The Long Tail

The Long Tail of Time

Why are some things less popular than others? There are lots of reasons, of course, but the two I've been focusing on most in my research are the breadth of their appeal and their age. Things of broad appeal tend to sell better than things of narrow appeal. And new things tend to sell better than old things.

If you've been reading any of my work you'll know that I'm quick to emphasize that there's little connection between those two factors and the underlying quality of the product in question or the extent to which someone will be satisfied by it. Indeed, I argue that products aimed at narrow audiences, while not for everyone, tend to satisfy that minority that they're aimed at better than one-size-fits-all fare (think niche blogs or documentary films). And older products that still come up in recommendations are often those that have passed the test of time (classics).

When you look at a basic demand curve, the reasons why some things sell less well than others are lost in the merged rankings. Popularity is a multi-dimension thing: factors that determine an album's rankings, for instance, can include not just the quality of the music but also its genre, its release date, the fame and/or nationality of the band, similarity to other artists and so on. But it's all lost in the single dimension of a bestseller list, which obscures all that in a mushed-together melange of apples and oranges. (You can read my earlier rant about popularity lists here.)

The following is a conceptual chart of the primary factor accounting for a song's position pretty far down a demand curve. As you can see, looking at popularity alone it's hard to tell whether something isn't very popular because it's of narrow interest or because it's old (or any combination thereof, although I've only shown those two for simplicity's sake):

If you tease apart those two dimensions, you'll get something like the following (again, the lines are just conceptual; different markets will exhibit different actual shapes):

Or, to put it another way, you can plot those two dimensions in quadrants like this (darker = more sales):

I'm still wrestling with how to visualize the actual topology of the surface connecting those two dimensions. I suspect it's kind of a spout shape, but without actual data I'm just guessing.

If you disregard quality, a rough equation of popularity might go like this:

Sales = Breadth of Appeal/Age

...where Breadth of Appeal goes from 100 (% of the population) to 0 and Age goes from 1 to infinity. So if something is of broad appeal and brand new that's 100/1 = sales factor 100. If it's niche and new that might be 10/1 = sales factor 10, which happens to be about as popular as something of broad appeal but older (100/10 = 10). And so on. Totally oversimplified, but it's a start.

Complicating matters, Kevin Kelly reminds me that "the fun thing, of course, is that narrow things can become broader as they age (Mississippi blues, which I would bet are more popular now then at their birth), or start broad when young and narrow as they age (opera)."

So there's lots here for the math geeks to chew on. Meanwhile, I'd love to hear any other ideas of better ways to visualize the many dimensions of popularity.

UPDATE: I thought about it a bit more and roughed out the following conceptual topology. Now to crunch some actual data and see if reality fits the theory:

The TV broadcasting business stinks

Terry Heaton says "Broadcasting is an industry in deep trouble, and it will take innovation and integrity to save it from a real disaster." He then shows the stock charts over the past year for the 12 publicly listed companies that own TV stations. While the number of lines going south is striking, it's a bit hard to see them in context that way. So I've re-run the numbers and expressed them below in percentage terms.

(Note: some of these companies, such as Gannett and the New York Times company, are primarily in the newspaper business, although they also own some TV stations. But since Terry listed them I'm also including them here for the sake of completeness.)

Stock performance over the past 12 months:

• Belo (BLC):  -11.6%
• Emmis (EMS):  +8.7% 
• Fisher (FSCI):  -3.1% 
• Gannett (GCI):  -24.2% 
• Gray (GTN):  -38% 
• Hearst-Argyle (HTV):  -6.9% 
• Media General (MEG):  -17% 
• Meredith (MDP):   -2.4% 
• New York Times (NYT):  -30.7% 
• Sinclair (SBGI):  +29.1% 
• Tribune (TRB):  -24.8% 
• Young (YBTVA):  -80.2%

-------------------------------
        Average: -16.8%
        Dow:      +4%

Thanks to Lost Remote for the pointer.

"The Movies": machinima for the rest of us

    I'm finishing the Long Tail Producers chapter and spending more time researching machinima as an example of what can happen when the tools of film production are really democratized. The promise of machinima is to put a Pixar in every home, just like GarageBand and its kin put a recording studio on every desktop. We're not quite there yet, but it's getting closer.

