My Digest

On March 21, 2000, Jive Records released No Strings Attached, the much-anticipated second album from NSync. The album debuted strong. It sold 1.1 million copies its first day and 2.4 million in the first week, making it the fastest-selling album ever. It went on to top the charts for eight weeks, moving 10 million copies by the end of the year. The music industry had cracked the commercial code. With NSync, a pop-idol boy band fronted by the charismatic Justin Timberlake, Jive had perfected the elusive formula for making a hit. In retrospect it was so obvious: What worked for the Monkees could now be replicated on an industrial scale. It was all about looks and scripted personalities. The music itself, which was outsourced to a small army of professionals (there are 60 people credited with creating No Strings Attached), hardly mattered.

Labels were on a roll. Between 1990 and 2000, album sales had doubled, the fastest growth rate in the history of the industry. Half of the top-grossing 100 albums ever were sold during that decade.

But even as NSync was celebrating its huge launch, the ground was shifting. Total music sales fell during 2000, for only the second time in a decade. Over the next few years, even after the economy recovered, the music industry continued to suffer. Something fundamental had changed. Sales fell 2.5 percent in 2001, 6.8 percent in 2002, and just kept dropping. By the end of 2005 (down another 8.3 percent), album sales in the US had declined 20 percent from their 1999 peak. Twenty-one of the all-time top 100 albums were released in the five-year period between 1996 and 2000. The next five years produced only two – Norah Jones’ Come Away With Me and OutKast’s Speakerboxxx/The Love Below – ranking 79 and 91, respectively.

It’s altogether possible that NSync’s first-week record may never be broken. The band could go down in history not just for launching Timberlake but also for marking the peak of the hit bubble – the last bit of manufactured pop to use the 20th century’s fine-tuned marketing machine to its fullest before the gears were stripped and the wheels fell off.

Music itself hasn’t gone out of favor – just the opposite. There has never been a better time to be an artist or a fan, and there has never been more music made or listened to. But the traditional model of marketing and selling music no longer works. The big players in the distribution system – major record labels, retail giants – depend on huge, platinum hits. These days, though, there are not nearly enough of those to support the industry in the style to which it has become accustomed. We are witnessing the end of an era.

What caused a generation of the industry’s best customers – fans in their teens and twenties – to abandon the record store? The labels cried piracy: Napster and other online file-sharing networks, along with CD burning and trading, had given rise to an underground economy of stolen music. Of course, there’s something to that. Despite countless record-industry lawsuits, traffic on the peer-to-peer file-trading networks has continued to grow, and about 10 million users now share music files each day.

But technology didn’t just allow fans to sidestep the cash register. It also offered massive, unprecedented choice in terms of what they could hear. The average file-trading network has more songs than any music store – by a factor of more than 100. Music fans had the opportunity for limitless choice, and they took it. Today, listeners have not only stopped buying as many CDs, they’re also losing their taste for the blockbuster hits that used to bring throngs into record stores on release day. If they have to choose between a packaged act and something new, more and more people are opting for exploration.

Technology also gave consumers a new way to buy music. Rather than having to purchase an entire album to get a couple of good tracks, they can buy songs à la carte for 99 cents each. The online music industry is primarily a singles business, which depresses album sales further. Meanwhile, the music marketing machine has lost its power. When consumers were buying mainly from record stores, prominent in-store displays could drive tremendous demand, which is why the labels paid so much for them. But now most of the largest record store chains, from Tower Records to Sam Goody, are either in bankruptcy or emerging from it with greatly diminished clout. MTV doesn’t play much music anymore, and money-losing Spin magazine was just, well, spun off for a fire-sale sum.

When it comes to lost marketing power, nothing compares to the decline of rock radio. In 1993, Americans spent an average of 23 hours and 15 minutes per week tuned to a local station. As of summer 2005, that figure had dropped to 19 hours and 15 minutes. Time spent listening to the radio is now at a 12-year low, and rock music is among the formats suffering the most. Since 1998, the rock radio audience has dropped 26 percent. What’s killing rock radio? A perfect storm of competition. Start with the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which added more than 700 FM stations to the dial. This fragmented the market and depressed the economics of the incumbents. At the same time, the limits of ownership in each market were relaxed, which led to a nationwide rollup by Clear Channel and Infinity, whose operating efficiencies included bringing cookie-cutter playlists to once-distinctive local stations.

Then came the cell phone, which gave people something else to do during their commutes. And finally, the iPod, the ultimate personal radio. With 10,000 of your favorite songs on tap, who needs FM?

Practically every other sector of mass media and entertainment has witnessed a similar shift away from hits. Last year the Hollywood box office take fell 6 percent, continuing a decline in attendance per capita that started in 2001. The average top 25 blockbusters in any given year so far this decade have accounted for 5 percent less of the total box office gross than in the 1990s, even as they’ve cost 57 percent more to make.

Network TV ratings continue to fall as viewers scatter to cable channels; since 1985, the networks’ share of the TV audience has dropped from three-quarters to less than half. Ratings of the top TV shows have fallen dramatically since the 1960s. Today’s top-rated show, American Idol, is watched by just 18 percent of households. During the ’70s, American Idol wouldn’t even have made it to the top 10 with that kind of market share. Collectively, the hundreds of cable channels have now surpassed the networks in total viewership. No single one dominates.

Even television mega-events have lost their allure. In 2005, the World Series had its worst TV ratings of all time, 30 percent lower than the previous year. Ratings for the NBA playoffs last year reached record lows as well, down 43 percent from 2004. The ratings for the Grammy Awards in 2006 were down 31 percent from two years ago. And the Winter Olympics this year had their lowest ratings in 38 years, down 36 percent from the 2002 Games in Salt Lake City.

The trend holds for other media. Just 52 percent of Americans read a daily newspaper, compared with 81 percent four decades ago. Magazine newsstand sales are at their lowest level since 1970. And the number of weeks the average best-selling novel remains at the top of the list has fallen by half over the past decade.

Before you shed too many tears for the declining hit, remember that the era of the blockbuster was an anomaly. Before the Industrial Revolution, culture was mostly local – niches were geographic. The economy was agrarian, which distributed populations as broadly as the land. Distance divided people, giving rise to such diversity as regional accents and folk music, and the lack of rapid transportation and communications limited the mixing of cultures and the propagation of ideas and trends.

Influences varied from town to town, because the vehicles for carrying common culture were so limited. There was a reason the church was the main cultural unifier in Western Europe: It had the best distribution infrastructure and, thanks to Gutenberg’s press, the most mass-produced item (the Bible).

