[majormajor]

The author doesn't give compelling evidence to suggest that the long term trend of "more options leads to more distribution of the audience" that you can see through the rise of cable TV, indie movies, streaming radio, etc, has been broken.

It's especially hard for me to believe when the pre-modern-internet-platform availability of that long-tail content was zero. The percentage of views/listens going to that content literally had nowhere to go but up.

[coldtea]

That's all well, but it's not my point.

First, TFA author might very well be wrong (or not give numbers to prove himself right), but I wasn't supporting the author.

I was clearing up what someone could imply from the parent comment that just because obscure music "has NEVER been more accessible" this necessarily means we have a long tail effect.

Your point shows the same misunderstanding in a more explicit way: "The percentage of views/listens going to that content literally had nowhere to go but up", still doesn't automatically translate to long tail consumption. If it has gone from being 0% to being 20% of the content consumption for example, the "long still" would still be nowhere competitive with the fat powerlaw "head" (the stuff still getting 80%).

[majormajor]

> If it has gone from being 0% to being 20% of the content consumption for example, the "long still" would still be nowhere competitive with the fat powerlaw "head" (the stuff still getting 80%).

Was it only ever claimed that it would eliminate the head?

It doesn't have to flatten the curve entirely to "expand the scope of the arts" or "nurture alternative voices" or "get indie films to larger audiences" or let "music be more surprising" (paraphrasing from the claimed benefits as restated by the author).

Or, if you move to the author's economic claims, "make a lot of money selling to these microscopically small groups of customers"... I would take more issue with that in general, but without a better defined "lots" we don't need Etsy to make its sellers more money than Walmart makes theirs - we just need them to make a "lot" more than they would otherwise.

The author prevents and argues against a perverse strawman of the least likely results of there being a flourishing long tail of both content production and content consumption and tries to disprove it by focusing on the profit margins of middlemen and high volume producers.

I would argue that a healthy long tail will force the profit margins of middlemen down because they have more competition so there's less ability to extract from consumers. Same for high-volume producers - some of the market will shift to lower-volume competitors. And that's exactly what we see happening: incumbents have had to respond to markets moving away from them. A film or TV show has to compete with entire new worlds of types of video content, so those incumbents go broad. But that's because the long tail is thriving on its own, and doesn't need them, not because the production or consumption worlds are short-tail.

You can't monopolize and extract rent from the long tail the same way you used to from the short tail because the barriers of entry for producing long-tail culture products have gotten so much lower. The struggles of the former kings and incumbents shows that their relative market share is being eaten into by cheaper-to-produce alternatives that their business model simply can't sustain itself by competing with. If demand was short-tail then the biggest incumbent players would face far fewer barriers to raking in profit. Relative demand for short tail stuff goes up -> ability to charge a higher price for short tail stuff goes up. But that's not happening. (Disney is the closest thing we have to this, they have a pretty firm grip on tons of non-free family TV and film, but that's one of the few areas (along with live sports) that have been less vulnerable.)

[coldtea]

>Was it only ever claimed that it would eliminate the head?

Did I say "eliminate"?

The "long tail" concept however is not that "some smaller percentage would still buy less popular items if only they were made available". Even metal-polka-combo bands or noise bands making noise by hitting bricks together had some fans, so obviously if such less popular items were available of course somebody would buy them or stream them. That was trivially correct, and uninteresting.

The "disruption" was about how "products in low demand or that have a low sales volume can collectively build a better market share than their rivals, or exceed the relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters, provided the store or distribution channel is large enough" (Wikipedia)

[majormajor]

Thanks for the link, that’s a more specific claim than I found in the article.

There are a lot of these markets that weren’t being served thirty, forty years ago, so it doesn’t seem so trivial to me to claim that business can exist to serve them. Nobody thought that at the time, given the tech or the time. Becoming cumulatively more popular? I don’t know where you draw the line, but I’d be surprised if the cumulative long tail of video content has not exceeded the viewership of Hollywood movie and TV products for the 30-and-other demographic. Same with Reddit vs major magazines.