The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More

The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. By Chris Anderson. New York, N.Y: Hyperion, 2006. 238 pp. ISBN 1401302378.

In entertainment industries such as movies, television, music, and book publishing, a few products and services are wildly successful each year. According to Chris Anderson, the search for successful "hits" and their revenue-generating capacity came to dominate the business strategies of the entertainment industries in the twentieth century. The major players preferred to allocate their resources to a few high cost productions in the hope of generating a "hit" rather than spreading their resources over a large number of modest projects with smaller potential payoffs. Until recently, this focus on generating "hits," reinforced by physical limitations on the size of inventories or "shelf space," favoured the abandonment of specialized products and services in favour of a few generic goods selected with the hope of attaining mass market success. The decline of U.S. independent feature film production over the last three decades of the twentieth century is one of many by-products of this phenomenon.

In The Long Tail, Chris Anderson argues that, although the U.S. entertainment industries continue to focus on "hits," in the last decade "hits" have become a lesser economic force as a result of digitization and the Internet. Digitization has permitted the decentralisation of production, distribution, and storage so that "hits" and less successful entertainment products and services can co-exist side by side. Indeed, a flourishing retail business has arisen that focuses exclusively or predominantly on the "long tail" of specialized or "niche" product offerings.

The "long tail" refers to the distribution of the demand for each of the many variations of an entertainment product or service in...