But in the early 19th century, modern industry and the growth of the railroad system led to a wave of urbanization and the rise of Europe’s great cities. These new hives of commerce and hubs of transportation mixed people like never before, creating a powerful engine of new culture. All it needed was mass media to give it flight.

In the mid- to late 19th century, several technologies emerged to do just that. First commercial printing technology improved and went mainstream. Then the new “wet plate” technique made photography popular. Finally, in 1877, Edison invented the phonograph. These developments led to the first great wave of pop culture, carried by such media as newspapers and magazines, novels, printed sheet music, records, and children’s books.

Along with news, newspapers spread word of the latest fashions from the urban style centers of New York, London, and Paris. Then, at the end of the 19th century, the moving picture gave the stars of stage a way to play many towns simultaneously and reach a much wider audience. Such potent carriers of culture had the effect of linking people across time and space, effectively synchronizing society. For the first time, it was a safe bet that not only did your neighbors read the same news you read in the morning and know the same music and movies, people across the country did too.

We are a gregarious species, highly influenced by what others do. And film was a medium that could not only show us what other people were doing but could endow it with such an intoxicating glamour that it was hard to resist. It was the dawn of the celebrity age.

The arrival of broadcast media – first radio, then TV – homogenized our adulation even more. The power of electromagnetic waves is that they spread in all directions essentially for free, a trait that made them as mind-blowing when they were introduced as the Internet would be some 60 years later. Broadcast emerged as the best vehicle for stardom ever.

From 1935 through the 1950s, the Golden Age of Radio led to the rise of national broadcast celebrities like Edward R. Murrow. Then television took over. By 1953, an astounding 72 percent of TV households watched I Love Lucy on Monday night.

This marked the peak of the so-called water-cooler effect, the buzz in the office around a shared cultural event. In the 1950s and 1960s, nearly everyone you worked with had seen Walter Cronkite read the news the previous night, and then tuned in to whatever top program followed: The Beverly Hillbillies, Gunsmoke, The Andy Griffith Show.

Throughout the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, even as more channels arrived, television continued to be the great American unifier. Nearly every year, TV advertising set a new record as companies paid more and more for prime time. And why not? Prime-time TV defined the mainstream.

Then came the great unraveling. A new medium arose, one even more powerful than broadcast, and its distribution economics favored infinite niches, not one-size-fits-all fare. The Internet’s peer-to-peer architecture is optimized for a symmetrical traffic load, with as many senders as receivers and data transmissions spread out over geography and time. In other words, it’s the opposite of broadcast.

It will take decades for our entertainment industries to internalize the lessons of this shift. If your goal is to make a hit movie – but not necessarily a good movie – you must follow the Hollywood rules. Do pay as much as you can for the biggest-name star you can lure to the project. Don’t try to be “too smart.” Do have a happy ending. Don’t kill off the star. If it’s an action movie (and, all things being equal, it probably should be an action movie), more effects are better than fewer. Certainly it’s possible to break these rules and still have a hit, but why take chances? After all, you’re investing a lot of money.

This hit-driven mindset has leaked out of Hollywood boardrooms and into our national culture. We have been conditioned by the economic demands of the hit machine to expect nothing less. We have internalized the bookkeeping of entertainment risk capital. This is why we follow weekend box office results like we do professional sports – to keep score and separate the clear winners from the seemingly obvious losers.

Fixated on star power, we follow the absurd lives of A-listers with attention that far exceeds our interest in their work. From superstar athletes to celebrity CEOs, we ascribe disproportionate attention to the very top of the heap. We have been trained, in other words, to see the world through a hit-colored lens.

If it’s not a hit, then it’s a miss. It has failed the economic test and, therefore, never should have been made. This Hollywood mindset is now how we allocate space on store shelves, fill time slots on television, and build radio playlists. It’s all about allocating scarce resources to the most “deserving,” which is to say, the most popular.

Ultimately, our response to hit culture is to reinforce hit culture. The world of shelf space is a zero-sum game: One product displaces another. Forced to choose, each link in the entertainment industry naturally selects the most popular products, giving them privileged placement. By putting our commercial weight behind the big winners, we amplify the gap between them and everything else. Economically, this is the same as saying, “If there can be only a few rich, let them at least be super-rich.”

But now the audience is turning to a distribution medium that doesn’t favor the hits alone. We are abandoning the tyranny of the top and becoming a niche nation again, defined not by our geography but by our interests. Instead of the weak connections of the office water cooler, we’re increasingly forming our own tribes, groups bound together more by affinity and shared interests than by broadcast schedules. These days our water coolers are increasingly virtual – there are many different ones, and the people who gather around them are self-selected.

The mass market is yielding to a million minimarkets. Hits will always be with us, but they have lost their monopoly. Blockbusters must now compete with an infinite number of niche offerings, which can be distributed just as easily. Justin Timberlake still makes albums, but today he has thousands of bands on MySpace as rivals. The hierarchy of attention has inverted – credibility now rises from below. MTV and Tower Records no longer decide who will win. You do.
Adapted from The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More, copyright © 2006 Chris Anderson, to be published by Hyperion in July. Chris Anderson (canderson@wiredmag.com) is Wired's editor in chief.

Issue 14.07 - July 2006

To score a ride sitting shotgun in a locomotive bound for Lhasa, it helps to like beer. I’ve just ditched my guide and wandered up to an unfinished train station at the edge of a dusty town high on the Tibetan plateau. Migrant workers, mostly Tibetans and Hui Muslims, wield sledgehammers, shovels, and drills, hurrying to finish work before midsummer. On July 1, China will celebrate the opening of the Qinghai-Tibet Railway, the highest rail line in the world. Its 1,200 miles of tracks traverse 342 miles of permafrost, much of it at altitudes exceeding 13,000 feet. The end of the line is Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, the restive province China has been trying to subdue for half a century.

As I pace the gravel platform next to the tracks, the locals keep looking my way and I feel awkward and conspicuous. Veiling my nerves behind sunglasses, I keep in mind that, despite their stares, the people here are somewhat familiar with foreign visitors. Western companies involved in the project – Nortel, General Electric, Quebec-based transportation giant Bombardier – sometimes send reps out here to check on progress.

A locomotive emerges from a pass between two mocha-colored mountains. For nearly two weeks, I’ve ping-ponged across China to learn about this train, and now may be my only chance to climb aboard. I find a guy on the platform who speaks half-decent English and explain my interest in hitching to Lhasa. He says the train is still off-limits – the Golmud-Lhasa line isn’t open yet – but I figure it can’t hurt to ask.

