The Long Tail reading discussed the tail of the power law curve where all the ‘misses’ reside.

Anderson believes that ‘popular taste is an artefact of poor demand and supply matching’ and that people are forced to consume ‘manufactured pop’, blockbusters, and mainstream media due to lack of alternatives.

The ‘problem’ is that we live in a tangible world, and in the past media was distributed physically. This presented two restrictions. The first one was that distributors had to look to locals to meet quotas; a certain amount of locals had to be willing to watch a certain film or buy a CD, within specific time frames in order to cover the cost of carrying them. The retailers could not reach international audiences and therefore relied solely on the interest of those within, say, a 10 mile radius.

The second is that, physically, it is not possible to screen every single film, play an infinite range of tracks, or house all the CDs and DVD under one roof. Media was not readily accessible to be used whenever and wherever one felt inclined.

Even though those that are situated in the long tail may have been ‘misses’ at the time of release, or are no longer relevant to the masses, if they find consumers a few times a month it can amount to something substantial.

Anderson promotes the three rules to benefitting from the long tail. The first is to make everything available. Combining everything in the long tail and viewing it as one entity can place it on par or even outweigh the earnings from the hits. The second is to lower the prices of these misses and to ‘pull consumers down’ the tail. The less popular the content, the lower the price. This strategy can encourage consumers to keep buying more merely because of how cheap it is, and the cheap prices should be compensated by the volume of purchases. Finally, retailers must make recommendations and help consumers find less mainstream content, potentially awakening new interests and prompting market growth. It is precisely because these three requirements are met by sites like Amazon, that they are so popular.

The benefit of keeping the long tail alive is that it will nurture more diversity in society’s taste.

References:

Anderson, C 2004, The Long Tail Wired, Wired October, viewed 17 October 2014 <http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html>