The Long Tail

How finely can you slice aggregation?

As I mentioned in the previous post, the three main Long Tail business opportunities are:

1. Long Tail aggregators (that include both the head and tail of content and products)
2. Niche suppliers/producers (who get aggregated by someone else)
3. Filters (which help people find what they want)

    Most of the examples I've been using to date, such as Netflix, Amazon and iTunes, fall into the first of these categories, aggregation. But as the smart kids in the front row always point out, there's a seeming paradox at work in that category.

    The Long Tail is all about the shift from hits to niches. But aren't all those aggregators "hits"? They're not only the largest players in their category, but they seem to be getting even larger, gaining market share at the expense of their competitors. Is there something about aggregators that tends to favor a few big winners, even as the other two categories fragment into a million niches of varying size?

    That's certainly the way it looks now, but I suspect it won't last, or at least won't last as it is. I'll give an example by starting with the biggest of them all, Google.

    In a sense, Google is a classic Long Tail aggregator, one that uses great filtering (its PageRank algorithms) to improve the s/n ratio of the tail. And not just one tail. They aggregate the tail of information, the tail of advertisers and the tail of publishers (see this post for more). But is plain old Google enough for all of this? Or is there something more appropriate for many needs than one-size-fits-all search?

    The question can be generalized to this: how finely can you slice aggregation? The answer, in the case of search, turns out to be quite finely indeed. The rise of the "vertical search" market is simply a case of slicing aggregation into niches, optimized for different needs. (Actual examples here; imaginary ones here)

    In fact, Google itself is already doing this, with Google Local, Google Scholar, Google Maps, Froogle, Google News, Google Print, and so on. Each has a specialized presentation and pulls from a subset of the information universe that gives more appropriate and useful results in that domain. Right now that's Google fine-slicing its own aggregation--the emergence of a long tail of search, but within a short head of search companies--but there are plenty of other firms that are rushing into this market to do the same.

    Now let's apply the same approach to media and entertainment aggregation. I've already argued that any Long Tail aggregator has to include both the head and tail of content, to allow the recommendations and filters to carry users from the known to the unknown. But does that only work in broad categories, such as music and film, or could it work just as well, if not better, at the sub-genre level, aggregating the head and tail of just jazz, for instance, or documentaries?

The advantages would be that, instead of a one-size-fits-all presentational model, such as is currently the case in iTunes, you could have a model customized for a genre. I don't know much about jazz, but I'll bet that it might be useful for a jazz music service to have links for each one of the musicians on an album (because they often shift from group to group), much as IMDB tracks the careers of each movie actor and director independently. But that wouldn't be appropriate for pop music, because the individual musicians aren't as important.

    Likewise for documentaries. Wouldn't it be useful to have documentaries accompanied by related information and news articles, so the films could be a launching-off point for further exploration of that subject? Or a site just for TV-show DVDs, complete with all the entertainment news and gossip around their stars?

    No doubt there are already companies working on all of these and many more. What's important, however, is that these fine-slice aggregators allow themselves, in turn, to be aggregated by the larger, more general aggregators. Those niche music services should, for starters, be fully searchable by Google and anyone else. Could they also do deals with iTunes to be niche specialists, the way individual merchants are integrated into Amazon's Marketplace and eBay's Stores? I'll bet they could. It's the Long Tail of aggregation, coming soon.

Brands: response

John Hagel responded thoughtfully and at length to the brand post below. So if you're into the subject of the future of brands I suggest you go read it.

    If you're still here, however, I'll add just two comments. First, my point about brands becoming people rather than products or companies is specific to long tail markets. In short tail markets, such as traditional retail, I imagine that the usual brands will continue to dominate for a good long time.