    The problem with standard machinima based on first-person-shooter game engines is that you're painting with an incredibly limited palette, both in terms of the characters and settings and in what you can do with them. There's a reason why all the Halo 2 movies are about space marines fighting aliens or each other. The Sims 2 was the first effort to make a game based on a more realistic setting machinima-friendly, and the result was The Strangerhood. But even that's hard to control, and prepping for a scene can take hours.

    Which is why my kids and I were really looking forward to The Movies, a new game/machinima studio from Peter Molyneux, the legendary games designer of Black & White fame. We've now had a few weeks to play with it, and it's really quite wonderful.

    At its core, it's a SimStudio game, where you have to build a Hollywood studio, operate it, make movies and the rest of the usual Sim-style resource management stuff. That's fun enough, but the really interesting bit is the "Sandbox" mode, where you can make your own movies, pretty much from scratch.

    You choose from a wide variety of sets, costumes and, best of all, pre-animated micro-scenes ("Walk in with ax", "Discover body"; "Slip on banana peel") many of which can be tweaked with more or less tension, humor, or whatever makes sense in context. You pick pre-created actors or create your own with the usual facial modeling tools. Then you string all these together in a storyboard with some gentle plot and pacing assistance, and when you're done "filming" you can type in your dialog as subtitles or record a voice-over in a sophisticated post-production studio.

    We're having a great time with this, mostly trying to replicate the kids' favorite The Movies movie, Attack of the Space Chickens (but minus the kissing part). The only hitch is that you've got to play the main studio sim game from the 1920s to the current era to unlock all the costumes and sets and that's way too much trouble for us. So far we're in the mid 1930s, and have unlocked a Gorilla and Robot costume to go with the usual array of outfits less amusing to small children. I have no idea when the Chicken costume will appear, although I hope it's soon for domestic harmony's sake.

    I wish Lionhead would release a stand-alone Sandbox version that has all the assets available from the start. Perhaps there's some cheat code that does this, but the one I found doesn't do the trick. Anybody know a better way?

    Meanwhile, we're not the only ones to see The Movies as a machinima breakthrough. Loads of people are uploading their own films, ranging from light comedies to politics. Speaking of which, check out Clive Thompson's post on the French machinimists who used The Movies to create a commentary on the recent riots. As Clive notes, "The raw DIY feel of this project is more punk rock than anything anyone's done with music in about 20 years." I agree: there's something really interesting going on here.

Machinima 202: Losing the targeting reticle

Two months ago I posted on the fantastic Codex Series, a machinima movie made on Halo 2 (which subsequently won a bunch of awards). It was my kids' favorite movie for a while, and after the director, Alexander Winn, kindly sent us a CD of the soundtrack, that became their favorite album, too. But the great thing about machinima is that the act of watching it is an inspiration to make some yourself.

So my eight-year-old and I got set up to recreate one of the scenes from the Codex. I was stunned by how intuitively he got the somewhat complicated mechanics of machinima. For instance, for a scene with N actors, you need N+1 players, because one has to be the camera (the six-year-old came in handy; when she got bored, she was replaced by my foot). Also, you need to choreograph the scene carefully--it's so easy to move quickly in Halo 2 that if you don't practice all the moves and camera placement one or more of the actors will find themselves bouncing off-screen.

The trickiest part, however, was turning off the targeting reticle, that circle at the center of the screen where your gun is aiming. Proper machinima shouldn't look exactly like a videogame, and turning off the heads-up-display elements is a big part of achieving that. We Googled a bit and couldn't find the answer, so we asked the master, Alexander Winn himself, for advice.

Here's what he told us. (Note: the following is for hardcore machinimists only, and I'm actually just posting it so the next people who Google with the same question will find it.):

Ah yes, the reticle.  Here's the explanation, but keep in mind that it sounds a lot harder than it is...

Set the starting weapons to whatever you want them to be, but make sure that the "Weapons on map" settings include Plasma Pistols and that the gametype is either Assault, Oddball or Capture the Flag.  With the cameraman, drop one gun for a Plasma Pistol, and then dual wield with the other slot.  (So, for example, you have a plasma pistol in one slot and in the other you're dual wielding two SMGs). 

Walk over another plasma pistol and hold X, (NOT Y, X!!!), and you'll switch the plasma pistol to your right hand.  Drop the gun in your left, and you'll have a plasma pistol in each hand. Once you've done that, walk over to the special object, (bomb, ball or flag), and charge up the plasma pistol.  While it's charged, try to pick up the object.  You should drop both, leaving you with only one plasma pistol.  Do the same thing again, and you'll be weaponless.

