Is The Tail Really Long? New Study Says P2P Primarily Peddles The Hits.
The authors of the study believe that there findings disprove Chris Anderson's Long Tail which postulated that the internet would mean more exposure and sales for niche product and less for the hits. "We are yet to see a big hit or wildly popular release in the pirate market that was not also a top seller in the licensed market," said BigChampagne CEO Eric Garland. The study goes on to recommend the licensing of P2P as a way for labels to capture some revenue.
THE RIGHT QUESTION
Just because the top of the tail looks the same as traditional sales charts, does it freally follow that the rest of the tale will as well? More importantly, how many artists can be found in the middle or even near the end of the tail that would not have been left in obscurity prior to the internet?
Because I deal in such obscure styles of music, I am forced to believe the tail is really long even if what this report is showing is true.
The supply of Spanish and Italian bagpipe music appears to be plentiful in filesharing land. Early 20th century banjo music too. German goth folk. Greek progressive rock from the 1970s. Belgian medieval classical music. Maybe this is not far enough down the long tail for our researcher, but it is good enough for me.
I wonder what pool of data this survey studied? The author seemed unwilling to disclose it. A technology like Kazaa/FastTrack is heavily dependent on what your neighbors have. It is going to skew much more to the hits than a technology like original Napster, BitTorrent, or the universe of MP3 blogs, which access the whole world equally.
As I wrote in my blog post last week about this (http://bobbyowsinski.blogspot.com/2009/05/long-tail-it-works-if-you-work-it.html), the Long Tail requires the following two items to work:
* Cut the price in half, then lower it some more.
* Make everything easy to find.
If you don’t follow these two rules, the Long Tail will never work as well as it’s supposed to.
Bobby Owsinski
bobbyowsinski.blogspot.com
bobbyowsinski.com
Great point bobby – i think the long tail is far from ready, and my never emerge as many hoped. Across so many music data points, beyond just p2p, we see the hits dominate where there are so many choices
Here is a better link to the info being reported on in this artical. Take a good look at the graph. The study on what is happening in the P2P/file sharing world suggests the long tail theory’s predictions aren’t the case…. at all. Check it out.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/13/long_tail_p2p/
The important idea here is
“So the fact we’re seeing the log normal distribution here may point to the power of culture on people’s choices. Chris Anderson’s hypothesis of a Pareto power law would be much more about random, individual choices – people alone with their computers. So perhaps this debate, of ‘thick versus fat’ is really about the power of culture in determining demand”.
I didn’t know what the different distribution curves they talked about were so I did a google image crash course. You all may know this already.
log normal distribution = The head or highest density point in the graph represents far more than the fall off before or after the peak (like a bell curve). Most of the ‘value’ falls in a smaller mean deviation from the peak ie more for the top transacters and little left for the rest.
Pareto power law = otherwsie known as ‘The Long Tail’. Peaks out at the very beginning, and then falls off in a long slow curve with much or more of the value distributed though out the tail, falling off gradually to the right of the peak.
So, all graph geekery aside THE RIGHT QUESTION listed above mistakes the basic findings of the new study. There IS NO LONG TAIL – it’s a fricken bell curve! The two graphs look completely different. It is arguable that since we are dealing with percentages, the whole graph is scaled up because of P2P networks massive useage( figures anyone?) but all this means is that the meagre pickings on each side of the Bell Curve’s chasmic fall off are increased by this growth in useage, not by extra exposure or increased choice as Mr Anderson posited. In fact it looks like small artists are getting lost in the cultural mist, and that the status quo has been maintained – that the Holy Grail of democratice net culture, file sharing, is not helping anyone except those who are sharing and downloading the music.
THE RIGHT QUESTION then becomes, “is the increase in exposure from P2P users who download something they haven’t heard before because it is free (on the off chance that it is good ) adding up to a sales for artists outside of the pop culture loop i.e. those who would supposedly benefit from the long tail economy? …..or is it just adding up to more lost sales for everyone, and musicians would be much better advised to start trying to make music for dog food commercials and accept that what little revenue there was out there for them selling their music has now been decimated by file sharing?
Having been on Napster a month or two before their closure, looking for b-sides, Japanese bonus tracks, albums not yet on CD and the occasional bootleg, I quickly realized after their closure by the law that the large number of smaller P2P networks weren’t nearly as well equipped with such “very deep cuts” as Napster was. All of a sudden, a rarity was more rare again than during the Napster days, whereas the “shallow cuts” were around in even higher concentrations when I had a look on Kazaa. So I’m not surprised by the outcome of the study at all.
It seemed to me that arrival of P2P only affected the availability of rarities, making them easier to find, whereas the “shallow cuts” a/k/a chart material was already everywhere before P2P.
Obviously, this study is not interested in rarities, because the current industrial business model is being paid for doing one and the same thing a huge number of times (which in this case is the distribution of a record). It’s common wisdom that the economical gain from a product is growing with the sales after you have played in the production costs. Therefore, the study and the industry in general, isn’t interested at all (just yet) in making easier available those records that are “very deep cuts” (used to be rarities), but in further decreasing production costs.
As the switch from Napster to several of its clones has shown, de-centralisation goes along with making scarce again the “deep cuts”, how low must production costs get to economically justify making available commercially a huge back catalogue? With all the ProToolery going on in home studios everywhere around the planet, it probably already is at an all time low.
I think the future isn’t so much in popular artists having huge hits, but in popular artists being prolific, putting out many different releases in shorter succession than before. (By the way, it’s no surprise that releasing an album only every 4 years is only good to create one-hit wonders.)
That may not be too easy a concept to communicate to a label CEO because these people are known to market to the taste of least common denominator, whereas the “deep cuts” cater to the taste of the largest common multiplicator.
This could lead to the creation of some very rich music, and not necessarily some very rich CEOs, too, but these trying times are the right times to try.