Funny ways people think here about Abderson’s theory. First of all the theory itself has nothing to do with online selling or marketing. The Long Tail is just a metaphor to picture how companies could make their profit. The Long Tail can be made by numerous ways like online-selling, lowering the prices, manufacturing related things etc. etc. And by that you just have a big volume to sell things. I think people are little confused about the theory cause Anderson used Amazon.com as an example in his original article. (the key to success was Amazon’s referral-system).

The digital market and selling is just the most obvious phenomenon to cling to in this discussion and are seen as the future of long tail profit making. People are still refusing to consume crap even they got it free or very cheap. It must have even some value to them. Levyvirasto is a good example. The half of the stock is absolutely rubbish there. Just young guys thinking “hey! let’s put our record to online market and make some money”. You do not consume things you don’t need at all ;)

Now we have Spotify which could make a new twist how we are consuming music. And where lays the Long Tail then?

Well, there’s an obvious obstacle for such a long tail effect to take place majorly in music business. Given there are practically unlimited pieces of music around, and no one will ever have enough time to listen to them all, there’s no point in checking out evenly through all the weirdest performances, too. People want to pick up things they are more likely to like, and the best basis for their decision – before knowing what each piece actually is like – can only be a recommendation from someone else. That recommendation may be from their friend, general popularity (charts, for instance) or by promotion. Of course, for music companies promotion costs, so they cannot promote but pieces that will lilkely sell way more than their cost. So, there will only be promotion for very few pieces. And this turns the sales curve back to a shorter tailed one.

I have gotten some feeling of the long tail effect in a popular Internet music site where they promise to recommend new music to you based on what you listen to. At least I have found some new music that way. Interestingly, the previous experience in this category was almost a decade ago when you could download free music from the Internet pretty easily. At least I found some interesting songs that otherwise I would never have come across.