NOTE:  Being weaponless in the Halo 2 engine is "unnatural", meaning that you'll pick up a gun if you walk over one and you'll have to do the whole process again.  So be careful where you step!

So there you have it. As it happens, my son and I didn't get much further in our Halo 2 movie anyway, because we found an even easier way to do machinima. But that will be the subject of the next post...

Standing out in a commodity crowd

    This week, as the number of RSS feeds I subscribe to crossed 150 (accounting for several hundred posts a day and at least an hour of reading time), I took a moment to look at what I've signed up for and why.

    Aside from a few purely information feeds, such as new Netflix releases, most of what I read online is blogs. (You can see my current subscriptions here.) I don't visit any mainstream media sites directly (and in print, I only read the Sunday New York Times and a load of magazines). If there's something relevant to my interests in the Wall Street Journal, the daily NYT or some other news site, I assume one of the blogs I read will point me to it.

    This is not to say that I don't value mainstream media; I do. It's just that I'd rather choose my own editor to select the articles of highest importance to me (including those the mainstream media choose not to cover at all, or just not well). In this case that "editor" is a network of bloggers, not whomever decides what makes it to the front page of the newspaper. This works so well that I suspect I'm actually reading more articles from mainstream media, and from a broader range of it, than ever before. It's just all via blogs, which microchunk and remix the information in ways that make it more useful to me.

    [Yes, I know that I'm an editor-in-chief in my day job, and, no, I don't find this contradictory. There's a role for multiple levels of editing and filtering, both before publication and after--what I call pre-filtering and post-filtering. My job is to be a pre-filter, but I know that this isn't enough. For our stories to have maximum impact, the post-filters, mostly influential bloggers, have to find value in what we've done and bring it to the attention of their readers. I control part of the attention chain, but the wise crowd controls the rest.]

    What all these blogs that have earned their way to my feed list are doing is adding value to commodity information. The ones I'm reading do this in at least one of three main ways:

1. Add value with a unique perspective or analysis.
2. Add value with unique information.
3. Add value by providing a unique filter/lens on content available elsewhere.

    This is not just a smart strategy for blogs; it's a smart strategy for any content creator in an era where the tools of production and distribution are fully democratized and the marketplace is flooded with commodity competition.

    For instance, magazines such as my own have the same challenge. We don't compete with any single other magazine or media source; we compete with the entire Internet--the sum total of all news, opinion and information from any source, from professional media to well-informed amateurs and everything in-between.

    The magazines that have a place in this world, despite the massive competition and the costs and delays of publishing on paper (in addition to online, of course), are those that offer something you can't get elsewhere. They do one or more of the following:

1. Add value with unique perspective or analysis (above and beyond what's already out there).
2. Add value with unique information (often obtained through the privileged access still afforded the mainstream media).
3. Add value with unique presentation, especially using immersive forms that don't work well on-screen, such as long-form narrative and lavish packaging (including photography, infographics and other design elements).

    It's not easy to do this well, which is why I imagine we'll see fewer successful magazines in the future than we have today. But it's not impossible, and the magazines that do thrive in the Friedmanesque Flat World of ultimate competition and commodification will be those that are genuinely differentiated, not just those who can buy ink by the barrel and glossy paper by the roll.

    Finally, I find it interesting that the word "subscribe" applies equally to both blogs and magazines, and that the success strategies for each are, at least at the level described above, so similar. I think the common factor is that a "subscription" requires an active gesture on the part of the reader--an invitation to come back often--that crosses some significant threshold of cost, in money and/or time. That's a big deal and it's hard to achieve. But attempting to get there brings out the best in editors and bloggers alike.

The effect of P2P file-sharing depends on popularity

A fascinating paper from David Blackburn, a Harvard PhD student, on the economics of P2P file-sharing concludes that it does indeed depress music sales overall. But the effect is not felt evenly. The hits at the top of the charts lose sales, but the niche artists further down the popularity curve actually benefit from file-trading.

Blackburn does a little mathematical magic to simulate what would happen if file-trading were reduced by 30%. [As you read, visualize the powerlaw curve that I use as my blog's logo: "leftward" means towards the hits and greater sales.].

