For those of you not familair with the concept of The Long Tail, coined by Chris Anderson, he “argued that products that are in low demand or have low sales volume can collectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters, if the store or distribution channel is large enough… stores such as Amazon.”

So how does that apply to music? Pretty simply. You might have a few mega hits on your books (choose your own target here, folks… ) but you’ll make a lot more money if you can finance and support the huge number of artists that don’t selling tens of millions of ’stuff’ a month, but from the artists that sell ten units a month. Which makes sense to a mathematician, but is something that may or may not be grasped by the Recording Industry.

Of course, it’s all about how you find and promote these artists in the long tail. The obvious answer is P2P software, but that just brings out execs in hives. Why? Let’s jump over to Chris Anderson’s site on the effect P2p has on The Long Tail

In this counterfactual world with 30% less file sharing, the lower 75% of the distribution of sales is shifted further to the left, while the top of the distribution increases its sales. This is what should be expected given the estimates from above. Artists who are unknown, and thus most helped by file sharing, are those artists who sell relatively few albums, whereas artists who are harmed by file sharing and thus gain from its removal, the popular ones, are the artists whose sales are relatively high… In particular, if file sharing essentially shifts sales away from established acts toward unknown acts, this has potentially very important implications for how talent is developed and distributed in the industry.
Link: The Long Tail

It seems obvious to me that a solid P2P system, on the internet, for promotion, would serve the industry far better than churning out yet another version of The Emancipation of Mimi with one extra song added every month (currently five versions at probably $15 each and counting…)

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