eMusic Says The Long Tails Is Not Dead

Last week Frank Taubert of 24-7 Entertainment announced at Popkomm that three million out of his mobile catalog of 4.5 million songs had not been played a single time casting doubts over the Long Tail theory. eMusic's stats suggest that The Long Tail is still twitching thanks to the growing importance of social networking sites for music fans.

" Three quarters of eMusic's entire four million track catalog sells at least once every year, or to put it another way, we sell more than 50% of our catalog at least once every quarter," according to Madeleine Milne, Managing Director of eMusic Europe. "Music discovery on mobile devices may not be supporting long tail sales but the new digital music consumer is web savvy, and turns to social networks, blogs and the web to find out about new music. This is further evidenced by Entertainment Media Research's Digital Music Report 2008 out this week which also highlights the growing importance of social networking sites for music fans."