Long Tail et al

There’s a bit of a debate happening about Chris Anderson’s Long Tail theory after the Harvard Business Review did a bit of a critique. Not going to rehash the points made here - it’s all summarised nicely in this Techdirt piece. Which nicely points this out:

Even more to the point is that the concept of the long tail changes the shape of the market. When shelf space was limited, it made it that much more difficult to even get a creative work produced at all. You had to be able to convince someone that your work would make it into the “hits” category, and then get them to finance the creation of the work. And, anything that didn’t actually become a hit fell off the chart completely.