The Long Tail, At Last
Posted on July 17, 2006
Filed Under What's New, Advertising/Marketing |
I picked up my review copy of Chris Anderson’s Long Tail on Friday and spent some of the day absorbing its lessons.
It may not be the book that seals-the-deal on a new vision of the future but it comes close because the basic idea if so fertile.
Anderson is a scientist turned economist so when he digresses into the long historical sweep (the agrarian economy, the industrial revolution) he has little new to say. In fact he errs. But on the division of markets into more minor hits, rather than blockbusters, and the future of many niches, and the implications of these developments, he is peerless.
The idea that the megahit factories of TV, the movies, the music industry, and indeed some core brands, are at an end has a magnificent appeal.
We have been through four sterile decades. Between the 1960s and MySpace did a whole lot happen?
I mean if you think back at the wholesale transformation of western culture around 1965, the proliferation and expression of youthful genius, the young McCartney and Lennon, Paul Simon, Eric Clapton, the narrative disconnects of the episodic movie, angry theatre, the arrival of anarchic fashion.
What changed in the interim that could possibly measure up to what changed in the 1960s?
When Netscape and Amazon and then Bebo and MySpace and Wikipedia and now Jotspot, MyblogLand, Google Maps, and many more web applications untied the creativity of young people again, and began creating automated content out of the networked intelligence of users, we could start celebrating that general sense of liberation.
People are empowered. Two song writers in a Liverpool den, 75 million biographers in bedrooms across the world.
I’m not sure that Anderson’s book conveys the scope of what the Web now means to people and his concern is more to plot the economic and hence corporate implications of change.
Nonetheless the book sets out a platform from which a swathe of cultural innovation can be surveyed.
The most telling concept he devises is that throughout the magahit era, radio, movies, magazines, TV, synchronised society. A whole country would come together and consume more or less the same thing.
This was the power that media moguls enjoyed. They became a kind of royalty to whom we all allocated a part of our lives, like a tithe. They knew it and the sooner their rule ends the better we’ll all be.
As Anderson points out that system created an aversion to innovation.
The best that can be said about the next ten years is how little we really can know about how it will evolve. But already we see classification systems overwhelmed by the proliferation of human interests.
Music catalogues, which used to segment audiences by their few categories of interest, now have hundreds of sub-genres.
Even kitchen utensils are dividing and sub-dividing according to consumer desires.
Categories are dead. Long live search.
A potential downside of these developments is that a few mega companies are capturing much of the proliferation - Amazon for example. And Google we all know about and fear.
But Amazon has won the game by sticking to the old Web 1.0 business model, the one people said could not work, building audience and loyalty before making the big sell, building recommendation from a user base, in effect innovating in user generated content, making the user part of the enterprise.
Web 2.0 is ultimately just more Web 1.0. More ASPs, more audience building, more user-generated content, and some innovation in usability. That’s why the decade from 2000, dot.bom or no dot.bomb will be compared to 1965.
It is ultimately about the big break-out, the great escape from a stultifying culture that’s been impressionistic on innovation but in reality encouraged conformity and synchronicity. It gave us Microsoft, Sun, H-P, operating systems and enterprise systems. It gave us knowledge management and document systems.
Today’s technologies give us biography, self-reflection, friendship, networks, creativity, expression. You just wouldn’t have known people were so desperate for it.
You might take something different from Anderson’s book but creativity unleashed, not just as a human desire but as an infrastructure to serve desire, is to my mind its more fertile inference.
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