(The above graph shows the unit sales of the 200th best-selling album in roughly four week intervals over June 2004 to June 2007.)

Whether or not the 200th best-selling album in the country is part of the long tail is up for discussion. I'll call it the middle tail.

We all know that the rationale behind the long tail says the hits will sell fewer units. When we think of hits, we generally think of the top ten or top 40 titles. Those are the cream of the crop.

The idea of the mid-level hit works well with the theory of the long tail. Mid-level hits sell in the 100,000 to 500,000 range and in the "new music industry" (the one that will have to make do without bigger album sales) those are healthy numbers.

When you look at the sales numbers for albums further down the chart, you see that even a mid-level hit is going to be harder to achieve. As we know, the biggest hits are selling sometimes half of what the top albums were selling three to five years ago. If digital distribution were merely shifting those sales further down the tail, album sales would be stable even though the hits are selling fewer units. Album sales, though, have dropped steadily over the years. If you think that decline is due only to fewer hits being sold, think again. Middle tail titles are not faring well.

To see the demise of the middle tail, one can look at the unit sales for the 200th best-selling album over the last three years. At this time in 2004, the 200th album was selling a bit over or a bit under 6,000 units. Two years ago, the 200th album was doing well over 5,000 units on a consistent basis. One year ago, a typical 200th album was doing about 4,500. This year, the 200th album often sells fewer than 4,000 units.

The downward-sloping trend line tells the story. A three-year decrease of 6,600 to 4,350 represents a compounded annual rate of decline of just over 13%. (I took those numbers from the trend line on the graph.) In other words, the middle tail's rate of decline looks to be higher than that of total album sales. (Total album sales are down 15% this year and dropped 5% and 9% in 2006 and 2005, respectively.)

If the hits are not selling well, and the middle tail titles are hurting as well, I would have to come to the conclusion that the sales at the far end of the tail are the only ones faring (relatively) well. Middle tail titles are struggling to reach mid-level hit status while lesser known and older catalog titles enjoy the benefits of digital and online distribution.

[music jobs] Wanted: A Software Engineering Manager who Loves Music;Boston, MA. more music jobs.