The Wall Street Journal's Lee Gomes isn't buying the basic tenants of Chris Anderson's era-defining book The Long Tail, which is seen in some quarters as a guidebook for the digital music era. His latest piece about the book by the editor of Wired Magazine picks apart Anderson's arguments and shoots to bring down the "current popularity of Web utopian fantasies about the way sales of niche products can rival those of hits."

Though The Long Tail is heralded left and right as a defining book, Gomes points out many examples of how hits are still hits and consumers aren't giving any greater market power to small book publishers and record labels. One book publisher told him his company's sales to Amazon.com mimic its sales to brick-and-mortar stores. Netflix, he estimates, gets 30% of its rentals from just 0.8% of its titles. Indie songs accounted for 15% of Rhapsody streams, which is roughly the same as indies' share of the CD market. (That may not bode well for music recommendation services. There is a huge overestimate on the number of people who want to find new music. Most people want familiar music, not new music.)

Businesses, he continues, should be wary of expanding production in hopes of riding the long tail to greater sales. This makes perfect sense. To me, the long tail benefits aggregators and distributors, especially those who deal with digital goods, who have the scale to add titles at almost no incremental cost. The cost to a digital music store of adding one more song to the catalog is virtually zero. But what about content creators? The cost to create that song isn't as low as the cost of distribute -- and that's to say nothing about the cost of marketing. There are exceptions, such as if it's an old song that is seeing the digital world for the first time. (Even then there's a cost associated with converting from analog to digital and readying for sale.) For new songs the cost to bring to market is usually not as low. A distributor can afford to add songs and sell less of each, but creators shouldn't have the same goal.