July 6, 2006
Review: The Long Tail, now in Book Form
Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail is coming out soon, and he was nice enough to send bloggers review copies. You’ve probably already read his earlier article, so I won’t spend time summarizing it — in fact, if you’ve read his article and all his blog entries, you probably don’t need to read the book.
Anyway, here’s a quick take: This may be the most important work on digital media written in the last two years. That doesn’t mean the book says something wholly novel or that this will be the one book-about-the-future to rule them all. Rather, Anderson has made a critical contribution by matching empirical evidence with leading edge cases, pointing out how a long-theorized future is now becoming the present while also recognizing how past projections now need to be rethought.
The Internet and digital technologies have made it far easier to produce and access niche content, changing the power held by traditional mass media gatekeepers — that’s a familiar notion by now. As The New Yorker’s review points out, Alvin Toffler among many others have made similar insights. Anderson acknowledges such thinkers early on and throughout his book.
But many other authors have started from macro-trends and then tried to deduce particular effects on our society. In contrast, Anderson generally builds out from particular cases (e.g., Amazon, Netflix, and Rhapsody) to a theory of how business and culture as a whole will change. More than naked anecdotes, he presents the most in-depth look at these companies’ sales stats yet. Anderson’s not just talking about some far off future world — he’s describing our world as it exists today and tomorrow. In that way, he’s closing the loop on earlier futurists’ visions; at the very least, he’s helped put to bed once and for all many myths built around the mass media world and “hit-ism.”
At the same time, Anderson tempers and adjusts the futurists’ visions. For instance, Anderson is quick to point out that abundant choice isn’t very useful if consumers can’t adequately navigate those choices with “filters” and recommendation tools. He also notes that it’s critical to aggregate both the “head” and the “tail,” both hits and niches, so that consumers can start navigating from a comfortable place. All this may seem obvious, but go back just a few years to the time of the original MP3.com’s clutter of niches. Certainly many of the articles about that site overstated how it would change the game for independent artists.
Most importantly, Anderson doesn’t confuse evidence that niches are becoming more prominent for evidence that mass culture is going to totally die off.
This is a key clarification, one many earlier writers struggled to make well and many critics of Anderson seem to gloss over. Sometimes even Anderson isn’t particularly clear — for instance, he repeats that we’re becoming a culture of niches and opens the book by describing a hypothetical typical teenager jumping effortlessly and continuously between mass culture and random niches, but it’s not clear to what role mass culture is playing. By book’s end I think he makes clear that his analysis and predictions are actually more modest yet no less significant.
Anderson certainly doesn’t avoid some relatively speculative projections. Because his stats derive from online entertainment content distributors, his predictions about other “long tail” businesses feel weaker. The New Yorker’s right that the changes we’re seeing in the music industry won’t necessarily fit other businesses. But by carefully considering these particular leading edge cases, Anderson’s focusing our attention on where to look next, and that’s quite useful.
I could make other quibbles (for instance, he could have made his chapter countering “Paradox of Choice” author Barry Schwartz much stronger, following thinkers like Virginia Postrel), but on the whole Anderson nails it.
Filed by Derek Slater at 12:32 am under General news
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