The Long Tail Again
I've written about the best-selling book, The Long Tail (written by Chris Anderson) and tried to show how someone its conclusions are based on what seems to us to be a dogmatic misapprehension of how markets work in the real world.
But I bow before the detailed "reader's guide" to The Long Tail available online. It is brilliantly written by author Tom Slee, who wrote a book called No One Makes You Shop At Wal-Mart.
Slee is even more skeptical than I am about the upbeat conclusions of Anderson's book. And he reads the book chapter by chapter distilling a cogent refutation of Andersons; book.
Slee's criticism is merciless. For example, the notes the Anderson watchwords "that the new economy eliminates 'The Tyranny of Locality' [p17] or 'The Tyranny of Geography' [162] or 'the tyranny of physical space" [163]." However, he notes that the books'; cover features eight blurbs, all from CEOs and influence makers. Six of the blurbers live in the Bay Area, one in Seattle, and one in New York.
His point?
There's an obvious irony here. A book about how the digital world permits small players from the fringes to reach a bigger audience (in ways I'll discuss later) and about how geography is fading as a force in our world comes to us from the centre of that new world, praised by big names from the high-class-neighbourhood of the techno-culture. It is promoted by and emerging from a network of culturally similar, geographically close (and very wealthy) people: The Long Tail is a reflection of conversations among a new elite. The Long Tail is joined to a head, and the head is still very much the place to be.
In a later chapter, Anderson the decline of the CD store and the rise of freedom from the digital music store, Slee begs to differ from Anderson's presentation:
The big point about The Long Tail is a cultural one, and the moral of the story according to Anderson is that we are moving away from a world of hits to a world of niche interests. But that's not the story this comparison tells. Instead, the story is of a retail model with a fair amount of effective diversity (the specialist record store) being squeezed in a technology-driven vice. One jaw of the vice is the technology-driven Wal-Mart, which uses its IT expertise and economies of scale along with other strategies to take the hits away from the specialists, driving them out of business. The other jaw is the online stores, which also benefit from economies of scale and are left to mop up any demand for diversity that is left, because it is no longer attainable in the physical world.
From what we can tell, iTunes is doing a poor job of selling niche products and, as the Guardian quotes Greg Eden, general manager of the trade organisation for the UK's independent music sector:
"unlike the high street, online distribution means one supplier can dominate the mass market. 'What you see on the internet is very much the "Highlander Theory",' says Eden. '"There can be only one.". There's only one search engine, there's only one big book retailer, one big online auction house, and so on."
In other words, what seems like a move to diversity and freedom is in fact an even more efficient way to creating a monopoly or tight oligopoly than is possible in the physical world. Choices can expand and contract at the same time, as we may have more choices but they are all from the same few sources, as dog food buyers recently learned when the secret came out that almost all the dog and cat food on the shelf was made by the same manufacturer, despite a pelthora of barnds.
Slee's screed is definitely worth a closer look.