When the engine chugs to a halt, I walk to the very front and find the train’s two engineers. With the help of my new English-speaking friend, I declare my unbridled love for trains, show my passport as requested, and make a plea for a ride. The engineers look perplexed. People in these parts get rattled by out-of-the-ordinary occurrences – like an unannounced visit from an American trainiac asking for a ride to Lhasa. Anything related to Tibet can attract unwanted attention from authorities. The subject is a minefield of political, religious, and cultural tension. During my trip, I met foreign visitors who dismissed this concern as paranoia – “the old China,” they said. But the new China hasn’t yet taken hold in the wild west, especially when it comes to the T-word. A few questions here, a license plate number jotted down there, and six months later – after the foreigners have safely returned home – police or state security officials knock on someone’s door, or make a few quiet phone calls that lead to the loss of a job, or worse.

The engineers eventually make a decision of sorts. Because the train doesn’t leave for another five hours, they invite me to join them for lunch in town. “During the afternoon,” the English speaker says, “they’ll decide if you can ride the train.”

Twelve of us pile into a van and are soon seated in a grimy restaurant overlooking the main street, where Tibetans cruise around on colorfully painted motorcycles or play pool on tables set up outside. Wearing a navy-blue cap backward, one of the engineers – I’ll call him Lee – eats only a few bites of pig’s foot stew, tofu and beef, and lamb soup, but drinks cup after paper cup of Lhasa Beer. Every couple of minutes, one of the guys in our lunch party makes a toast, calling out, “Gan bei!” (“Dry glass!”) at which point everyone is obliged to drain their cup. Lee leads another chugging charge precisely when I need a respite from the drinking. The elevation here is well over 14,000 feet, after all. At this altitude, the effect of alcohol is magnified and could do who knows what when combined with the Diamox I’ve been popping. (The drug is the same stuff high-altitude mountaineers take to keep their brains from swelling.) But Lee wants me to drink. Holding up his cup of beer, he looks at me with glassy eyes. If I don’t gan bei, he says, I can’t ride the train. I grab my beer and knock it back, finishing before anyone.

Two hours later I’m sitting in the front of the locomotive, my nose no more than 20 inches from the windshield. Lee naps in preparation for his nighttime shift at the controls. The other driver flips open his cell phone to show me pictures of Lhasa’s Potala Palace, the spiritual epicenter of Tibetan Buddhism and once home to the exiled Dalai Lama. Straightening up in his chair, the engineer repositions his logbook on the console, makes a call on his walkie-talkie, and pulls a silver lever. The train engine lets out two jarringly loud hisses, then starts moving. Staring out at the shimmering tracks and concrete-reinforced embankment extending to the horizon, I can’t help but think of the senior Chinese scientist who confessed to me that the rail line he helped build might not be safe for long.

Ever since Tibet was incorporated into the People’s Republic of China in 1951, Chinese leaders have dreamed of a railway that would link the mountainous province with the rest of the country. Such a rail line would be a long-distance lasso drawing the people and resources of the far west closer to central control. It would also provide an efficient means of transporting Chinese settlers, troops, and weapons into Tibet and the disputed border with India.

In 1955, Mao Zedong sent a team to the Tibetan plateau to investigate the feasibility of track construction, but engineering obstacles, political upheavals, and funding shortfalls stalled the project. During a meeting with King Birendra of Nepal in 1973, Mao confided, “If the railway is not constructed, I can’t even fall asleep.”

The chairman died in 1976. Three years later, China completed construction on the 500-mile stretch from Xining, in western China, to Golmud, at the foot of the Kunlun Mountains. (Regular service began in 1984.) Not until 2001 did construction start on the much more difficult Golmud-Lhasa leg. But the newly rich, construction-mad Chinese government made up for lost time: In the past five years, 100,000 workers laid about 700 miles of track over some of the harshest geography on the planet. In its entirety, the Qinghai-Tibet railway stretches 1,215 miles, and most of the new portion runs over terrain with elevations between 13,000 and 16,000 feet – cruising altitude for some commuter flights.

It is the largest construction project built on permafrost since the Trans-Alaska Pipeline was completed in 1977. Nearly half of the new track crosses this permanently frozen subsoil, which can become unstable if it thaws. And if that’s not enough of an engineering challenge, the line also runs over a major fault in the Kunlun Mountains, where a magnitude 8.1 earthquake struck in 2001. Nevertheless, beginning this month, trial runs on the line will give people from Beijing, Shanghai, and other major Chinese cities direct rail access to Lhasa.

Proponents of the new railway say it will bring desperately needed economic development – especially tourism – to the hinterlands. Historic Tibet and far-western China lag behind the rest of the country in health and education, and rail connectivity promises to be a crucial tool for closing that gap. Critics say the $3.2 billion line is essentially a political and military gambit, strategically stitching Tibet into the fabric of the motherland and, by facilitating the westward migration of ethnic Chinese, accelerating the marginalization of Tibetan culture, religion, and anti-Beijing sentiment. But there’s at least one thing about this project that everyone agrees on: The Qinghai-Tibet is an engineering marvel.

Straddling the horrendously polluted Yellow River, Lanzhou is a gray amalgamation of chemical plants, oil refineries, billboards for antifreeze, and second-rate hotels and noodle shops. But this city in Gansu province is also home to China’s top permafrost research facility, the Cold and Arid Regions Environmental and Engineering Research Institute. This is where Wu Ziwang and his colleagues used their knowledge of permafrost physics to figure out how to build on the shifting, fragile ground of the vast Tibetan plateau, which is about the size of Alaska and Texas combined. Without Wu’s team, the Qinghai-Tibet would never have been completed.

Wu, 70, sets down his plastic cup of leafy tea and shuffles through stacks of papers. Taped to the wall of his office is a 3-foot-long elevation profile of the newly constructed railway, with the areas of permafrost most susceptible to thawing highlighted in red. If the permafrost under the train thaws too much, the tracks will slump or tilt, and bridges or other structures could crack. Trains would be forced to slow down or, in extreme cases, could derail.

Wu eventually finds a shiny red folder containing a letter of commendation from the Chinese Academy of Sciences: “For his prominent achievement in roadbed construction technology, and demonstrating engineering construction on permafrost along the Qinghai-Tibet Railway.” After 45 years studying permafrost, Wu has a kind of sixth sense for ice. “If I walk on the plateau, I know with about 90 percent certainty whether there’s permafrost below my feet,” he says.

After graduating from China University of Geosciences (Beijing) in 1961, Wu declined a more comfortable living in his home province of Fujian, northeast of Hong Kong, choosing Lanzhou instead. He wanted to do his part to help develop “backward” regions of western China. In the decades before construction survey crews arrived on the plateau, Wu and other geoscientists were assessing the effects of aboveground activity on permafrost and exploring construction techniques that would keep the ground cool.

