Entertainment in the 21st Century and the Rise of the Long Tail
For most of the 20th century, the entertainment industry was focused on making hits. The reason for this was that basic economics. Take for example the movie industry. Movie theaters will only show a film if it attracts a minimum of 1,500 people over the course of 2 weeks. As a result, only the most popular movies are shown in theaters. This also held for things like books or music before the internet. Stores selling these items can only carry the most popular ones since it makes no sense to carry items that don’t sell well. Since the internet did not exist until the late 20th century, the only way to buy entertainment items was at stores, and since stores only carried hits, it only made economic sense to make hits.
In the late 20th century, people began realizing that with the rise of the internet, it was possible to sell entertainment products that were less popular yet still make profits. This market is known as the long tail. The long tail is the huge amounts of entertainment that are much less popular than the hits. These products are much more niche items that fewer people buy, however, the internet makes it easy for distributers to carry these products and for customers to find products that they like in the long tail. The reason for this is that products online don’t take up shelf space, and computer algorithms can recommend new items to people based on their current likes. Spotify for example creates a Discover Weekly playlist for users based on what music they currently have in their playlists. This playlist can be helpful in discovering unknown artists that a customer may like, and would not have found otherwise.
A good example of the market that exists in the long tail is book sales on Amazon versus book sales from Barnes and Noble. On average a Barnes and Noble store has 130,000 different titles. Amazon makes more off of the book sales of titles that are outside of the top 130,000 sellers than it does off of the top 130,000 books. This example shows that there is a huge market to be had in the long tail of entertainment. Netflix is another fast growing company that has been able to tap into the market that is the long tail.
What this means for the 21st century is that more of the entertainment created will be geared toward smaller audiences. I’m not saying that hits are going away, but rather the relatively untapped market that is the long tail will continue to grow. This is already being seen with the rapid rise of companies like Netflix and Amazon.
Source: http://www.wired.com/2004/10/tail/