    Second, here's a little more detail on the role of people as "branded filters" in the long tail:  There are, as it happens, three main long tail businesses: filters, aggregators and producers. Each of those will have its own sort of brands, but those brands are all related in that they're increasingly about real people, rather than abstract advertising messages, invented characters or slogans. To whit:

--Filters: Here, as I wrote in the preceding post, I think filters are the key to a working long tail market and that people make the best filters, giving such trusted tastemakers the effective power of a brand. John disagrees:

"Expert friends don't scale well. Even the most gregarious friends have a circle of a few thousand friends and, at this point, their knowledge of the needs of each friend is probably pretty superficial. And celebrities come from a different end of the spectrum.  They don’t have a clue who I am as an individual customer.

    I addressed the friends part in a earlier post ("Why social software makes for poor recommendations."). In short, I agree that actual friends are unlikely to be the best experts on whatever it is you're looking for. But individuals you may not know personally but nevertheless trust (because of their track record, say) often  do have the best advice. And these days there's hardly a niche so narrow you can't find one or two of those with a little searching, from blogs to customer reviews. As for celebrities, it doesn't matter that they don't know you; you pick them to emulate because they represent values you admire.

--Aggregators: The best of these, such as Amazon and Google, have built their brands on the power of their filters. Yet these filters--from Google's search algorithms to Amazon's recommendations--are nothing more than the wisdom of the crowds, the statistically measured opinions of millions of, yes, people. That's why we trust them.

--Producers: Not much change here. As much as the TV networks, music labels and movies studios have tried to build their own brands, it's always been mostly about the individuals stars, shows and talents. Now, in an emerging era of infinite channels where talent can find an audiences regardless of how it's distributed, this will be even more true.
 

Brands: Think people, not products

Today we buy the brands we're conditioned to buy, and not just because we're suckers. Brands, if they're doing their job right, stand for qualities we understand, such as reliability or value, and they make it easier to chose in categories where we otherwise would find choice difficult. Brands help us order a chaotic world of variety. When in doubt, we buy what we know.

    But we're entering a new era where the number of available products is exploding thanks to the infinite shelf space effect. That chaotic world is getting more chaotic by the day as our choices expand with Amazon's inventory and Google's reach. The problem is we can only recall so many brands, and down there in the niches the Nikes and Apples may not be of much help.

    This would lead to a classic "tyranny of choice" problem were it not for the fact that at the same time there's been a parallel explosion of information about those abundant products. That information, ranging from product reviews to "rank by bestselling", also helps us choose wisely. In a sense, information is increasingly serving the same role as a brand, bringing order and structure to a chaotic marketplace. More importantly, information can scale with massive variety in the way that brands can't. So what does this mean for brands?

    The short answer is radical change. Although I've been giving talks on this for a while, I'm prompted to expand on this here by John Hagel, who has posted an interesting analysis on how he sees the changing role of brands in an era of empowered consumers. We start with some of the same assumptions and then diverge a bit, which is always good fun.

    John begins by mentioning an influential article in Wired last year by Jim Surowiecki (of The New Yorker and The Wisdom of Crowds fame) entitled "The Decline of Brands." It discussed the implications of three big trends in the consumer landscape, which are, in my words:

1. There are more brands than ever, yet the power of individual brands is falling (measured by the price premium they can command).
2. Historically brands were a proxy for quality, which varied widely from product to product. Now, with globalized manufacturing, those differences in quality across brands are shrinking, and consumers know it.
   
3. The reason they know it is that it now takes little more than a Google search to become a remarkably sophisticated buyer. Likewise, they can "rank by price" or "rank by rating" with one click. For discriminating consumers who want to shop smart, information power is replacing brand power.

    The consequence of this, John says, is that brands are shifting from being about things to being about customer experience:

In the first half of the 20^th century, consistently high quality products were relatively scarce. Product brands prevailed. Over time, more and more products entered the market and shelf space became the scarce good. Power shifted to retailer brands.

We’re now on the cusp of another major shift in brand power, driven in part by the growing role of the Internet as a shopping platform....If a product is out there, the customer can easily find it and buy it. As shelf space constraints evaporate, what becomes the scarce good? It is something that is becoming ever more valuable – our attention.

