Anderson downgrades Long Tail to Chocolate Teapot status: Metaphor swallows Man 21st November 2008
""The end came quickly," as authors of morbid weepies like to say. On Monday WiReD magazine editor Chris Anderson effectively admitted game over for his "Long Tail", the idea he's been dragging so lucratively around the conference circuit for the past four years. In as many words, he downgraded it from "the future of business" to something that's, er, not very helpful for your business at all.
"I'll end by conceding a point: It's hard to make money in the Tail," Anderson wrote. "The revenues are disproportionately in the Head. Perhaps that will never change."
As befits a quasi-religious cult, the straw that broke the Long Tail's back wasn't empirical evidence, but the Word of God. The Google God, to be precise - Eric Schmidt. Will Page's exhaustive analysis of tens of millions of music transactions from a giant digital music store had already prompted a last ditch stand. But it was remarks by Schmidt, however, interviewed by McKinsey, that prompted the downgrade. Schmidt said they make most of the money in the top 10 per cent of advertising inventory." [TheRegister]
Artist Royalty Program (Slight Return) November 7th, 2008
"This is a blog post I wrote for the Last.fm blog, head over there if you want to join the discussion:
With the Artist Royalty Program we wanted to solve a crucial problem. Since we started in 2002 we had licensed music from various ‘content owners’ (major and indie labels as well as digital music distribution companies), and we also paid money to collections societies all over the world. But there were certain artists and labels losing out: those who do not have access to all the above, or chose not to be part of this traditional music industry network." [HeutePopMorgen]
The Long Fail: the cost of digital distribution November 25th, 2008
This is a my recent contribution to the Music Think Tank where you can join the discussion:
Digital distribution as well as promotion has undoubtedly been the best thing that could have happened to music fans as well as musicians. Even bigger content owners are finally seeing the opportunities (instead of the threats) that come with the technical change of delivering ‘media’ over the last ten years. It is now easier than ever for artists to connect to their fans and delivering the music to them, gatekeepers have been eliminated and (in theory) artists can reach out to millions of music fans out there through the internet. So far, so good.
Everyone who works in music knows that there are various new challenges that have developed through new digital delivery methods and those challenges can make it difficult to monetize digital music. I won’t be going into the issue of file sharing (there are enough people out there who have something to say about that) but I want to explore a common misunderstanding about digital media: “digital distribution is free” (or at least very cheap). It is not at the moment." [HeutePopMorgen]
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