But now he’s torn between dueling loyalties to state and science. On one hand, Wu the headstrong patriot is proud of the work Chinese researchers and engineers have done to make the Qinghai-Tibet line possible. He inserts nationalistic non sequiturs into our conversation, complaining about American corporate imperialism and claiming that the US routinely puts bugging devices on Chinese airplanes. His patience runs thin when asked about the railway’s stability, or when he reads online mutterings about the line’s potential weaknesses – statements written, Wu insists, by foreigners eager to see China falter.

Minutes later, however, Wu the scientist says he worries that the precarious condition of the permafrost beneath the railway is being overshadowed by the government’s post-construction celebrations. He points to a stack of copies of letters he has sent to the Ministry of Railways over the past few years. The general theme: a sometimes pleading, sometimes stern call for better permafrost monitoring and maintenance along the Qinghai-Tibet. “Every day I think about whether the railway will have problems in the next 10 to 20 years,” he says. The government has thus far only ignored or chafed at his warnings. “When I express concerns to the media,” Wu says, “the ministry and construction companies call to say, ‘Why did you say this? Everything is OK with the railway, so why did you say otherwise?’”

But he has good reason to worry. The ground under this railway is what could be called barely permanent permafrost. Unlike the terrain in Alaska and Siberia, where frigid temperatures typically keep permafrost well below the thawing point, the subsoil on the Tibetan plateau is just a few degrees from turning into a muddy, unstable mush.

So the biggest challenge for the railroad builders was keeping things cool. Construction work on permafrost can heat up the ground, as can the pounding of thousand-ton-plus trains – the added pressure is translated into heat energy. In some places the best solution was to build an elevated track: About 100 miles of the railway is raised, allowing cold air to flow below the track and cool the ground. The sight of these stretches of raised railway in the otherwise untouched vastness of the plateau is surreal – a frozen ribbon of concrete floating above the landscape and disappearing into the distance.

In areas where elevated track didn’t make sense or proved too expensive, sections of the railway are lined with vertical pipes that circulate liquid nitrogen. In other places, hollow concrete pipes beneath the tracks create a reverse-insulating effect. Metal sun shades were also placed in a few south-facing locations to reduce warming from the sun. (Wu says the shades are mostly experimental and that research into their efficacy is ongoing.) Another experimental cooling strategy involved building track foundations with stones of various sizes. When piled together, they create pockets that retain cool air.

But all the engineering in China can’t halt global climate change. “I’m not worried about the construction now,” Wu says. “I’m worried about money for maintenance in the coming 10 to 20 years.” After that, Wu believes, technology will catch up and provide solutions to structural challenges posed by global warming. But by sprinting to build its way into Tibet, did Beijing buy a railroad that could fail within a decade?

What happens, I ask, if temperatures on the plateau increase by 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2021? Assuming there’s no improved monitoring or additional construction to the railway, Wu says that “several hundred kilometers” of track could bend out of shape. “In my dreams,” he adds, “I see trains running off the tracks.”

About 1,000 miles from the railway’s starting point, on the Yellow Sea city of Qingdao, past rank after rank of new apartment complexes, Amir Levin walks through a cavernous factory. At 786,000 square feet, it’s almost as big as 14 football fields. “By China standards, this is small,” Levin says. A tall, Israeli-born Canadian with a dozen parallel wrinkles in his brow, Levin is general manager of Bombardier Sifang Power Transportation, a joint venture between three entities: a Chinese government-owned company, Power Corporation of Canada, and Bombardier Transportation, a Canadian train manufacturer. The factory is building 224 passenger cars specially designed to handle the trip to the roof of the world. Levin says doing business with Beijing is bad for one’s blood pressure. “When China orders, it’s for high quantity in a short time.” (This year alone, the Chinese government plans to spend $20 billion on railway projects nationwide.) BSP received the contract to build the souped-up passenger cars for the Qinghai-Tibet in 2005; the joint venture had just 10 months to deliver the first of these 70-ton cars, each of which includes extra lightning-protective structures, UV-resistant coatings, enclosed underbellies to protect wiring from snowstorms and sandstorms, ecofriendly wastewater storage measures, and an oxygen enrichment system.

Providing passengers with enough oxygen was one of the biggest technology challenges BSP faced. The thin air on the Tibetan plateau contains fewer O2 molecules than the air at sea level. Along much of the train’s route, the altitude is so high and the air so thin that a breath delivers 35 to 40 percent less oxygen to the lungs than at low elevation. People who are not acclimated to high altitudes increase their breathing rate, but that isn’t always enough to bring blood oxygen levels up to normal. The result can be labored breathing, headaches, and, occasionally, potentially fatal conditions in which the lungs or brain fill with fluid.

So BSP is jacking up the concentration of oxygen circulating in the train cabins. Early media reports described the new cabins as pressurized, but Levin says no one at BSP or the government railroad ministry was ever serious about building fully pressurized cars. Doing so would be prohibitively expensive and impractical; the cars would need to be repressurized every time the train stopped to let passengers on or off.

Instead, generators on the trains pull in outside air and separate the oxygen. Nitrogen and other gasses are released back into the atmosphere, while the concentrated oxygen, mixed with some outside air, is pumped throughout the train. When passengers cross the 16,640-foot Tanggula Pass – the line’s highest elevation point, about 1,000 feet lower than Mount Everest’s main base camp – the system will provide air that is 23 percent O2 (normal air is 21 percent oxygen). Passengers will feel like they’re at only about 10,000 feet. The 2 percent improvement may sound small, but it can mean the difference between riding in comfort and gasping for air. Cranking the oxygen up too high, though, could be more dangerous than keeping it too low: At a concentration of more then 28 percent, the air could become flammable.

Every passenger will also be able to self-administer oxygen whenever they need to. Woozy travelers can plug the hose of their “individual diffuser” into an outlet anywhere on the train – under every seat, next to every sleeper, in the dining car – and breathe from an air supply that is 40 percent oxygen. None of this is dangerous for healthy people – you simply feel a bit more alert – but passengers with respiratory disorders like emphysema will have to be careful: The extra O2 can trick the brain into shutting off the breathing function altogether.

All of which is to say, these trains get way up there, and even with supplemental oxygen, many passengers arriving in Lhasa can expect a headache or three.

