The Register has an article on a study on the long tail that puts an additional chink or two in the armor of the popular digital distribution theory. Economist Will Page (of the MCPS-PRS Alliance), his colleague Gary Eggleton and Mblox founder Andrew Bud looked at tens of millions of transactions and came to conclusions that are odds with Chris Anderson's long tail teachings.

The transactions had a log-normal distribution, not the power law distribution common in long tail theory. The trio found a relatively concentrated head and a "rather poverty stricken tail."

Research by Anita Elberse, an associate professor at Harvard Business School, has similar findings about the concentration of hit titles and consumers' lack of interest in the obscure. "Light users have a disproportionately strong preference for the more popular offerings," she wrote in a reaction to Anderson's rebuttal to her study.

"Is the 'future of business' really selling more of less?" asked Page. "Absolutely not. If you had Top of the Pops now, you'd feature the Top 14, not Top 40."

The key thing about research that contradicts Anderson's theories is that they come to conclusions at odds with the business strategies he laid out in "The Long Tail." The issue is not about the shape of the tail or what constitutes the curve's short head. "The Long Tail" told us consumers were losing their taste for hits, and it argued that making available online more obscure titles would level the playing field. Between this study and the research of Professor Elberse, we have evidence that popular titles now represent a greater share of sales and merely making songs available online does not put an artist at an advantage.