rave scene.

  What was notable about the rise of house was that it was both a reaction to the bankruptcy of blockbuster culture and a vibrant culture of its own. DJs and clubs created a music industry that was radically different from pop music. Clubbing is really about surfing the Long Tail of dance music, and this ecosystem has seen the evolution of new models of innovation around it.

  In order to understand why, let’s chart the rise of house music. Its origins are now attributed to legendary DJs like Larry Levan, who rose to prominence as the resident DJ of New York’s Paradise Garage. In the late seventies, DJs such as Levan and David Mancuso began stringing records together in the now-familiar DJ sets that clubbers dance to until the sun comes up.

  What gave rise to these superstar DJs? Many of the same sort of forces that are at work today. It started with the spread of affordable technology, from mixing decks to multitrack recorders. That’s the first force of the Long Tail, the democratization of the tools of production. Cheap production technology reduced the cost of studio time; and cheap mastering technology made it possible for hundreds of small indie record labels to economically press and market records. Some of the best known of these house labels, such as West End Records, pressed hundreds of records in a few short years.

  The economic effect of this was an explosion of records, which created a vacuum of information about those records—and an opportunity for someone to act as a filter to help people find these records. But such a filter couldn’t be effective without access to these underground records in the first place, which required distribution channels with a low barrier to entry. Which is exactly what clubs and warehouse parties offered, thus providing the necessary second force—democratized distribution.

  Where mass-media radio stations are dominated by one-way information flows in the form of record-label marketing—labels push the albums they think will be hits and only later find out if they’re right—clubs close the feedback loop instantly and immediately. If a DJ plays tracks that clubgoers don’t value, their dissatisfaction is apparent—they don’t dance. Clubgoers vote instantly with their feet, relaying their decentralized expectation and preference info to the DJ in aggregate. DJs surf the Long Tail of music and recommend the content their audience is most likely to gain satisfaction from—and dance to.

  As production and mastering costs continued to drop, house music exploded and fragmented into hyperspecialized genres such as deep house, funky house, and dub house. And as it did, a new mechanism was necessary for DJs to be able to navigate a consumption landscape of bewildering complexity.

  This mechanism is paradoxical when viewed from the outside. For many years, house producers have released records under a variety of aliases. Why use aliases if their goal is to sell records? After all, varieties of aliases are a kind of anti-branding, creating information clutter that can confuse the market.

  But for DJs, the important information is in the label, not the track. Indie record labels are like tags, providing a clue about what hyperspecialized microgenre a track is likely to be. Labels are a way to allow DJs to cheaply and efficiently find tracks that are likely to satisfy their audience’s expectations. In this sense, labels lay the infrastructure for the later aggregation of decentralized information that takes place on the dance floor.

  In fact, at a certain point DJ names ceased to matter, since labels provided most of the valuable information. For example, the seminal Berlin duo of Moritz Von Oswald and Mark Ernestus, better known as Basic Channel, release records with their collaborators under a variety of labels. The Burial Mix label is for deep, dark dub with vocals; the M label is for minimal, instrumental, dub house; Rhythm & Sound is for abstract dub with strong reggae influences; and the Chain Reaction label is for instrumental abstract electronica with a strong house influence.

  Each of these labels features records by a number of different artists. Multiply this by a factor of a thousand, and you begin to understand just how complex the consumption landscape of house music has become—and why the need for labels as tags arose. Since DJs can use the information embedded in the label itself, they don’t have to spend time listening to each and every project Oswald and Ernestus are involved with—they can simply focus on the labels that are most relevant to their audiences. They can cheaply and efficiently surf the Long Tail of house music.

  House music producers also rely on open-access product strategies. In contrast to record labels that spend more and more time on litigation to enforce copyright infringement, house music producers (and underground producers in general) have long realized that opening up their goods to being remixed and tweaked has beneficial economic consequences.

  A house record that does well often attracts remixes from other producers; it becomes a kind of platform. Because these remixes are usually hyperspecialized for different microgenres, they’re complements to the original track. As the number of complements increases, the value of the platform track snowballs. This snowball effect is another mechanism by which DJs-as-aggregators can efficiently navigate the Long Tail of music, quickly and easily discovering which tracks are snowballs within their respective niches.

  FROM “OR” CULTURE TO “AND” CULTURE

  The Long Tail is nothing more than infinite choice. Abundant, cheap distribution means abundant, cheap, and unlimited variety—and that means the audience tends to distribute as widely as the choice. From the mainstream media and entertainment industry perspective, this looks like a battle between traditional media and the Internet. But the problem is that once people shift their attention online, they don’t just go from one media outlet to another—they simply scatter. Infinite choice equals ultimate fragmentation.

  Writing in Corante, Vin Crosbie, a media analyst, explains why:

  Each individual listener, viewer, or reader is, and has always been, a unique mix of generic interests and specific interests. Although many of these individuals might share some generic interests, such as the weather, most, if not all of them, have very different specific interests. And each individual is a truly unique mix of generic and specific interests. Until about 30 years ago, the average American hadn’t access to any medium that could satisfy each of their specific interests. All they had was the mass medium, which could somewhat successfully satisfy many of their generic
(i.e., “mass”) interests.

  Then media technologies evolved in ways that started to satisfy their specific interests. During the 1970s, improvements in offset lithography led to a bloom of specialty magazines; no longer were there a dozen or two magazines on newsstands, but hundreds, most about only specific topics. Proliferations of, first, analog cable television systems during the 1980s, then digital ones during the late 1990s, increased the average American’s number of accessible TV stations from four to hundreds, mostly specialty channels (Home & Garden TV, the Golf Channel, the Military Channel, etc.). Then the Internet became publicly accessible during the 1990s and the average individual quickly had access to millions of websites, most of those sites about very specific topics.

  The result is that more and more individuals, who had been using only the (generic) mass medium because that’s all they had, have gravitated to these specialty publications, channels, or websites rather than continue to use only mass medium publications, channels, or websites. More and more use the mass medium less and less. And more and more will soon be most. The individuals haven’t changed; they’ve always been fragmented. What’s changing is their media habits. They’re now simply satisfying the fragmented interests that they’ve always had. There are as many fragments as there are individuals. Always have been and always will be.

  This shift from the generic to the specific doesn’t mean the end of the existing power structure or a wholesale shift to an all-amateur, laptop culture. Instead, it’s simply a rebalancing of the equation, an evolution from an “Or” era of hits or niches (mainstream culture vs. subcultures) to an “And” era. Today, our culture is increasingly a mix of head and tail, hits and niches, institutions and individuals, professionals and amateurs. Mass culture will not fall, it will simply get less mass. And niche culture will get less obscure.