The final 150 miles of the Qinghai-Tibet weave between mountain ranges, through wetlands, and over grassy expanses dotted with grazing sheep and yaks. Occasionally, the train passes groups of three or four Tibetans stringing barbed wire on the new concrete posts that line the railway path. At one point I spot a stoic-looking shepherd taking a break from his windy walk to stare at the machine roaring by. I’m too far away and moving too fast for him to see me, yet I imagine our eyes meeting, and him thinking: What the hell are you doing here?

At dusk, Lee downs a quick dinner of chicken wings, dried lamb strips, and mandarin oranges, then lights up a cigarette. When we use the last of the water from the electric hot pot, he gets up from his seat at the controls to open a large plastic drum and proceeds to refill the pot, spilling water all over the floor of the cab in the process. His calm suggests the train can manage on autopilot while he tends to our tea-drinking needs.

During the night, as the train pulls into a station still a few hours from Lhasa, Lee motions for me to duck. There’s another train parked in front of us, facing the opposite way, and Lee doesn’t want the engineers in that locomotive to see his unsanctioned hitchhiker. Head resting on my forearms, I close my eyes and listen to the hum of the engines. In a few hours, I will be standing in the plaza across the street from the Potala Palace, where an angular, brazen monument built in 2001 by the Chinese government commemorates “the peaceful liberation of Tibet.”

As we approach Lhasa, the tracks cut downward across steep hills and through a few perfectly elliptical tunnels. The locomotive’s headlight illuminates one precarious-looking curve, and I recall how, in the 1860s, Chinese laborers in the US were instrumental in the construction of the transcontinental railroad, especially its passage over the then-seemingly impassable Sierra Nevada mountains.

You can’t stop this train, one researcher told me a few weeks ago. He meant the Qinghai-Tibet, but he might have been talking about globalization. Inexorably, it is reaching remote places like Lhasa. This railroad could, and likely will, have negative effects on traditional Tibetan culture. But it will also bring the benefits of modern life to more people, and maybe that’s a good thing. Either way, the train is coming and, unless thawing permafrost throws it wildly off course, more tracks are sure to follow. In the coming years, two new lines linking Lhasa with other, more remote parts of Tibet are expected to open. And government planners have already asked Wu what it would take to construct a superhighway to Lhasa.
David Wolman (david@david-wolman.com) wrote about genetically engineered grass grass in issue 14.04.

Issue 14.07 - July 2006

In 1988, a British mountain climber named Joe Simpson wrote a book called Touching the Void, a harrowing account of near death in the Peruvian Andes. It got good reviews but, only a modest success, it was soon forgotten. Then, a decade later, a strange thing happened. Jon Krakauer wrote Into Thin Air, another book about a mountain-climbing tragedy, which became a publishing sensation. Suddenly Touching the Void started to sell again.

Random House rushed out a new edition to keep up with demand. Booksellers began to promote it next to their Into Thin Air displays, and sales rose further. A revised paperback edition, which came out in January, spent 14 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. That same month, IFC Films released a docudrama of the story to critical acclaim. Now Touching the Void outsells Into Thin Air more than two to one.

What happened? In short, Amazon.com recommendations. The online bookseller's software noted patterns in buying behavior and suggested that readers who liked Into Thin Air would also like Touching the Void. People took the suggestion, agreed wholeheartedly, wrote rhapsodic reviews. More sales, more algorithm-fueled recommendations, and the positive feedback loop kicked in.

Particularly notable is that when Krakauer's book hit shelves, Simpson's was nearly out of print. A few years ago, readers of Krakauer would never even have learned about Simpson's book - and if they had, they wouldn't have been able to find it. Amazon changed that. It created the Touching the Void phenomenon by combining infinite shelf space with real-time information about buying trends and public opinion. The result: rising demand for an obscure book.

This is not just a virtue of online booksellers; it is an example of an entirely new economic model for the media and entertainment industries, one that is just beginning to show its power. Unlimited selection is revealing truths about what consumers want and how they want to get it in service after service, from DVDs at Netflix to music videos on Yahoo! Launch to songs in the iTunes Music Store and Rhapsody. People are going deep into the catalog, down the long, long list of available titles, far past what's available at Blockbuster Video, Tower Records, and Barnes & Noble. And the more they find, the more they like. As they wander further from the beaten path, they discover their taste is not as mainstream as they thought (or as they had been led to believe by marketing, a lack of alternatives, and a hit-driven culture).

An analysis of the sales data and trends from these services and others like them shows that the emerging digital entertainment economy is going to be radically different from today's mass market. If the 20th- century entertainment industry was about hits, the 21st will be equally about misses.

For too long we've been suffering the tyranny of lowest-common-denominator fare, subjected to brain-dead summer blockbusters and manufactured pop. Why? Economics. Many of our assumptions about popular taste are actually artifacts of poor supply-and-demand matching - a market response to inefficient distribution.

The main problem, if that's the word, is that we live in the physical world and, until recently, most of our entertainment media did, too. But that world puts two dramatic limitations on our entertainment.

The first is the need to find local audiences. An average movie theater will not show a film unless it can attract at least 1,500 people over a two-week run; that's essentially the rent for a screen. An average record store needs to sell at least two copies of a CD per year to make it worth carrying; that's the rent for a half inch of shelf space. And so on for DVD rental shops, videogame stores, booksellers, and newsstands.

In each case, retailers will carry only content that can generate sufficient demand to earn its keep. But each can pull only from a limited local population - perhaps a 10-mile radius for a typical movie theater, less than that for music and bookstores, and even less (just a mile or two) for video rental shops. It's not enough for a great documentary to have a potential national audience of half a million; what matters is how many it has in the northern part of Rockville, Maryland, and among the mall shoppers of Walnut Creek, California.

There is plenty of great entertainment with potentially large, even rapturous, national audiences that cannot clear that bar. For instance, The Triplets of Belleville, a critically acclaimed film that was nominated for the best animated feature Oscar this year, opened on just six screens nationwide. An even more striking example is the plight of Bollywood in America. Each year, India's film industry puts out more than 800 feature films. There are an estimated 1.7 million Indians in the US. Yet the top-rated (according to Amazon's Internet Movie Database) Hindi-language film, Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India, opened on just two screens, and it was one of only a handful of Indian films to get any US distribution at all. In the tyranny of physical space, an audience too thinly spread is the same as no audience at all.

The other constraint of the physical world is physics itself. The radio spectrum can carry only so many stations, and a coaxial cable so many TV channels. And, of course, there are only 24 hours a day of programming. The curse of broadcast technologies is that they are profligate users of limited resources. The result is yet another instance of having to aggregate large audiences in one geographic area - another high bar, above which only a fraction of potential content rises.

