Music sales falling in the Head, rising in the Tail

Larry Lessig pointed me to an interesting bit of research on filesharing and the decline of music sales in Denmark, which shows that the fall in sales has been felt far more in the hits than in the niches. The work, by Claus Pedersen, uses data from the Nordic Copyright Bureau. That means the data are not just estimates of sales declines, but actual sales. I've charted one aspect of the research, which looks at the change in sales in four sales categories, from bestsellers to the long tail:

A summary of the paper was translated by Marie Elisabeth Pade Andersen. You can read it here.

Comments

[Jeremy Clark]

Chris,

Just FYI: I was listening to a podcast from GMU on Wine and e-Commerce. It was a panel discussion, and an audience member asked specifically about your long tail Wired article and how it relates to the online Wine market. I'm not sure the panel understood the question but you might be interested in their response.

The MP3 is here:
http://tlinscott.cachefly.net/WinePanel.mp3

The question is at 1:04:55

[Barry Ritholtz]

This is an extremely important finding, and parallels my own research into how the recording industry is declining.

It also provides some insight into how the recording industry can save itself (if only its clever enoguh to do so).

BTW, I am halfway thru the book -- and enjoying it a great deal.

BR

[Brugte biler]

was a panel discussion, and an audience member asked specifically about your long tail Wired article and how it relates to the online Wine market. It also provides some insight into how the recording industry can save itself (if only its clever enoguh to do so).

[eAgent]

Hi Chris,

I've been tracking the recording industry, and specifically the condition of declining album (hard media) sales to "soft" media sales and distribution.

I've found that in some ways it very closely parallels software pirating issues in general: People who pirate are often not my clients. Sure, they may use my software (or software in general), but overall, they're not my "customer", because if they were, over time they would purchase.

And guess what? They do. Certainly not all of them, but overall, we get enough people "upgrading" to the paid version, even if they were currently using an unpaid-for pirated and fully-functioning version up to the point of their purchase.

Cool, huh?

Janis Ian has a phenomenal commentary on her web site addressing the very same issue that is certainly worth a read. She happens to believe that pirating of songs via download sites does as much for long-tail dynamics of her catalog than almost any other method. I definitely recommend this article to anyone addressing this issue:

http://www.janisian.com/article-internet_debacle.html

Thanks for the great book, by the way. David McInnis of www.PRWeb.com picked it up and has made the term "Long Tail" a part of the company vernacular. Good stuff.

Best,
Mark Alan Effinger
RichContent.com

[Earl Mardle]

Just one point about the chart Chris.

The ranges are
>150k
50k-150k
10k-50k

and strangely, <50k

Shouldn't that be <10k?

Otherwise the chart is not a series.

However, thanks for tracing down the hard proof.

[Chris Anderson]

Earl,

Good catch. I typed a number into Excel wrong. It's now fixed.

Best,

Chris