Chris Anderson's The Long Tail does something that only the best books do—uncovers a phenomenon that's undeniably going on and makes clear sense of it. Anderson, the Wired editor-in-chief who first wrote about the Long Tail concept in 2004, had two moments of genius: He visualized the demand for certain products as a "power curve," and he came up with a catchy phrase to go with his observation. Like most good ideas, the Long Tail attaches to your mind and gets stuck there. Everything you take in—cult blogs, alternative music, festival films—starts looking like the Long Tail in action. But that's also the problem. The Long Tail theory is so catchy it can overgrow its useful boundaries. Unfortunately, Anderson's book exacerbates this problem. When you put it down, there's one question you won't be able to answer: When, exactly, doesn't the Long Tail matter?
The graph below is the Long Tail in a nutshell.
This image accurately describes the demand for cultural products. In most entertainment industries (films, music, books, etc.) a few hits make most of the money, and demand drops off quickly thereafter. Demand, however, doesn't drop to zero. The products in the Long Tail are less popular in a mass sense, but still popular in a niche sense. What that means is that some businesses, like Amazon and Google, can make money not just on big hits, but by eating the Long Tail. They can live like a blue whale, growing fat by eating millions of tiny shrimp.
This insight goes only so far, but like many business books, The Long Tail commits the sin of overreaching. The tagline on the book's cover reads, "Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More," which is certainly wrong or at least exaggerated. Inside we learn about "the Long Tail of Everything." Anderson's book, unlike his original Wired article, threatens to turn a great theory of inventory economics into a bad theory of life and the universe. He writes that "there are now Long Tail markets practically everywhere you look," calling offshoring the "Long Tail of labor," and online universities "the Long Tail of education." He quotes approvingly an analysis that claims, improbably, that there's a "Long Tail of national security" in which al-Qaida is a "supercharged niche supplier." At times, the Long Tail becomes the proverbial theory hammer looking for nails to pound.
What are the Long Tail's limits? As a business model, it matters most 1) where the price of carrying additional inventory approaches zero and 2) where consumers have strong and heterogeneous preferences. When these two conditions are satisfied, a company can radically enlarge its inventory and make money raking in the niche demand. This is the lifeblood of a handful of products and companies, Apple's iTunes, Netflix, and Google among them, all of which are basically in the business of aggregating content. It doesn't cost much to add another song to iTunes—having 10,000 songs available costs about the same as having 1 million. Moreover, people's music preferences are intense—fans of Tchaikovsky aren't usually into Lordi.
But it's important to remember that many industries don't rely on the weird economics of information products. Take the oil industry, which Anderson doesn't discuss, but whose significance is obvious—compare Exxon's $371 billion in revenues in 2005 to Google's $6.1 billion. The Long Tail doesn't seem to tell us much about the future of the oil biz. It's not really clear how Exxon might benefit from expanding the types of gas it makes available at its service stations. It would cost Exxon a lot to install extra pumps, and few people have well-developed tastes for types of gasoline. Since it's not easy for Exxon to reduce its inventory costs, product diversification is expensive. There might be long lines in gasoline retail, but there's no Long Tail.
The Long Tail also sometimes doesn't work in its home category: the information-technology industries. The key issue is the question of standardization. Sometimes consumers want a diverse set of product offerings. But sometimes they prefer a standard or compatible product. Most of Anderson's examples are content firms, where product diversity is almost always a good thing. But in the information-transport industry, standardization is usually more important. Do people want 10 different types of (incompatible) Internet connections? Or just the fastest one they can get? How about 30 types of (incompatible) Ethernet cables?
What the book doesn't get at is the relationship between these standards-driven industries where the Long Tail doesn't matter, and the content industries where it does. There aren't Long Tails everywhere. Instead, for every diverse Long Tail there's a "Big Dog": a boring standardized industry that isn't sexy like Apple or Amazon but that delivers all that niche content you're hungry for. For example, there's the telecommunications side of the Internet, the backbone carriers that exist purely to deliver content. Their standardization makes accessing the Long Tail possible.