[From page 32] In this counterfactual world with 30% less file sharing, the lower 75% of the distribution of sales is shifted further to the left, while the top of the distribution increases its sales. This is what should be expected given the estimates from above. Artists who are unknown, and thus most helped by file sharing, are those artists who sell relatively few albums, whereas artists who are harmed by file sharing and thus gain from its removal, the popular ones, are the artists whose sales are relatively high.

This conclusion leads to further questions regarding the impacts that file sharing has had and will have on the recorded music industry. In particular, if file sharing essentially shifts sales away from established acts toward unknown acts, this has potentially very important implications for how talent is developed and distributed in the industry. As with the simple short-run effects of file sharing on sales, the direction of the impact is not clear. While one might guess that increasing the sales of new acts would lead to more investment in developing new talent, it is also possible that the investment in new acts is done as a fishing expedition to find artists who will sell millions of records. File sharing is reducing the probability that any act is able to sell millions of records, and if the success of the mega-star artists is what drives the investment in new acts, it might reduce the incentive to invest in new talent. This is, at its heart, an empirical question which is left to future work.

The data follows, but first a little explanation. The 1% line refers to the sales of the least popular albums; the 99% line is the sales of the most popular. The third column is the calculated sales if file-sharing were reduced by 30%. As you can see from the below, that would help the sales in the top 25% of popularity, and hurt those below. Which is another way of saying that file-trading seems to help those in the bottom three-quarters of popularity, probably for the reasons stated above.

Percentile | Actual Sales | Sales with 30% less file-sharing 
1%                73             70
5%                170            166
10%               281            277
25%               757            745
50%               2,852          2,851
75%               10,110         9,831
90%               26,531         26,934
95%               45,255         47,357
99%               133,983        165,054

The Long Tail implications of this are pretty clear. For the majority of artists further down the tail, free distribution is good marketing, with a net positive effect on sales. Which is yet another reminder that the rules are all too often made to protect the minority of artists at the top of the curve, not most artists overall.

Thanks to Miscellaneous Factz for the pointer.

First take: XBox 360 Media Center extender

Thanks to my cool day job, I got an early Xbox 360 and spent some time today running it through its paces. I'll leave the reviews of the release-day games to others (although I found Amped 3, a top-notch snowboarding game,  to be delightfully off-beat and stylish, with loads of 8-bit and retro design touches to counterbalance the slick graphics of the main game). I was looking at it more as a digital home enabler.

Given my interest in the Media Center PC as a Long Tail video platform, I was particularly interested in how well it worked as a Media Center "extender", serving as the link between one of the TVs scattered around our house and the Windows Media Center PC running in the study that serves as our media library and DVR.

The simple answer is very well indeed. We'd been using the original Xbox as an extender, but it was always a somewhat clunky solution. For starters, the extender software required a disk to be loaded each time, so if there happened to be a game disk in the machine already, switching them was an extra step. The Xbox also had to be turned on and off manually, an artifact of the fact that it's basically just a regular PC in a closed box.

The Xbox 360, on the other hand, has the extender software built-in, and the remote control included with the "fully-loaded" package has a dedicated green Media Center button that both turns on the Xbox 360 and takes it directly to the Media Center interface. The remote can also turn the machine off, which is handy.

Performance, unsurprisingly, is significantly quicker. It boots up faster, connects to the Media Center a bit sooner, and the on-screen interface is more responsive and crisp. It's not all perfect: although the Xbox 360 supports HDTV-resolution games, it doesn't yet support streaming HDTV video [correction: it does stream high-def video, but the Media Center DVR can only record  HDTV from over-the-air broadcasts (is someone out there actually watching those?) right now. See this for more. The following will no doubt extend that to recording HDTV from digital cable, which is how most people get it.]. But Microsoft's recent deal to include digital cable card support in the Media Center may bring that soon.

Interestingly, you don't need to have a PC running Windows Media Center edition to get some of this functionality. The Xbox 360 has its own music player (complete with trippy visualizations from the famed Jeff Minter) that can stream music and photos from any Windows XP PC.

I suspect that the release of the Xbox 360 is going to be one of two breakthrough events that take the Media Center concept mainstream. The 360 is a mass-market device (the original Xbox sold 22m units worldwide, and the Xbox 360 will presumably do better than that) that is built from the ground up to distribute digital content around the house. Having a Media Center extender built into a hot videogame console will go a long way to legitimizing that concept.