In broad strokes, we are moving from product-centric brands to customer-centric brands. Product-centric brands represent promises about products (or retailers) – “buy this product from us because you can trust that it will be a quality product at good value.” Customer-centric brands offer a radically different promise – “buy from us because we know and understand you as an individual customer and we can tailor an appropriate bundle of products and services to meet your individual needs better than anyone else.” In other words, customer-centric brands promise that, if you give them their attention, they will give you a better return on attention than anyone else.

    Sounds good, but the problem, as John acknowledges, is that "relatively few customer-centric brands exist today". Indeed, he doesn't name any. I think the reason he's struggling to find examples is that he hasn't gone far enough. Yes, the center of gravity of brands is shifting from products to customers, but I think John trips over the fuzzy term "-centric". Instead, I suspect that tomorrow's most powerful brands probably won't be companies at all. They'll be the customers themselves. 

    I've written a lot here about the importance of filters in driving demand down the Long Tail. Some of those filters are trusted aggregators, from Amazon to Google, which use smart software to help you find the good stuff. But others are individual tastemakers, from celebrities to critics to editors to simple mavens with influential blogs.

    As product brand proliferation leads to brand dilution (following Surowiecki's argument), brand power will shift downstream from the producers to the consumers. So the fact that Jessica Simpson is wearing something becomes more important that what she's wearing. Likewise for the fact that Instapundit bought that camera. Or that Jon Stewart praised that book (like Oprah did before him).

    It's the Martha Stewart effect, multiplied by a million niches.

    So, in a Long Tail market, the brands that matter most are the tastemakers. These are the filters you trust, who point you to the niche (or mainstream) stuff you wouldn't have found on your own. And because you trust them, you're willing to follow their recommendations, voyaging down the tail with confidence. In the Long Tail, great filters become brands.

-----------
If you want more, here's some recommended reading:

From Trendwatching.com:

• Nouveau Niche

"The new riches will come from servicing the new niches. From hyper-individualization to millions of new niche producers to full transparency to no-cost inventory, mass will soon make way for niche. Neglect at own risk."

• Garage Influentials

"Amateurs-turned-professionals post reviews, criticisms, software, and God knows what else on the web -- an untapped gold mine for marketers, and a source of worry or opportunity for corporations at large."

• Ready-to-Know

"Demanding consumers are in a constant 'ready-to-know' state of mind, expecting any information deemed relevant to be available instantly, at their own terms. Think of it as the Google effect (demanding and getting instant answers) permeating all aspects of daily life."

• Curated Consumption

  "Millions of consumers following and obeying the new curators of style and taste in an ever growing number of B2C industries. So stop listening to your customers, and tell them what to do!"

A nice bit of counterbalance from the levelheaded folks at PSFK: Is 'Curated Consumption' a Marketer's Lie?

And finally, a book that I've ordered but haven't yet read that seems on point: Communities Dominate Brands, by Alan Moore of the UK marketing consultancy SMLXL.

NerdTV

When I praised Robert X. Cringely as a longtailer a few months ago, I didn't know the half of it. This week he and PBS launched NerdTV, "a whole new kind of TV for niche audiences", which will launch on the web on Sept 6th.

    It's going to start with 13 weekly one-hour freely downloadable shows, featuring such guests as original Macintosh programmer Andy Hertzfeld and Bill Joy, the Sun Microsystems co-founder and the father of Berkeley UNIX. "NerdTV viewers are actually encouraged to download and copy the shows, share them with friends and even post them on their own Web sites - all legally."

    Cringely is the author of Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can't Get a Date, which was based on his rightly famous PBS documentary Triumph of the Nerds.   

   Here, he describes the genesis of the project and why it makes more sense now than it did three years ago, when he first came up with the idea:

What's changed since 2002 is a dramatic expansion of broadband Internet access and a dramatic lowering of both bandwidth and distribution costs.  I make a distinction between bandwidth and distribution expenses because there are technologies like Bit Torrent that can take much of the expense out of video distribution by removing some of the bandwidth demand. I say SOME of the bandwidth demand because Bit Torrent is a fickle lover and if I throw a couple hundred episodes of NerdTV up there, only the most recent are likely to be broadly seeded, meaning the archive distribution costs fall back on me.

