There's life in them thar Long Tails yet....

You would have thought that after Harvard, McKinsey, Google, Amazon, Will Page and Apple debunked it, in fact even after the original author climbed down, the Long Tail Theory would be dead by now*. But no, Techdirt rides in to its rescuscitation:

There have been a series of criticisms to Chris Anderson's concept of "The Long Tail" lately. While most don't hold up under scrutiny, a few have made some good points that don't actually go against the long tail concept, but may adjust some of how people understand it. Of course, people love to jump and declare something completely dead, so there have been a few stories making the rounds claiming that the long tail era has been disproved.

Not hold up to scrutiny cough! splutter!. Yup, cancel your subscriptions to the McKinsey Quarterly and Harvard Business Review and buy TechDirt Anyway, the new argument is here:

eMusic has published a report noting that, indeed, their own sales show a pretty clear long tail distribution, with at least 75% of all of the music they stocked being sold at least once in 2008. Once again, though, it comes down to the filters. eMusic has some good features (they could be better, honestly) to help people find new and obscure music -- and that helps spread interest to new acts. So, once again, it appears that the long tail is still very much alive, but it does still depend on the filters being used.

Those last 3 sentences are actually by and large true - the Long Tail is actually alive, and it depends largely on its filters. But is is not very big, and never has been, and that is essentially the claim the economists debunked from the original Long Tail book, which held that it was a much larger opportunity than had previously been supposed.

From Pareto's 80/20 law (and long before in fact, the Phoenician traders of yore knew of the principle), people have long known that consumption of nearly everything is a power law, with the bulk (the 80%) of the consumption going to the top sellers (the 20%) of the goods. In fact, in hit based businesses like Media, it can be much worse - a 95 / 5 split is not uncommon.

In fact, the old inventory theory used to define the "A" class (the hits), the "B" class (the movers) and "C" class - the Long Tail. However, e-Music above defines "long tail" as anything not in the Top 40, which is like arguing that anything not in the top few % of sellers is "Long Tail" - ie the Long Tail begins at the neck .

What is true is that if one can make the back-catalogue cheap to store, easily searchable, and cheap to distribute, it makes it worth the while of retailers to eke that last tail-off few % of revenue from the market. And digital music media is 2 orders of magnitude cheaper, so it is worth their while.

But this is not a revolutionary new business model, unless you can build a system to become a bottom fisher across multiple long tails, like eBay and Amazon did. To make money you need serious scale, and low transaction costs. Its life as we've always known it.

* To be fair to Chris Anderson, his book was a well argued hypothesis that was over time shown to be not always correct, he is far from the first (or last) business theorist to whom this has happened to - the ongoing momentum of the Long tail is more from acolytes who are still trying to maintain commercial practices from it.