The head of the long tail

Now that Chris Anderson's book has finally come out, there's a new wave of discussion about the long tail, but it's all focused on the tail itself: the low volume, niche, back catalog products that are now becoming commercially viable through low-cost digital storage, search and distribution mechanisms. Who will spare a thought for the poor old boring hits? Won't they also be affected? Or will they just disappear, shrinking away into the mass, Prince and the Pauper style? My guess is that there will be hits, though fewer of them, and that many of them will begin to resemble today's web fads: spectacular, ephemeral and unpredictable.

As we abandon the mass media common for our filter-gated gardens, what will open enough of those gates to become a hit? One well-known skeleton key is spectacle: novel effects and "Can you believe that?" stunts that have widespread, visceral appeal immediately upon viewing. Plot, character and storytelling are just risky complications that may make some audiences more interested, but will also prevent the item from getting into other gardens at all. (I think the spectacular shift is well underway in advertising, where, for a number of reasons, commercials are already being supplanted by animated posters.)

But spectacularism also means that our interest quickly passes. Pure spectacle has no legs. It's not interesting. And with so many more choices of what we actually want to see, hear or read now available, our attention and our wallets are wandering away from the new hits a lot sooner, meaning more chart volatility and faster media product turnover. Special effects laden movies that open and close in a week. Novelty singles that hit #1 and are never heard from again (though they will try.)

This sounds pretty grim. But the long tail also means that hits may become less predictable, which means that at least some of them might be more interesting than they are today. As our filters increase in number, resolution, interactivity and flexibility, their collective functioning will become so complex that the hits they elect will be truly emergent phenomena, seeming to come out of nowhere (at least nowhere foreseen by any marketing department.) Large audiences momentarily cobbled together by the complex behavior of their filters will sometimes converge on an obscure item multifaceted enough to appeal to lots of niches at once. So The Simpsons could still be a hit (yea!) and the beaten path will no longer be a path at all, but a set of disconnected clearings at naturally intersecting points of interest.

Comments

[Paul Wilson]

You make an interesting point about what the Long Tail means for Blockbusters. And you're right we are seeing more slow-burn films emerging as people find out more about them through their filters - march of the penguins and the shawshank redemption are good examples.

But what does this mean if you have to launch a Blockbuster? The days of controlling the message are fast disappearing and we are in danger of getting stuck in spectacle hyper-inflation.

However, and this is where I was struggling with my own thinking, fragmenting a movie into multiple stories that appeal to different niches runs the risk of taking a sense of wonderment from the movie experience. Its the shared, communal experience that contributes to the power of a Blockbuster - few people go to the Cinema on their own and we all want to be able to talk about the latest big thing.

That's why I like your idea of looking for intersections between these niche interests. I think communications need to play a role in nuturing and building these sections of interest. Perhaps, this is why 'Pirates' has done so well. The whole theme of Pirates is so compelling it stretches across interest groups.

I need to think a bit more about this - and the air conditioning isn't working...

[Jeffre Jackson]

Yes, there is something...I don't know, unsatisfying, about multitrack marketing like the religious/secular campaigns for The Chronicles of Narnia. It seems to lessen the movie, making it more obviously a product rather than Maybe if they had found an intersection at an idea like "wonder"?

And as you say, a big part of blockbusterdom is being able to talk about it with lots of other people. But as spectacle inflation continues, there's less and less to say about a hit movie other than, "Wow!"

[Richard Buchanan]

Not if these guys have their way with music.

http://echonest.com/

They have a computer program that(apparently)hears music like a human being. They also have run software that monitors how people behave with the new music on the web.

Type a song into the search bar. The result is strange! Like The music is being played through some kind of drain from hell!

Rich