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1、E X C L U S I V E E X T R A C TTo f i n d o u t m o r e a b o u t T h e L o n g Ta i la n d v i e w t h e e x c l u s i v e v i d e o p r o m o v i s i tw w w . l o n g t a i l b o o k . c o . u kThe Big Idea of 2006GQA brilliant and important book as i-intelligent as it is e-entertainingRobeRt thom
2、son, The TimesWithin the next year, you will hear people talking about thelong tail in the same way that two or three years ago they were discussing Malcolm Gladwells tipping point World BusinessBelongs on your shelf between The Tipping Point and Freakonomics, offering great insight into the next ge
3、neration of internet revolution and opportunityReed hastings, Ceo neTFliXThe Long Tail has huge ramifications for our culture and mediaGuardianThe Long TaiL is available from all good book retailers now.visit amazon.co.uk to order your copy for a 40% discount.INTRODUCTION The tracking of top-seller
4、lists is a national obsession. Our culture is a massive popularity contest. We are consumed by hitsmaking them, choosing them, talking about them, and following their rise and fall. Every weekend is a box-ofce horse race, and every Thursday night is a Darwinian struggle to nd the ttest TV show and l
5、et it live to see another week. A few hit songs play in heavy rotation on the radio dials, while entertainment executives in all these industries sweat as they search for the next big thing.This is the world the blockbuster built. The massive media and en- tertainment industries grew up over the pas
6、t half century on the back of box-ofce rockets, gold records, and double-digit TV ratings. No surprise that hits have become the lens through which we observe our own culture. We dene our age by our celebrities and mass-market productsthey are the connective tissue of our common experience. The star
7、-making system that Hollywood began eight decades ago has now spun out into every corner of commerce, from shoes to chefs. Our media is obsessed with whats hot and whats not. Hits, in short, rule.Yet look a little closer and youll see that this picture, which rst emerged with the postwar broadcast e
8、ra of radio and television, is now|CHRIS ANDERSON starting to tatter at the edges. Hits are starting to, gasp, rule less. Num- ber one is still number one, but the sales that go with that are not what they once were.Most of the top fty best-selling albums of all time were recorded in the seventies a
9、nd eighties (the Eagles, Michael Jackson), and none of them were made in the past ve years. Hollywood box-ofce rev- enue was down by more than 6 percent in 2005, reecting the reality that the theatergoing audience is falling even as the population grows.Every year network TV loses more of its audien
10、ce to hundreds of niche cable channels. Males age eighteen to thirty-four, the most de- sirable audience for advertisers, are starting to turn off the TV alto- gether, shifting more and more of their screen time to the Internet and video games. The ratings of top TV shows have been falling for de- c
11、ades, and the number one show today wouldnt have made the top ten in 1970.In short, although we still obsess over hits, they are not quite the economic force they once were. Where are those ckle consumers go- ing instead? No single place. They are scattered to the winds as mar- kets fragment into co
12、untless niches. The one big growth area is the Web, but it is an uncategorizable sea of a million destinations, eachdefying in its own way the conventional logic of media and marketing.ITUNES KILLED THE RADIO STAR I came of age in the peak of the mass-culture erathe seventies and eighties. The avera
13、ge teenager then had access to a half dozen TV channels, and virtually everyone watched a few or more of the same handful of TV shows. There were three or four rock radio stations in any town that largely dictated what music people listened to; only a few lucky kids with money built record collectio
14、ns that ventured far- ther aeld.We all saw the same summer blockbusters in the theater and got our news from the same papers and broadcasts. About the only places you could explore outside the mainstream were the library and the comic book shop. As best I can recall, the only culture I was exposedTH
15、E LONG T AIL|to other than mass culture was books and whatever my friends and Imade up, and that traveled no farther than our own backyards.Contrast my adolescence with that of Ben, a sixteen-year-old who grew up with the Internet. Hes the single child of afuent parents in the tony North Berkeley Hills, so hes got a Mac in his bedroom, a fully stocked