The past century of entertainment has offered an easy solution to these constraints. Hits fill theaters, fly off shelves, and keep listeners and viewers from touching their dials and remotes. Nothing wrong with that; indeed, sociologists will tell you that hits are hardwired into human psychology, the combinatorial effect of conformity and word of mouth. And to be sure, a healthy share of hits earn their place: Great songs, movies, and books attract big, broad audiences.

But most of us want more than just hits. Everyone's taste departs from the mainstream somewhere, and the more we explore alternatives, the more we're drawn to them. Unfortunately, in recent decades such alternatives have been pushed to the fringes by pumped-up marketing vehicles built to order by industries that desperately need them.

Hit-driven economics is a creation of an age without enough room to carry everything for everybody. Not enough shelf space for all the CDs, DVDs, and games produced. Not enough screens to show all the available movies. Not enough channels to broadcast all the TV programs, not enough radio waves to play all the music created, and not enough hours in the day to squeeze everything out through either of those sets of slots.

This is the world of scarcity. Now, with online distribution and retail, we are entering a world of abundance. And the differences are profound.

To see how, meet Robbie Vann-Adib�, the CEO of Ecast, a digital jukebox company whose barroom players offer more than 150,000 tracks - and some surprising usage statistics. He hints at them with a question that visitors invariably get wrong: "What percentage of the top 10,000 titles in any online media store (Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, or any other) will rent or sell at least once a month?"

Most people guess 20 percent, and for good reason: We've been trained to think that way. The 80-20 rule, also known as Pareto's principle (after Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian economist who devised the concept in 1906), is all around us. Only 20 percent of major studio films will be hits. Same for TV shows, games, and mass-market books - 20 percent all. The odds are even worse for major-label CDs, where fewer than 10 percent are profitable, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.

But the right answer, says Vann-Adib�, is 99 percent. There is demand for nearly every one of those top 10,000 tracks. He sees it in his own jukebox statistics; each month, thousands of people put in their dollars for songs that no traditional jukebox anywhere has ever carried.

People get Vann-Adib�'s question wrong because the answer is counterintuitive in two ways. The first is we forget that the 20 percent rule in the entertainment industry is about hits, not sales of any sort. We're stuck in a hit-driven mindset - we think that if something isn't a hit, it won't make money and so won't return the cost of its production. We assume, in other words, that only hits deserve to exist. But Vann-Adib�, like executives at iTunes, Amazon, and Netflix, has discovered that the "misses" usually make money, too. And because there are so many more of them, that money can add up quickly to a huge new market.

With no shelf space to pay for and, in the case of purely digital services like iTunes, no manufacturing costs and hardly any distribution fees, a miss sold is just another sale, with the same margins as a hit. A hit and a miss are on equal economic footing, both just entries in a database called up on demand, both equally worthy of being carried. Suddenly, popularity no longer has a monopoly on profitability.

The second reason for the wrong answer is that the industry has a poor sense of what people want. Indeed, we have a poor sense of what we want. We assume, for instance, that there is little demand for the stuff that isn't carried by Wal-Mart and other major retailers; if people wanted it, surely it would be sold. The rest, the bottom 80 percent, must be subcommercial at best.

But as egalitarian as Wal-Mart may seem, it is actually extraordinarily elitist. Wal-Mart must sell at least 100,000 copies of a CD to cover its retail overhead and make a sufficient profit; less than 1 percent of CDs do that kind of volume. What about the 60,000 people who would like to buy the latest Fountains of Wayne or Crystal Method album, or any other nonmainstream fare? They have to go somewhere else. Bookstores, the megaplex, radio, and network TV can be equally demanding. We equate mass market with quality and demand, when in fact it often just represents familiarity, savvy advertising, and broad if somewhat shallow appeal. What do we really want? We're only just discovering, but it clearly starts with more.

To get a sense of our true taste, unfiltered by the economics of scarcity, look at Rhapsody, a subscription-based streaming music service (owned by RealNetworks) that currently offers more than 735,000 tracks.

Chart Rhapsody's monthly statistics and you get a "power law" demand curve that looks much like any record store's, with huge appeal for the top tracks, tailing off quickly for less popular ones. But a really interesting thing happens once you dig below the top 40,000 tracks, which is about the amount of the fluid inventory (the albums carried that will eventually be sold) of the average real-world record store. Here, the Wal-Marts of the world go to zero - either they don't carry any more CDs, or the few potential local takers for such fringy fare never find it or never even enter the store.

The Rhapsody demand, however, keeps going. Not only is every one of Rhapsody's top 100,000 tracks streamed at least once each month, the same is true for its top 200,000, top 300,000, and top 400,000. As fast as Rhapsody adds tracks to its library, those songs find an audience, even if it's just a few people a month, somewhere in the country.

This is the Long Tail.

You can find everything out there on the Long Tail. There's the back catalog, older albums still fondly remembered by longtime fans or rediscovered by new ones. There are live tracks, B-sides, remixes, even (gasp) covers. There are niches by the thousands, genre within genre within genre: Imagine an entire Tower Records devoted to '80s hair bands or ambient dub. There are foreign bands, once priced out of reach in the Import aisle, and obscure bands on even more obscure labels, many of which don't have the distribution clout to get into Tower at all.

Oh sure, there's also a lot of crap. But there's a lot of crap hiding between the radio tracks on hit albums, too. People have to skip over it on CDs, but they can more easily avoid it online, since the collaborative filters typically won't steer you to it. Unlike the CD, where each crap track costs perhaps one-twelfth of a $15 album price, online it just sits harmlessly on some server, ignored in a market that sells by the song and evaluates tracks on their own merit.

What's really amazing about the Long Tail is the sheer size of it. Combine enough nonhits on the Long Tail and you've got a market bigger than the hits. Take books: The average Barnes & Noble carries 130,000 titles. Yet more than half of Amazon's book sales come from outside its top 130,000 titles. Consider the implication: If the Amazon statistics are any guide, the market for books that are not even sold in the average bookstore is larger than the market for those that are (see "Anatomy of the Long Tail"). In other words, the potential book market may be twice as big as it appears to be, if only we can get over the economics of scarcity. Venture capitalist and former music industry consultant Kevin Laws puts it this way: "The biggest money is in the smallest sales."

The same is true for all other aspects of the entertainment business, to one degree or another. Just compare online and offline businesses: The average Blockbuster carries fewer than 3,000 DVDs. Yet a fifth of Netflix rentals are outside its top 3,000 titles. Rhapsody streams more songs each month beyond its top 10,000 than it does its top 10,000. In each case, the market that lies outside the reach of the physical retailer is big and getting bigger.

