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:

Comments

[bob dowling]

chris i tihnk this theory relates to every intelectual property industry and highlights the significance of editors in every discipine of entertainment

[Matt Hulbert]

I'm not a regular at Wal-Mart, but I don't think they carry 5,000 *albums* but 5,000 *cd's*. 15 copies of Britney Spear's latest album only counts as one, doesn't it?

[chris anderson]

Matt,

Good clarification--I should have been more precise in my wording. By my count the average Wal-Mart carries about 4,200 *unique titles*. There are often multiple copies of each.

[Robert Sherrod]

Aren't Walmart's 80,000 CDs in their online store part of the long tail. Why do you only focus on the 4,000 titles in their brick-and-mortar outlets?

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