Unsymposium 0.5

In this week’s symposium one of the questions asked was in a long tail society, would a hierarchy of recommendations occur and would that be bad. I think my reaction most aligned with Brian’s if my memory serves me correctly.

I don’t know that it particularly changes things in a negative way. If we think about it conceptually, in traditional distribution forms there was a dictatorial recommendation hierarchy where distributors and producers were essentially making their recommendations by which artists they chose to gamble on in producing and distributing their work. There have always been critics who, depending on their support base garner the power to recommend with more weight than your neighbour would. Through this niche interests have always persisted and minor players in the game’s recommendations have been heard by their specific audience so I would suspect things would improve rather than worsen in that the smaller players will have a greater chance at their voice being heard.