Yes, me.

Even with 355 megabits-per-second of Internet bandwidth, PBS can't take a risk of derailing the NewsHour or crippling PBSKids if NerdTV happens to be a surprise hit, so the real heavy lifting for NerdTV will be done through a network of distributed servers I've created as a kind of "poor man's Akamai."  My distribution cost using this system, by the way, works out to be approximately ONE PERCENT of Akamai's retail price, which shows how much profit there is in that business, or should be.

Outstanding.

The Long Tail of videogames

Back to our regularly scheduled programming.... Several commenters have pointed out that Nintendo's next game console, code-named Revolution, has a strong Long Tail aspect to it. It will be backwards compatible with all previous generations of Nintendo game consoles, from the current GameCube to the ancient NES. 

    What's the connection between backwards compatibility and the Long Tail? Well, the reason I haven't used videogames, despite it being a major media category, as a classic Long Tail example is that system compatibility is a major barrier to entry for all but the newest mainstream releases.

    Consoles are the biggest part of the game business (with the PC gaming market shrinking and the Mac market tiny) and the main console makers--Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo--still run that show with an iron fist. They decide which games will be released for their platforms (nominally to ensure quality control, but also to ensure that they get a cut of the revenues). Worse, their hardware enforces geographic region control, so you can't play import games unless you mod your box (voiding the warranty and possibly breaking the law).

    It's a classic bottleneck, even worse than movie theaters, and it has led to a pretty short tail of game offerings, at least compared to other media. However, all that's now changing in at least four ways: 

1. Nintendo's new console will not only be backwards compatible, it will be way backwards compatible. As the release puts it, "The console also will have downloadable access to 20 years of fan-favorite titles originally released for Nintendo 64, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) and even the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)." Thanks to the fact that the original Nintendo Generation is now in their thirties and into 80s nostalgia, retro gaming is hot.  Archives = Long Tail. 


2. Microsoft is doing that one better with its XBox 360, which will have built-in access to an online marketplace that supports microtransactions, so you can buy (and sell?) everything from full games to virtual game characters, clothing, parts and features for as little as a few cents. On-demand game content and custom creations  = Long Tail. 


3. Cellphone gaming is taking off. Although at the moment it suffers from the distribution problem that the carriers (or, as Steve Jobs tastefully describes them, "the orifices") still control what you can download and play on your phone, cellphone games do have the Long Tail advantage of being simple and thus cheap to make. They harken back to the day of the bedroom coder and small teams who could create niche games on the cheap, then for open platforms such as the home computers of the 80s. Over time, the same technological forces that opened the Internet and felled the walled gardens will play out in the mobile market as well. Peer and niche production = Long Tail.


4. "Casual games" are booming. These are mostly quick and simple web-based games, ranging from poker to arcade-style fare, that can be found at such sites as Yahoo games, Real Arcade and Shockwave.com. Unlike the shareware model of independent PC games that was big a decade ago, these games typically don't require a download and install (aside from the common game platform software, such as Flash, that each site uses). This means that the game makers generally don't have to deal with the vagaries of each user's computer configuration, and the game players don't have to worry about viruses and other malware. That lowers the barrier to entry for both parties. Niche content aggregation = Long Tail.

Wired subscription concerns

    I normally don't delve into my day job here, but I'll make an exception today for expediency's sake. On Friday, the SF Chronicle's consumer-rights columnist ran a piece about complaints from Wired subscribers that they were getting threatening letters from a collection agency when they let their subscription lapse.

    The reason turned out to be that they were among the small fraction of our subscribers who signed up for an automatically-renewing subscription under the bill-me option, rather than the usual credit card option, and then didn't send in a $12 check at the end of their billing cycle. They thought, quite reasonably, they were just letting their subscription lapse and were not aware that they had signed up for the auto-renew plan, probably because the details of the subscription plans are not marked as clearly as they could be.

