February 19, 2005
REVERSE OUROBOROS:
Chasing the Long Tail (Edward B. Driscoll, Jr., 02/07/2005, Tech Central Station)
Back in October of last year, Chris Anderson of Wired magazine created a powerful meme -- the concept of "The long tail". His article discussed how e-tailers such as Amazon and Netflix are changing how we think about inventories of books, DVDs and CDs; and how pop culture is transformed by making available not only obscure titles that would otherwise consume valuable space in a physical store, but also all of an artist's back catalog.For example, your local Borders is likely to have, say, Miles Davis' Kind of Blue, Porgy and Bess, and a few of his other titles available on CD. Amazon has virtually every CD that he's played on that's currently in print (or available used) as well as almost every disc released by his myriad sidemen. (And if some of their albums aren't available on CD, they're likely to pop up in LP form on eBay from time to time.)
Anderson notes that because Netflix doesn't have to worry about shoving as many bestsellers into a limited store space as Blockbuster does, he's helped pump new life into documentaries that had brief theater runs, or shorter exposures on television:
"Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, who's something of a documentary buff, took this newfound clout to PBS, which had produced Daughter From Danang, a documentary about the children of US soldiers and Vietnamese women. In 2002, the film was nominated for an Oscar and was named best documentary at Sundance, but PBS had no plans to release it on DVD. Hastings offered to handle the manufacturing and distribution if PBS would make it available as a Netflix exclusive. Now Daughter From Danang consistently ranks in the top 15 on Netflix documentary charts. That amounts to a market of tens of thousands of documentary renters that did not otherwise exist."
This ability of the tail to make heretofore relatively uncommercial products viable has enormous implications for both pop culture and political discourse as mass media continues breaking apart into smaller and smaller fractals. [...]
Although Anderson has his own weblog, his Wired piece didn't directly reference the Blogosphere -- but it also has its own long tail.
Personally, I won't believe in the power of the Long Tail until this book is back in print. Posted by Orrin Judd at February 19, 2005 3:03 PM
Thanks for the link!
"Personally, I won't believe in the power of the Long Tail until this book is back in print."
Here's the next best thing, thanks to the Long Tail: I can type the name of the title you link to above into Bookfinder.com and find, literally, 114 copies of it available for sale in varying conditions and prices. That's very, very different from when I used to haunt used bookstores, and it was strictly hit or miss (usually miss) as to which titles they had on the shelves.
Posted by: Ed Driscoll at February 19, 2005 3:28 PMSame goes for Barry Goldwater's out-of-print manifesto "Conscience of a Conservative." A few years ago I found a first edition of that on eBay, autographed by the author (well, Goldwater at any rate), for a buck. Personally, I think that indicates that, when liberal crybabies cry about how our culture is becoming more homogenized, they're full of it.
Posted by: Governor Breck at February 19, 2005 3:42 PMi don't understand why copyright holders don't make every title available. how much can it cost to have a few copies (or few hundred copies) around of each title ? there are many many movies and albums i would gladly buy if they were available. it should be legal to distribute copies yourself if the title holders let an item go out of print. of course maybe the genius accountants (running things) have some secret plan to build up demand over the decades...
Posted by: cjm at February 19, 2005 3:56 PMCJM,
With DVDs, it's an expensive and time consuming process to restore a movie to the quality necessary to look presentable in a digital transfer. (The same is true, perhaps to a lesser extent, with preparing the master tapes of an LP for release onto CD.) Movie studios don't want to release what looks like a bad VHS copy on DVD, and the demand has to be there to justify the amount of man-hours required to clean a title up. Fortunately, the movie channels on cable and especially satellite are an alternative source, and it's worth searching their online guides for a particular title and recording it yourself.
One option is eBay--I've bought a number of laser discs of titles either several years before they were released on DVD, or in the case of few, still aren't out on DVD. (Hopefully someday, somebody will release The 49th Parallel on DVD in the US!)
Posted by: Ed Driscoll at February 19, 2005 4:37 PMMr. Driscoll;
Movie studios should farm it out. If not now, soon there will be plenty of people with the equipment and expertise to do the restoration. It might not even cost money, just credit on the release.
Posted by: Annoying Old Guy at February 19, 2005 6:52 PMe.d.: i guess a lot of titles fall into a "no man's land" where they are worth enough to keep the rights to but not enough to put onto dvd. i do record from the satellite when the occasional "find" comes along, but some things *never* get played. my 500+ title laser disc collection is gathering dust in the garage, sigh.
sky satellite in the u.k. was an absolute treasure trove of hard to find titles. still, the hunt is what makes collecting so fun....
Posted by: cjm at February 19, 2005 7:18 PMCJM,
If it's any consolation, I watched my dad go through the same sort of conundrum in the 1970s, trying to collect jazz records of the '20s through the '40s. He knew there were tons of titles sitting in the vaults of the record labels, but apparently not enough demand to get them to release the stuff on LP. So he kept a 78 rpm record player through at least the 1980s as a result and scoured collector's newsletters and swap meets.
It was a bit like the Nockian Remnant--the Crosbyian Remnant!
Posted by: Ed Driscoll at February 19, 2005 7:37 PMactually, i heard that the book is on amazon.com now (http://www.pejmanesque.com/archives/009472.html). also some more info on amazon.com's part in the long tail:
"In books, Barnes&Noble and Amazon gathered similar amounts of revenue for their top 130,000 books, but Amazon learned to capture the "long tail" of the market. Amazon offers 2.3 million books (couldn't find the exact number, but that's what i heard) and 57% of these are ordered less than 12 times a year."
The Power of the Long Tail (Dec. 15, 2004)
http://www.alwayson-network.com/comments.php?id=7532_0_1_0_C
e.d.: i hope you (or your dad) kept the jazz collection :) unlike laser discs they have retained there value -- darwin can be so fickle in the mediums he blesses (jk) interesting analogy to A.J.
Posted by: cjm at February 20, 2005 4:04 PM