The second breakthrough event will be the release of Microsoft's next version of Windows, Vista, which will come with the Media Center technology as a default in the home version (although they better fix the interface before they release it). Already about half of new PCs are sold with the Media Center version of Windows (although most don't come with TV tuners, so they're probably not used as DVRs). Analysts project that 5m such Media Centers were sold this year, a figure that will double next year. Once Vista comes out, perhaps in late 2006, that could rise severalfold.

Between these two forces--the inclusion of Media Center software in most new PCs and the spread of tens of millions of Media Center extenders in the form of videogame consoles--it's not hard to see the Media Center becoming the leading DVR/streaming standard in a few years. Its rise is also helped by the fact that it's both a relatively open platform on which other companies can create software and services, and it supports more standard media formats than the closed-box DVRs of TiVo or DirectTV or the proprietary technology of cable company set-top boxes.

I never thought I'd say this, but by the standards in this industry Microsoft is actually looking relatively innovative (Apple is playing catch-up with Front Row, but until it comes up with its own version of the extender concept to distribute content easily to TVs around the house, it won't have broad appeal).

What's important about the Media Center is that it takes the DVR concept and extends it to all forms of content, whether broadcast or downloaded from the Web. By having a broadband-connected PC at its core, it's by nature a full-featured connected device that can keep up with the pace of innovation in digital media online. If the Xbox 360 and the new content marketplaces of its associated Xbox Live service continue to take off, we really could have the beginnings of a Long Tail platform that could challenge broadcast TV.

A Long Tail strategy for Arrested Development

Lost Remote suggests that Arrested Development should stop struggling to fit into Fox's mass-appeal broadcast model (it's perpetually at risk of cancellation, which now looks more likely than ever) and instead embrace a Long Tail strategy that better suits its niche appeal:

Here’s what "Arrested Development" and its producers should do once they are are free of the network shackles and retake ownership:

Offer the show online and on VOD every week for free

Make it a free video podcast  

Seed Bittorrent with it.

Set up a site that has all the shows right there, along with shorter-form content, ready to watch or download in all formats

Have the cast blog - in character. Have them do video blogs and even live webcasts in character, too

After each show, have viewers comment and then address their comments. Invite the best commenters to have a guest spot on the show

Heck - invite fans to shoot their own fan-fic shows. Celebrate “AD” as the first open-source sitcom

Web contests: “GET ARRESTED”! “George Bluth is hiding somewhere on the web. Clues are available both online and at geocaching locations. Find him, and you’ll be on a show - and not just in a cameo role - as the man who caught George!”

Find a title sponsor, but for just enough money to make a dent in your budget.

Then comes the money:

“Arrested Development” is already a proven, strong DVD seller. Put out DVDs with all the extra content you’ve created on the web. Don’t wait until after the season is done: put out a month’s worth of shows every four weeks on one DVD.

After four weeks, the video podcast version will cost 99 cents. The VOD version will be 49 cents after the initial month, for the rest of the year. After that, older episodes will be just a quarter.

Invite premium membership on your site for unlimited archival access and free podcast downloads, in addition to direct access via chats with stars. Auction walk-on parts on eBay

It will be a phenomenal success. There is one warning, however: “Arrested Development” will make so much money that the networks will try to woo it back. Under no circumstances should the show make that mistake.

Great post; great blog. If you're into the future of TV, it's well worth subscribing to its feed.

Is Jack FM the Long Tail of radio?

In an email, Anil Dash asks a good question:

I've been following the rise of Jack FM a lot lately... It's alleged to be the fastest growing new broadcast format in radio today (I think that honor might actually go to latin radio, but it's certainly one of the most popular), based on the idea of pulling the songs played from a much longer playlist and having no DJs. Thought this might be interesting as an attempt by the notoriously conservative radio industry  trying to adopt long tail-influenced techniques.

The flagship station for the format is here, but you can see that it's been adopted all over (here's the Wikipedia article)

The radio metrics groups classify the stations as Variety Hits, and they draw from 1000+ songs for the playlist, vs. the flagship Clear Channel stations (like New York's Z100), which I believe recently had a rotation playlist as short as 80  songs, their site lists fewer than 30!

My response: Jack does seem to be a nod in the Long Tail direction, but I can't imagine it will do more than slow the decline of music radio.

The main problem with radio is not the relatively small size of the playlists (although that doesn't help); it's that music is polarizing--people may like one song but hate the next, so they're prone to switch stations or switch off entirely. As MTV found out a decade ago, there simply is no single playlist that can keep enough people listening long enough to please the advertisers. MTV switched to reality shows because they're sticky. Radio is switching to talk for the same reason.