To his credit, Anderson briefly mentions the standardization problem. He also makes a valiant effort, near the end of the book, to show the Long Tail in action outside the entertainment industries, using eBay, KitchenAid, and a company called Salesforce.com. But, at their worst, these examples threaten to make the phrase Long Tail meaningless. Anderson says that eBay "is both the Long Tail of products and the Long Tail of merchants." But eBay is easy to understand without picking up The Long Tail: It lowers the transaction costs of buying and selling used goods, whether they're niche products or not. If you call that a Long Tail, then the word means nothing more than "make easier to buy." And then everything from the Yellow Pages, to paper money, to my real estate agent has suddenly grown a Long Tail.
The Long Tail isn't useful as a theory of everything. It is best and strongest when it helps us understand what's happening to our culture. It shows, graphically, the difference between the mass culture we've had, and the folk culture we're bringing back. That's an achievement worth celebrating, and it's why the Long Tail can leave us feeling like cavemen looking at a map of the world for the first time. But the book should come with a warning: There's more to this economy than chasing tail.
Tim Wu is a professor at Columbia Law School and co-author of Who Controls the Internet?
Posted Friday, July 21, 2006, at 6:19 AM ET
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I wish I could report that the debut single by Paris Hilton, "Stars Are Blind," is a dud. The fact is, I can't stop humming the damn thing. It's certainly a triumph of counterintuitive branding. Hilton spent time in the studio with producers like Scott Storch, a specialist in loud and nasty hip-hop club tracks, and it seemed a forgone conclusion that she would inaugurate her musical career with a sleazy pole-dance anthem. (The first track from her recording sessions to leak to the Internet was called "Screwed.") But "Stars Are Blind" is a sweet, sun-kissed love song with a snappy ska beat, and Hilton (with the aid, undoubtedly, of the Anteres Auto-Tune 4 Pitch Correcting Plug-In) puts it over well, cooing lyrics about her "heart and soul" in a reasonable impersonation of a human being with feelings. All in all, it's a surprisingly good start to Hilton's campaign to break into the pop diva game.
This will not be an easy task. Pop music is a high-stakes blood sport, and nowhere is the competition fiercer than among the women who crowd the upper reaches of the Top 40. In the first half of 2006, we've already seen a sold-out tour by Madonna; continued chart dominance by last year's comeback queen, Mariah Carey (whose own world tour launches later this month); fine albums by established stars Pink, Mary J. Blige, and Shakira; and strong showings by young up-and-comers—Rihanna, Ciara, Cassie—who, like all aspiring divas worth their salt, have conveniently disposed of their surnames. Two weeks ago, the No. 1 album belonged to Nelly Furtado, erstwhile earthy bohemian, who has refashioned her image in a bid for a place on the A-list. A week later, the top spot was claimed by India.Arie*, who now has the earthy-boho space all to herself. Seemingly the only major female stars sitting out the season are Britney Spears and Gwen Stefani, both on maternity leave, and Jennifer Lopez, who presumably is prowling the darkened corridors of a South Beach mansion, raving like Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard.
Things will really heat up over the next several weeks with the release of long-awaited albums by Janet Jackson, Beyoncé, Christina Aguilera, Jessica Simpson, and a couple of the second-tier stars, including the R&B singer Kelis. It's a veritable perfect storm of pop—never before has the public faced so concentrated an assault of melisma and décolletage—and it's bound to be bloody: In a market this glutted, someone's record is going to flop. But based on the slew of new songs already in heavy rotation on radio and MTV, we're in for some awfully good music, and all kinds of clever stratagems for besting the competition
Consider Furtado. On her first two CDs, she sang catchy songs spiced with the rustic sounds of her ancestral Portugal, but on the new Loose, she's embraced buzzing hip-hop beats and lots of saucy talk. Furtado is a fine singer-songwriter, but her slick, sexed-up new act is a bit of a stretch: There's a still a whiff of patchouli about her and she's inescapably cutesy, with delicate features and a chirping little voice. (Her debut hit, "I'm Like a Bird," was pretty spot-on.)
But the awkwardness is the point. Furtado is selling her good-girl-gone-bad transformation, and her slightly gauche rapping and dancing is its own charming style, setting her apart from a steely disco princess like Kelis. Her producer is the ingenious techno-hip-hop specialist Timbaland. He supplies a festive array of beats and synthesizer hooks and plays Furtado's foil in a string of duets, including the No. 1 hit "Promiscuous," which rolls out the new 2006-model Furtado with a great big postmodern wink. "I'm curious about you," Timbaland raps, "you seem so innocent."