When you think about it, most successful businesses on the Internet are about aggregating the Long Tail in one way or another. Google, for instance, makes most of its money off small advertisers (the long tail of advertising), and eBay is mostly tail as well - niche and one-off products. By overcoming the limitations of geography and scale, just as Rhapsody and Amazon have, Google and eBay have discovered new markets and expanded existing ones.

This is the power of the Long Tail. The companies at the vanguard of it are showing the way with three big lessons. Call them the new rules for the new entertainment economy.

Rule 1: Make everything available

If you love documentaries, Blockbuster is not for you. Nor is any other video store - there are too many documentaries, and they sell too poorly to justify stocking more than a few dozen of them on physical shelves. Instead, you'll want to join Netflix, which offers more than a thousand documentaries - because it can. Such profligacy is giving a boost to the documentary business; last year, Netflix accounted for half of all US rental revenue for Capturing the Friedmans, a documentary about a family destroyed by allegations of pedophilia.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, who's something of a documentary buff, took this newfound clout to PBS, which had produced Daughter From Danang, a documentary about the children of US soldiers and Vietnamese women. In 2002, the film was nominated for an Oscar and was named best documentary at Sundance, but PBS had no plans to release it on DVD. Hastings offered to handle the manufacturing and distribution if PBS would make it available as a Netflix exclusive. Now Daughter From Danang consistently ranks in the top 15 on Netflix documentary charts. That amounts to a market of tens of thousands of documentary renters that did not otherwise exist.

There are any number of equally attractive genres and subgenres neglected by the traditional DVD channels: foreign films, anime, independent movies, British television dramas, old American TV sitcoms. These underserved markets make up a big chunk of Netflix rentals. Bollywood alone accounts for nearly 100,000 rentals each month. The availability of offbeat content drives new customers to Netflix - and anything that cuts the cost of customer acquisition is gold for a subscription business. Thus the company's first lesson: Embrace niches.

Netflix has made a good business out of what's unprofitable fare in movie theaters and video rental shops because it can aggregate dispersed audiences. It doesn't matter if the several thousand people who rent Doctor Who episodes each month are in one city or spread, one per town, across the country - the economics are the same to Netflix. It has, in short, broken the tyranny of physical space. What matters is not where customers are, or even how many of them are seeking a particular title, but only that some number of them exist, anywhere.

As a result, almost anything is worth offering on the off chance it will find a buyer. This is the opposite of the way the entertainment industry now thinks. Today, the decision about whether or when to release an old film on DVD is based on estimates of demand, availability of extras such as commentary and additional material, and marketing opportunities such as anniversaries, awards, and generational windows (Disney briefly rereleases its classics every 10 years or so as a new wave of kids come of age). It's a high bar, which is why only a fraction of movies ever made are available on DVD.

That model may make sense for the true classics, but it's way too much fuss for everything else. The Long Tail approach, by contrast, is to simply dump huge chunks of the archive onto bare-bones DVDs, without any extras or marketing. Call it the Silver Series and charge half the price. Same for independent films. This year, nearly 6,000 movies were submitted to the Sundance Film Festival. Of those, 255 were accepted, and just two dozen have been picked up for distribution; to see the others, you had to be there. Why not release all 255 on DVD each year as part of a discount Sundance Series?In a Long Tail economy, it's more expensive to evaluate than to release. Just do it!

The same is true for the music industry. It should be securing the rights to release all the titles in all the back catalogs as quickly as it can - thoughtlessly, automatically, and at industrial scale. (This is one of those rare moments where the world needs more lawyers, not fewer.) So too for videogames. Retro gaming, including simulators of classic game consoles that run on modern PCs, is a growing phenomenon driven by the nostalgia of the first joystick generation. Game publishers could release every title as a 99-cent download three years after its release - no support, no guarantees, no packaging.

All this, of course, applies equally to books. Already, we're seeing a blurring of the line between in and out of print. Amazon and other networks of used booksellers have made it almost as easy to find and buy a second-hand book as it is a new one. By divorcing bookselling from geography, these networks create a liquid market at low volume, dramatically increasing both their own business and the overall demand for used books. Combine that with the rapidly dropping costs of print-on-demand technologies and it's clear why any book should always be available. Indeed, it is a fair bet that children today will grow up never knowing the meaning of out of print.

Rule 2: Cut the price in half. Now lower it.

Thanks to the success of Apple's iTunes, we now have a standard price for a downloaded track: 99 cents. But is it the right one?

Ask the labels and they'll tell you it's too low: Even though 99 cents per track works out to about the same price as a CD, most consumers just buy a track or two from an album online, rather than the full CD. In effect, online music has seen a return to the singles-driven business of the 1950s. So from a label perspective, consumers should pay more for the privilege of purchasing � la carte to compensate for the lost album revenue.

Ask consumers, on the other hand, and they'll tell you that 99 cents is too high. It is, for starters, 99 cents more than Kazaa. But piracy aside, 99 cents violates our innate sense of economic justice: If it clearly costs less for a record label to deliver a song online, with no packaging, manufacturing, distribution, or shelf space overheads, why shouldn't the price be less, too?

Surprisingly enough, there's been little good economic analysis on what the right price for online music should be. The main reason for this is that pricing isn't set by the market today but by the record label demi-cartel. Record companies charge a wholesale price of around 65 cents per track, leaving little room for price experimentation by the retailers.

That wholesale price is set to roughly match the price of CDs, to avoid dreaded "channel conflict." The labels fear that if they price online music lower, their CD retailers (still the vast majority of the business) will revolt or, more likely, go out of business even more quickly than they already are. In either case, it would be a serious disruption of the status quo, which terrifies the already spooked record companies. No wonder they're doing price calculations with an eye on the downsides in their traditional CD business rather than the upside in their new online business.

But what if the record labels stopped playing defense? A brave new look at the economics of music would calculate what it really costs to simply put a song on an iTunes server and adjust pricing accordingly. The results are surprising.

Take away the unnecessary costs of the retail channel - CD manufacturing, distribution, and retail overheads. That leaves the costs of finding, making, and marketing music. Keep them as they are, to ensure that the people on the creative and label side of the business make as much as they currently do. For a popular album that sells 300,000 copies, the creative costs work out to about $7.50 per disc, or around 60 cents a track. Add to that the actual cost of delivering music online, which is mostly the cost of building and maintaining the online service rather than the negligible storage and bandwidth costs. Current price tag: around 17 cents a track. By this calculation, hit music is overpriced by 25 percent online - it should cost just 79 cents a track, reflecting the savings of digital delivery.

