Sounds quite interesting to me!

Your post about Anderssons interested me a lot, as you all can understand by my first comment, and I finally bought his newly written book; The Long Tail.

I had a positive feeling when walking to the Swedish store PocketShop at Arlanda Airport, mainly because I more or less was in Cyprus for a two week holiday – at least on my way. However when I entered the store I immediately found The Long Tail… Let’s put it this way: The book made my vacation in Cyprus even better.

We are familiar with the economic term “80/20”. 20 % of a business products making 80 % of it’s revenue, and more or less the 100 % of it’s profit. Chris Andersson flipping that around by writing his book “The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More (2006)” and making a crystal clear statement about the new economic we are facing.

Andersson interviewed Robbie Vann-Adibé, MD for a company with digital Jukeboxes which is capable to download requested songs by customers, from the Internet. Vann-Adibé tells Andersson that 98 % of 10.000 albums sells at least one track each quarter! Since the songs is downloaded from their own databas they don’t have great expenses in a stockroom perspective. Its amazing!

Andersson investigates the long tail effect even further by looking at Rapsody (an online music store). He founds out that song number 100.000, far down the long tail, still got thousands of downloads each month, and so was song 200.000, 300.000 and 400.000 with a fairly decreasing amongt of downloads a month, but people want the songs! Could any, regular and traditional, music store compete with this sort of numbers? None! The new technology is transforming the economic terms of today.

Chris Anderssons book The Long Tail is indeed – to quote Anders – food for thoughts!

Read more at Chris Andersson’s site The Long Tail here…

Read more about the idea of a long tail here…

Read a longer review of his book made by The NewYorker here…
(John Cassidy pinpointing, in the end of his article, out a few “blind spots” in Anderssons analysis. I do not agree on John Cassidys finalization of his review. To be frank, I don’t think John Cassidy fully understand Chris Anderssons point of view…)

Just my five cent’s!

Push is dead but big companies, especially in entertainment industries is trying to keep it alive in a mouth-to-mouth resuscitation way. Unfortunately they make their consumers criminals instead of offering what the masses want, entertainment on demand without DRM-damaged attitude.

Future has been spoken.
Pull, we decide and then the hits will have lower amongt of downloads but the masses will win. Long-tail economy is a benefit for everyone, not just a selected few. Democracy.

On Demand, we decide when and how. Perhaps we should greet Microsoft? Don’t we all, the Internet oldies, remember their old quote… Where do you want to go today? Or if we speaking about Swedish IT-pioneers… Jonas Birgersson was right!