Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine, popularized the long tail, a new, digitally-enabled business model, with an article on the subject and for a couple of years has spent given speeches and proselytized about the new era of digital economics. Anderson just doesn't hit the technologist circuit. He recently spoke at the Alternative Distribution Alliance conference in Philadelphia.

Now Anderson's book, The Long Tail, is available...and doing well enough to be currently ranked #78 at Amazon.com. (Today at Wired.com there's an adaptation from The Long Tail that's titled "The Rise and Fall of the Hit.")

John Cassidy reviewed the book for The New Yorker and gave it a luke warm grade. While he complements Anderson for taking an established model (power-law distribution) and presenting a "readily graspable picture," Cassidy points out some flaws and ommissions. Part of what's missing has to do with consumer behavior that distribution alone doesn't take into account.

"A widening of choices doesn’t necessarily lead to cultural fragmentation and a defection from mainstream fare; sometimes it has the opposite effect, as befuddled consumers congregate around the same things. To be sure, some curious individuals will rent Japanese anime and science documentaries from Netflix, but far more people will turn up for the fifth 'Harry Potter' film and 'Shrek 3,' because they’ll want to see the movies that everybody’s talking about. Big-time movie releases aren’t merely stories and images on a screen; they’re news events—a fact that Hollywood studio executives have long recognized. Sony’s 'The Da Vinci Code' was a good illustration."

And later:

"A widening of choices doesn’t necessarily lead to cultural fragmentation and a defection from mainstream fare; sometimes it has the opposite effect, as befuddled consumers congregate around the same things."

One phenemenon of digital distribution was the center of an article at The Times Online last week, and it appears to conflict with the niche-creating theory of the long tail: Songs stay on the UK singles chart longer than before digital downloads were taken into account. Some songs, like The Verve's "Bittersweet Symphony" and Oasis's "Wonderwall," never leave the chart. And longevity has been affected. The typical hit stays on the UK singles chart for five weeks, up from three and a half weeks before digital sales counted. That doesn't jibe with Anderson's theory. In the Wired article, Anderson writes that "the number of weeks the average best-selling novel remains at the top of the list has fallen by half over the past decade." Shouldn't there more, not less, turnover on the music charts?

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