Landmark 'Tail' long on insight, short on depth

Scott C. Yates, Special to the News

Published July 14, 2006 at midnight

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Here's the question that's been running through my brain ever since I finished The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More by Chris Anderson: If you finish reading a book, and it leaves you wanting more, more, more. . . does that mean it's a great book because it so piqued your interest? Or is it a bad book because it left unanswered questions and ignored whole topics?

You decide.

Anderson, editor of Wired magazine, invented the term the "long tail" to refer to the dwindling end of a line on a simple graph displaying how many units of a particular thing are sold out of an inventory.

If a music store has 5,000 discs in stock, the biggest selling disc is on the left side of the graph. Let's say it sells 200 units in a year. The second-best sells 150, the third 100 and so on down the graph to the right until you get to the long part of the tail - all of the discs that sell only one unit per year, if that.

Now look at an example that Anderson uses extensively throughout his book: iTunes - the popular music store from Apple. That online service doesn't have 5,000 discs; it doesn't have discs at all. You can buy "albums," but they are just collections of digitized songs, or you can buy songs - more than 2 million of them. Now instead of the "tail" of the graph stretching from the 100th best-selling disc in the store to the 5,000th best-selling disc, it stretches to the 2 millionth.

That's a lot of tail! Even if nearly all of those 2 million songs sell only once in a while, because Apple has no significant cost to store them, the profit from those hundreds and thousands of onesies and twosies adds up to real money.

Anderson illustrates with great skill several of the ramifications of this. First is the death of the "hit." Where nearly every teenager as recently as the 1990s would buy one of a handful of albums, now they get just the songs they want, and what they want is far less influenced by conglomerate-owned radio or television.

Consider the all-time record for sales in the first week for *NSYNC's No Strings Attached in March of 2000 (2.4 million copies). Anderson makes a convincing case that the boy band's sales milestone will never be broken. Since then, nobody has come close, and there really have not even been any hit records since then. The hit machine, honed by generations of record executives, is dead.

Indeed, much of the way we've all thought about economics itself needs to change, Anderson says. The word "economics" is defined by the distribution of scarce resources. What if resources are no longer scarce? What if every single song that anybody anywhere in the world wants to sell is available to anyone who wants to buy it?

It's a fascinating notion, one I was very interested to see applied to other industries and facets of our modern world. This is where I was disappointed. Anderson writes cogently and provocatively about media sales on the Internet, and illustrates with solid reporting how much the world has already changed. He also explains clearly why Google has so radically upturned the apple cart of advertising. But he doesn't go much beyond that.

A chapter late in the book devoted to applications of the Long Tail outside of the media gave only five. One of them was eBay, which has been pretty well dissected elsewhere, and another was Google - again. The other three were interesting, but disappointingly brief.

I was left wishing that the book was twice or three times as long and went much deeper on a variety of topics. My hunch is that people who read the original Long Tail story in Wired will be especially disappointed because this book doesn't elaborate enough on the great material from the article.

That said, there's no doubt that the concept of the Long Tail will rewrite much of how we approach applied economics, and this book is an excellent primer.

Yates is an entrepreneur and freelance writer. He lives in Denver.

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