    This was really distressing to hear for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is that sending letters from a collection agency for $12 is a poor way to treat customers. But the good news is that it has clarified a problem that we can fix, and for that we're grateful to the Chronicle.

    Circulation is one of those tangled parts of the magazine industry that's dependent on all sorts of third parties, ranging from the US Postal Service to independent subscription agents, each of which add a layer of uncertain customer service between us and our subscribers. And as a subscriber to loads of other magazines, I know how frustrating that can be. But in this case the problem turns out to be in our own policies, which we're going to change.

    As Joe Timko, the circulation manager, said in the piece, we're going to stop turning over accounts to collection agencies (although these agencies weren't authorized to do anything other than send badgering letters, the wording sounded pretty serious). Although I had heard these complaints before, I had always assumed it was bad behavior from third-party agents, which are a declining fraction of our subscription business. The bad news was finding out that this was actually our own doing (even if it affected just a small percentage of our subscribers); the good news is that this means we can stop it immediately, as we've now done.

    Second, we're going to make it much clearer which subscriptions are automatically renewing and which aren't. We're not going to eliminate the option of an automatically-renewing subscription, because many subscriber prefer those, especially with credit card billing (the only checks I write these days are to renew magazine subscriptions, which always seems like an anachronistic hassle), but what's important is that we ensure that the unsubscribing procedure be quick, simple and painless. No AO-Hell run-arounds.

    Right now, it's not nearly clear enough how to do that (or even to find out if you have an automatically-renewing subscription or not). This week, I'll start working with the Conde Nast circulation department on improving that. Transparency is the key.

    Finally, I'd like to hear directly from anyone who is experiencing problems with their subscription. Although I can't promise a personal reply, I can promise that I'll be forwarding each email to the circulation managers personally and will ensure that they all get reviewed and resolved to the best of our ability. Email me at this address: ca@wiredmag.com.

New sidebar feed

I've been neglecting my "Long Tail comment elsewhere" sidebar a bit, largely because I'm an RSS zealot and loath to invest time in anything that doesn't appear in the feed. But now my friends at Six Apart have let me give you all a preview of an upcoming Typepad feature that will allow you to subscribe to the mainbars and/or sidebars of your favorite Typepad blogs separately.

So if you'd like me to serve as your filter and aggregator of Long Tail comment around the web, just copy the "syndicate this sidebar" link into your favorite feedreader. Hopefully this will inspire me to get off my butt and update the sidebar more regularly. I've got a backlog of about thirty worthy links, which I hope to get to this weekend. 

Objections

    A test of any theory is how many impassioned objections it generates. By that measure, the Long Tail could be doing better, since nobody's really ripped it or me to shreds yet (bring it on!). Indeed, all the best criticism has come in the comments here, where all sorts of sloppy thinking and phrasing on my part have been caught and corrected with remarkable wisdom, insight and civility. Thanks, but where's the fun in that?

    Today, however, brought some hope with one of the more straightforward attempts to refute the theory. It comes from Shelly Palmer, a composer and media consultant (and blogger), Writing in MediaPost (free registration req'd) he calls the Long Tail "a myth", mostly because I've underestimated the costs of making archive material available. Fighting economics with economics is my favorite battle, so let's dive in with an extensive quotation from Palmer's piece:

There is a very real point where marginal cost exceeds marginal gain and it happens very close to the borderline of the top 20 percent of the selections available on the Long Tail. So, in essence, the Big Hump [his phrase, unfortunately based on a statistical misunderstanding, for Pareto's 80-20 rule] is still the appropriate model for investors and content owners to follow.

Take a movie that already exists. Retain counsel (internal or external) to get all of the appropriate clearances for reduction of the work to the final form factor - ones and zeros. Rent a film chain and color correction suite for the day. Make a 4K file of the entire movie. Down-convert it to every usable format for current distribution and then create files in every resolution required from 56k up.