Compared to personalized playlists (iPods), a choice of hundreds of narrow-targeted playlists (satellite) and just talking to friends on the phone, even the stations with the most diverse playlists are chronically limited. It is the curse of broadcast: with just a few dozen stations in each city, most must aggregate audiences in the tens of thousands. In an era of infinite choice and narrowcasting, such mass-market broadcast distribution--the ultimate one-size-fits-all model--just can't compete.

So far the jury is out on Jack. Some stations are doing well with the format, others aren't showing as much improvement. Sean Ross at Edison Media Research gives a sample of the mixed results:

KCJK (Jack FM) Kansas City posted a good first book 12-plus, a flat second book, and bigger than ever third and fourth books. By now, KPKX (the Peak) Phoenix, WWJK (Jack FM) Jackson, Miss., and WPYA (Bob FM) Norfolk, Va., have all been up, down, and back up again. And we’ve also seen relatively late bloomers, such as WDRQ and KYCH (Charlie FM) Portland, Ore., although what that meant was taking four months to kick in, instead of two. Sometimes, the timing seems to have more to do with when the TV marketing starts than with how long a station has been on the air.

Meanwhile rock radio overall continues to lose share. This year an average of one rock radio station a week has been going out of business, usually replaced by talk or Latino). Most just can't get enough traction to strongly reverse their slide, regardless of the format. Music radio is fighting technological and generational change, not just taste.

I grew up in an era where radio largely determined music culture and was by far the strongest marketing vehicle for new artists, but I suspect that my kids won't think of radio as a music medium at all. Given the numbing effect of Casey Kasem and America's Top 40 on my adolescence and early music taste, this may be no bad thing.

Friday Fanboy: the Zen Micro + Rhapsody To Go

I really wanted an iPod Nano, I did. It's a triumph of industrial design, a delight to hold, and the sweet deal Apple got from Samsung for the 4GB SRAM chips is a tribute to the power of monopsony (don't tell the South Korean FTC). In terms of hardware alone, I think it's pretty clearly the best portable music player on the market right now.

But instead I bought a 6GB Creative Zen Micro. Why? Three words: Rhapsody To Go.

For all the genius engineering of the iPod Nano, its functionality is largely determined by the iTunes software and music service, which really leaves me cold. It may be the most popular music service, but it is far from the most fully-featured. Compared to Rhapsody, iTunes has bare-bones artist descriptions, few editorial reviews or much other useful metadata, an unhelpfully broad single-level genre hierarchy and lame recommendations. Plus the over-restrictive DRM in its AAC files makes even Microsoft's WMA look good.

On top of that, I prefer Rhapsody's all-you-can-eat subscription model to iTunes' $0.99/track downloads. For $8.25 a month (on the yearly plan), I can listen to all the music I want from the 1m+ tracks the service offers. As a result I'm far more inclined to explore new bands and genres, something that's now fun, easy and risk-free. I'm even starting to feel a little cool again.

So the main reason for not choosing a Nano is that I didn't want to leave Rhapsody and the ability to stream unlimited music. But the reason for choosing the Zen Micro in particular had to do with a newish feature that I was keen to try, extending that all-you-can-eat subscription model to a portable music player.

A regular Rhapsody subscription allows you to store any tracks, even those you don't own, on your PC so you can access them even when you're not online, such on your laptop on a plane (as long as you continue to subscribe to the service). But the Rhapsody To Go option, at another $5 a month, allows you to copy them to a portable device so you can carry them anywhere.
Right now there aren't many MP3 players that support this, but the Zen Micro is clearly the best of those that do.

Charlie Owen has posted on his own research and logic in choosing the Zen Micro over the iPod Nano. Among the factors that influenced him was the cost per capacity, which he summarized with this:

• 2GB iPod Nano = $99.50 per GB
• 4GB iPod Nano = $62.25 per GB
• 6GB Creative Zen Micro = $33.17 per GB

My own reasons included the Micro's small size, intuitive controls and interface, and USB 2.0 data transfer and recharging, which meant fast loading and no extra charger.

So now I've got a cool black Zen Micro. It's loaded up with 2,000 cool (and legal) tracks that I didn't have to pay for. (That's $2,000 worth of iTunes music.) Maybe next month it will be a different 2,000 tracks. And another 2,000 the month after that. All for an extra $60 a year. Cool.