Does the Long Tail work for mobile music?

Apparently not, at least not with the current generation of phones that make music discovery difficult. From our Listening Post blog:

Frank Taubert, CEO of 24/7 Entertainment, which provides 4.5 million songs to a wide variety of digital music services including the unlimited mobile music services Omnifone, toldPopkomm attendees on Monday  that a full 66 percent of those songs had never been purchased or downloaded -- not even once.

So does that say something about the limitations of devices or does it reflect consumer demand? It appears it's more the former. Online, with all the tools of the web (search, sample, recommend, and other social tools), the Long Tail is alive and well, according to eMusic, who responded to Taubert's data to say that their own experience was very different.

Three quarters of eMusic's entire four million track catalog sells at least once every year, or to put it another way, we sell more than 50% of our catalog at least once every quarter," according to Madeleine Milne, Managing Director of eMusic Europe. "Music discovery on mobile devices may not be supporting long tail sales but the new digital music consumer is web savvy, and turns to social networks, blogs and the web to find out about new music. This is further evidenced by Entertainment Media Research's Digital Music Report 2008.

The lesson? More evidence that a Long Tail without good filters is just noise.

Comments

[Elisa]

Hi Chris,

I'm studying for an exam on your book. Congratulations for your work. Moreover thelongtail.com seems very interesting!

[Rachael]

Thanks for the information...I bookmarked your site, and I appreciate your time and effort to make your blog a success!

[bksmyth]

I suspect these numbers will shift significantly as the speed of download in mobile devices increases and the cost of data transfer either decreases or becomes an understood norm in the budgets of basic users.

[Bou]

In my personal opinion there are also issues related to the actual applications available. For instance, MusicStation (Omnifone) has many stability issues, especially as regard calls while listening to music, that prevent the adoption of the application.

Another factor to take into consideration, I'm mainly referring to western Europe, are the different demographics as regard online and mobile music. Another factor which results in the figure mentioned above.

In other advance mobile music marketspaces, such as Japan or Korea, the situation is completely different if considering that in Japan, for example, mobile music accounts for over 90% of overall digital sales.

[PedestrianConcepts]

The key to providing useful search on a very small piece of real estate like a mobile device is field uncoupling and truncation. Uncoupling allows the user to use cognitive thought progress without hindrance and truncation gives iconic reference while maintaining perspective on position within a large data set.