Now the fun starts. Create meta-tags and descriptions that are meaningful to search engines so people can find the work. Add a DRM (digital rights management) wrapper, so you can get paid. Come on, take a guess... how much have we spent on this single title? Call it $15,000 sitting on a server ready to go. Now remember, we don't know who wants to watch this movie, we are just sure that in time, every movie will be watched according to the Zipfian distribution. Add the cost of money to this equation and multiply by every title in your library. Still sound like a good idea?

I didn't think so. You probably want to do an analysis to determine which movies are the best investments: Which will bring the best return in the shortest time frame? In other words, you will apply the Big Hump to the Long Tail to determine if your content is worth encoding at all.

But isn't the Long Tail an accurate way to look at content usage? Yes, it is. It's just not a profitable way to look at a back catalog that was not created with the Long Tail in mind. It is never less expensive than in the original edit suite. But after the fact, there are very real costs associated with encoding and storage. When you calculate those costs and the cost of capital, the value chain (or lack thereof) is clear.

So, as it has been for time immemorial, the Big Hump is the clear winner for modeling return on investment in the information age or any other. No disrespect intended to those who have been spinning the tale of the Long Tail.

    Sigh. Not as bruising as I'd hoped. There are some good points here, but unfortunately they're in the minority, largely because Palmer sees the Long Tail from too narrow a perspective.

    First, it's a trivial point but let's correct the math. A Pareto distribution is not a bell curve, but is instead another long tail curve that looks pretty much like a Zipf or any other powerlaw.

Pareto distribution

Bell curve (aka "normal distribution")

    Second, the Long Tail is about more than just archives and back catalogs. As I mentioned in the previous post, less than 1% of the CDs currently available are sold at Wal-Mart, which also carries less than 3% of the new music released each year. That's not stuff moldering away in some archive; that's music still on the market, even though only a tiny fraction of it is available in traditional retail. iTunes, Amazon, Rhapsody and their ilk didn't have to look very far to add a few orders of magnitude to the average consumer's range of choice.

    And that's just entertainment media. There's also the Long Tail of advertising, physical goods, software, people and all the new independent and peer-production content that's now being made because there are ways for it to reach a market or at least an audience. The notion of an archive isn't even meaningful for most of those. Lesson: the Long Tail isn't just about Hollywood.

    Third, the example Palmer gives of wrapping old movies in DRM and making them available online is indeed a pretty poor Long Tail economic model, largely for the reasons he gives. But that's not the only way to tap the potential of a movie archive. A much better one is to distribute DVDs via a Long Tail retailer like Netflix.

    Take Sony's $5 billion deal to buy MGM last year. Why did they pay so much? According to the video trade press, "Sony is buying MGM chiefly for its rich catalog of classic movies and plans to exploit that catalog however it can." DVD sales are the fastest growing part of the movie business, and lend themselves to any number of Long Tail distribution models. Just ask the guy who built a huge business in $1 DVDs of old movies, somehow avoiding most of the costs Palmer describes. Maybe Palmer doesn't see DVDs as part of Long Tail distribution. If so, he has either misunderstood the concept or has some good reason for discounting DVDs that he unfortunately hasn't described.

    Finally, most of the costs Palmer enumerates don't apply to other media, such as music or books or even most modern TV and other video. All of them have far more friendly Long Tail economics, either because they're already digital or can easily be converted. Perhaps Palmer has a reason for discounting them, too, but again he hasn't given it. If anyone takes a better swing at the theory, I'll be sure to share all the gory details here. Hope springs eternal.

Updated music data

    I thought it would be interesting to go back to Rhapsody, the commercial music service that had been my canonical Long Tail example, and see how its statistics had changed in the year since I last looked at the data. It was. All the trends we saw a year ago are now even more pronounced.

    Rhapsody's usage has nearly tripled over that period and its inventory has grown from 700,000 to 1m tracks. At the same time, its Short Tail (offline) counterpart, Wal-Mart, which accounts for a quarter of US music sales (by far the largest source) has reduced the shelf space it gives to CDs to make more room for DVDs. So the Short Tail has gotten shorter, and the Long Tail has gotten longer.