While Furtado is milking her status as diva-pop's freshest face, Janet Jackson is strutting her veteran's bona fides. Her forthcoming CD is called 20 Years Old, a reference to her career-making Control, which came out two decades ago. Jackson has made some extraordinary records in her time and she commands one of pop's most loyal audiences. For this album, she's assembled an intergenerational production dream team, including her longtime collaborators Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis and her boyfriend, the prolific hitmaker Jermaine Dupri. But if Jackson wants to compete in 2006, she'll have to come up with something better than the first single, "Call on Me," a desultory duet with rapper Nelly. Respect for one's elders only goes so far.
In the absence of any better ideas, Jessica Simpson is leaning on two bankable commodities: her breakup with Nick Lachey, and Madonna's music. The title of Simpson's new single, "A Public Affair," alludes to her tabloid misadventures; on her Web site, she's pictured in a crowded nightclub, gazing vacantly into the middle distance: a single girl, lost in the maddening crowd. The song itself, though, is a fizzy delight, with a synthesizer refrain lifted straight out of Madonna's "Holiday." (Later, there's a snatch of "Ain't No Mountain High Enough.") Download it now, before the lawyers swoop in.
Beyoncé is also engaging in plagiarism of a sort: She's biting herself. Her new single is called "Déjà Vu," and sure enough, it's a retread of her big 2003 hit, "Crazy in Love," right down to the blaring horn fanfares and the guest rap by her beau, Jay-Z. It's not as thrilling as the earlier song; Beyoncé's singing is casually, breezily virtuoso, and the loping bass line is just this side of Muzak. It takes real confidence to launch your big new album with a single so supremely nonchalant—this is the sound of a woman who thinks, perhaps not unreasonably, she's won the game before it's started. Nice view from up there on Mt. Olympus.
At the other end of the cool-hot spectrum, there's Christina Aguilera's "Ain't No Other Man," which finds the singer belting and growling paeans to her guy above honking brass and a furious dance beat—a performance of stupendous speed and force that seems designed to frighten the daylights out everyone, especially Mariah Carey, with whom Aguilera has been trading insults in the press. Her album is called Back to Basics, and, no surprise, she's playing the retro-authenticity card—she's out to prove that she's the real musician here. The CD is filled with Broadway-style jazz ballads; she sashays through the "Ain't No Other Man" video in a 1940s outfit, looking like a very slutty Andrews Sister. She's planning a tour of jazz clubs (take that, Mariah!), and clearly hopes to cut into Norah Jones' audience of retro-infatuated boomers. But she hasn't forgotten the kids: Tucked alongside the "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" pastiches and saloon ballads is a thumping club track called "Still Dirrty."
The internecine diva battles make an engrossing spectator sport. But rivalry among these women should not obscure their larger collective victory—the widening gender gap at the top of the pops. Of course, there are chart-topping rappers and rockers, and even a couple of plain old mega-selling male pop stars. But marquee artists like Usher and Justin Timberlake seem small and niche next to Beyoncé or Shakira, whose huge voices and pretty faces dominate the mass-media dreamscape on the grandest scale. In the 21st century, the superstar pop singer—that heroic mantle once held by Sinatra and Elvis and Michael Jackson—has become almost exclusively women's work.
And for good reason. These days, the emotional range of a male performer is radically circumscribed: Rappers are slick trash-talkers and brutes, emo rockers are sensitive and aggrieved, R&B singers are lotharios. But pop's female superstars recognize no limits, playing all these roles and a dozen others, often in the course of a single torrid love song, all the while executing tricky dance steps with bared midriffs glistening beneath whirling strobe lights. (Now that's showbiz.) A hundred emo-rockers couldn't wring as much catharsis out of their self-pity as Mary J. Blige does, and the even the great Jay-Z, the biggest ego in a genre of egotists, sounds cowed in the presence of his indomitable girlfriend. In the current season, the ladies may steal some more thunder with the arrival of a figure whose malevolence rivals the most fearsome gangsta rapper's. She might not be able to sing or dance, but Paris Hilton offers diva-pop one thing it's lacked: an anti-hero.
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