Putting channel conflict aside for the moment, if the incremental cost of making content that was originally produced for physical distribution available online is low, the price should be, too. Price according to digital costs, not physical ones.

All this good news for consumers doesn't have to hurt the industry. When you lower prices, people tend to buy more. Last year, Rhapsody did an experiment in elastic demand that suggested it could be a lot more. For a brief period, the service offered tracks at 99 cents, 79 cents, and 49 cents. Although the 49-cent tracks were only half the price of the 99-cent tracks, Rhapsody sold three times as many of them.

Since the record companies still charged 65 cents a track - and Rhapsody paid another 8 cents per track to the copyright-holding publishers - Rhapsody lost money on that experiment (but, as the old joke goes, made it up in volume). Yet much of the content on the Long Tail is older material that has already made back its money (or been written off for failing to do so): music from bands that had little record company investment and was thus cheap to make, or live recordings, remixes, and other material that came at low cost.

Such "misses" cost less to make available than hits, so why not charge even less for them? Imagine if prices declined the further you went down the Tail, with popularity (the market) effectively dictating pricing. All it would take is for the labels to lower the wholesale price for the vast majority of their content not in heavy rotation; even a two- or three-tiered pricing structure could work wonders. And because so much of that content is not available in record stores, the risk of channel conflict is greatly diminished. The lesson: Pull consumers down the tail with lower prices.

How low should the labels go? The answer comes by examining the psychology of the music consumer. The choice facing fans is not how many songs to buy from iTunes and Rhapsody, but how many songs to buy rather than download for free from Kazaa and other peer-to-peer networks. Intuitively, consumers know that free music is not really free: Aside from any legal risks, it's a time-consuming hassle to build a collection that way. Labeling is inconsistent, quality varies, and an estimated 30 percent of tracks are defective in one way or another. As Steve Jobs put it at the iTunes Music Store launch, you may save a little money downloading from Kazaa, but "you're working for under minimum wage." And what's true for music is doubly true for movies and games, where the quality of pirated products can be even more dismal, viruses are a risk, and downloads take so much longer.

So free has a cost: the psychological value of convenience. This is the "not worth it" moment where the wallet opens. The exact amount is an impossible calculus involving the bank balance of the average college student multiplied by their available free time. But imagine that for music, at least, it's around 20 cents a track. That, in effect, is the dividing line between the commercial world of the Long Tail and the underground. Both worlds will continue to exist in parallel, but it's crucial for Long Tail thinkers to exploit the opportunities between 20 and 99 cents to maximize their share. By offering fair pricing, ease of use, and consistent quality, you can compete with free.

Perhaps the best way to do that is to stop charging for individual tracks at all. Danny Stein, whose private equity firm owns eMusic, thinks the future of the business is to move away from the ownership model entirely. With ubiquitous broadband, both wired and wireless, more consumers will turn to the celestial jukebox of music services that offer every track ever made, playable on demand. Some of those tracks will be free to listeners and advertising-supported, like radio. Others, like eMusic and Rhapsody, will be subscription services. Today, digital music economics are dominated by the iPod, with its notion of a paid-up library of personal tracks. But as the networks improve, the comparative economic advantages of unlimited streamed music, either financed by advertising or a flat fee (infinite choice for $9.99 a month), may shift the market that way. And drive another nail in the coffin of the retail music model.

Rule 3: Help me find it

In 1997, an entrepreneur named Michael Robertson started what looked like a classic Long Tail business. Called MP3.com, it let anyone upload music files that would be available to all. The idea was the service would bypass the record labels, allowing artists to connect directly to listeners. MP3.com would make its money in fees paid by bands to have their music promoted on the site. The tyranny of the labels would be broken, and a thousand flowers would bloom.

Putting aside the fact that many people actually used the service to illegally upload and share commercial tracks, leading the labels to sue MP3.com, the model failed at its intended purpose, too. Struggling bands did not, as a rule, find new audiences, and independent music was not transformed. Indeed, MP3.com got a reputation for being exactly what it was: an undifferentiated mass of mostly bad music that deserved its obscurity.

The problem with MP3.com was that it was only Long Tail. It didn't have license agreements with the labels to offer mainstream fare or much popular commercial music at all. Therefore, there was no familiar point of entry for consumers, no known quantity from which further exploring could begin.

Offering only hits is no better. Think of the struggling video-on-demand services of the cable companies. Or think of Movielink, the feeble video download service run by the studios. Due to overcontrolling providers and high costs, they suffer from limited content: in most cases just a few hundred recent releases. There's not enough choice to change consumer behavior, to become a real force in the entertainment economy.

By contrast, the success of Netflix, Amazon, and the commercial music services shows that you need both ends of the curve. Their huge libraries of less-mainstream fare set them apart, but hits still matter in attracting consumers in the first place. Great Long Tail businesses can then guide consumers further afield by following the contours of their likes and dislikes, easing their exploration of the unknown.

For instance, the front screen of Rhapsody features Britney Spears, unsurprisingly. Next to the listings of her work is a box of "similar artists." Among them is Pink. If you click on that and are pleased with what you hear, you may do the same for Pink's similar artists, which include No Doubt. And on No Doubt's page, the list includes a few "followers" and "influencers," the last of which includes the Selecter, a 1980s ska band from Coventry, England. In three clicks, Rhapsody may have enticed a Britney Spears fan to try an album that can hardly be found in a record store.

Rhapsody does this with a combination of human editors and genre guides. But Netflix, where 60 percent of rentals come from recommendations, and Amazon do this with collaborative filtering, which uses the browsing and purchasing patterns of users to guide those who follow them ("Customers who bought this also bought ..."). In each, the aim is the same: Use recommendations to drive demand down the Long Tail.

This is the difference between push and pull, between broadcast and personalized taste. Long Tail business can treat consumers as individuals, offering mass customization as an alternative to mass-market fare.

The advantages are spread widely. For the entertainment industry itself, recommendations are a remarkably efficient form of marketing, allowing smaller films and less-mainstream music to find an audience. For consumers, the improved signal-to-noise ratio that comes from following a good recommendation encourages exploration and can reawaken a passion for music and film, potentially creating a far larger entertainment market overall. (The average Netflix customer rents seven DVDs a month, three times the rate at brick-and-mortar stores.) And the cultural benefit of all of this is much more diversity, reversing the blanding effects of a century of distribution scarcity and ending the tyranny of the hit.

Such is the power of the Long Tail. Its time has come.
Chris Anderson (canderson@wiredmag.com) is Wired's editor in chief and writes the blog The Long Tail.

Issue 12.10 - October 2004