    A year ago we estimated that the average Wal-Mart carried 5,000 CDs, for a total of around 60,000 tracks. Now our latest count shows just 4,200 CDs, for a total of about 50,000 tracks (nearly a third of them Latina music), compared to Rhapsody's 1m. Note that Amazon lists at least 800,000 CDs, so Wal-Mart carries just 0.5% of the music inventory available, a figure that continues to shrink.

    The result of these two trends--online expanding, offline contracting--is that the market is shifting even more towards niches. Last year music that wasn't available at Wal-Mart accounted for 23% of Rhapsody's business. Now that's 28%. Some of this is due to the statistical effect of Wal-Mart carrying fewer CDs and the vertical line below shifting to the left, but even at last year's level Rhapsody is seeing demand shift gradually towards the niches (its 50% line, where half the demand is ahead and half is below, has shifted from rank 12,000 to 12,500). Last year's demand curve is shown as the dotted blue line inside the current demand curve.

    The data, in somewhat prettied-up form, follows:

The interesting afterlife of a bad TV show

    About a year ago, Frontline did a documentary called "The Way the Music Died". Apparently it wasn't very good, but it remains notable for two things:

1. An insight into the collapsing channel of the traditional music business (rock radio is evaporating, MTV doesn't play much music anymore, and retailers are carrying fewer and fewer CDs).
   
2. A fantastic example of Long Tail TV.

    Although the documentary's moment on broadcast is gone, it lives on as a website that not only offers the entire documentary in streaming format, but also has the full transcripts of all the interviews, lots of background info and, amazingly, excerpts from some of the most withering press reviews I've read. Example:

"The venerable PBS documentary series Frontline makes a rare -- and, unfortunately, entirely unintentional -- foray into comedy tonight with The Way the Music Died, a ludicrous look at the recording industry."

    Wow. Once upon a time, that would have been the end of it. I'd read the review, wouldn't watch the show, and it would be gone. But because PBS decided to let it have an afterlife on the web, things got interesting.

    I found the documentary because someone linked to some statistics quoted by David Gottlieb, former head of RCA music marketing, that are relevant to the Long Tail:

"The year after I started working at the record label, as an industry, we put out 6,000 releases. I think last year it was about 35,000. So in 12, 14 years, it expanded 600 percent."

"For the big stores -- the Best Buys, the Targets, the Wal-Marts -- who are the bulk of our business -- those three accounts alone are 50 percent of our sales -- we're nothing to them. There's a great stat that music is one-tenth of 1 percent of all of Wal-Mart's gross revenues. So we're the smallest tadpole in the Wal-Mart pond, yet they're the most important thing in the world to us. And Best Buy is not much different. I think we're 3 to 5 percent of their overall revenue. So if music disappeared out of some of these stores, they're not really going to feel it. But if we disappeared out of their stores, we would feel it."

"The music section at Wal-Mart is, you know, a third of the size of this office, maybe half the size of this office. It's tiny. Out of the 30,000 records that get released every year, they probably have 750 titles."

    Had this been just another TV show, I never would had seen that. The website includes interview material that didn't make the final cut, so even if Google or Yahoo video searches (which scan the closed-caption text) were to eventually get all of Frontline, which they haven't yet, they wouldn't have found it. Instead, by bundling the show, the promotion around the show, press coverage and overmatter into a well-designed website and leaving it there indefinitely for the search engines to find, Frontline reached an audience it never would have had before. 

    PBS may be struggling, but you've got to hand them this: they're making the most of their archive. Along with the music documentary, PBS has more than 50 other full-length Frontline shows, along with web-only supporting material, online. Many are on DVD, too. I don't see much of a future for PBS on broadcast in competition with 400 commercial channels, but it continues to be a pathblazer in Long Tail television. Someday all TV networks will do things this way.