The "Long Tail" addresses the digital wave of appeal to larger audiences by widening the variety and availability of selection. Anderson specifically mentions that success is only found where companies accommodate to the long tail, but also work with major vendors to access the entertainment "hits." Some popular companies you might recognize associated with this theory include Netflix, Ebay, and Amazon.com.
Music is tricky because apparently record and label companies feel threatened and aren't the friendliest bunch. They think they should get more profit. So that begged the question... how is Spotify doing?
Spotify is my music lifesaver. However, as much as I enjoy using Spotify to stream music I enjoy, I'm just a "freemium" user, meaning that I don't pay for it experience 10 second commercials every once and a while. Premium users experience streaming on-demand music on any device, any time.
So if Spotify doesn't require pay, is it benefiting from obscure downloads for less-popular genres like Netflix? I found an article from the New York times, addressing Spotify's falling revenues (Spotify Losses Grow) and unfortunately the answer to my question was no. Spotify does not seem to be thriving as iTunes or Rhapsody.
What most interested me most from the article was "the music industry’s continuing struggle to reinvent itself in the digital age."
How does the availability of music, or lack thereof, influence music's identity and create distinct musical cultures in this digital age? Just like print versus digital books, how do we view CD's versus exclusively digital music?
I don't think we have fully adapted to the realm of digital culture. As Spotify demonstrates, there are still many questions to be asked about profit, popularity, and demand. Consumers don't want to pay, but label and record companies still have a tight hold on what they allow into the market at what rates.
The musical realm of the digital market seems to be another whale to chase down because of its long tail.
A great follow up to the Long Tail post. The music industry is in many ways a leader in the reinvention process, and what ends up working there is likely to be a model of what will work in other fields. Regarding Spotify's decline, keep in mind that capitalizing on the long tail is a separate phenomenon than the distribution of content that the tail describes. At another time we will talk more about the economics of the digital age. The freemium model is one very important part of that, but even that has a range of ways of being implemented. (See Chris Anderson's other book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price
ReplyDeleteI think this is a really important issue to talk about. Because music is so easy to steal now a days I think that it's really important for the music industry to revamp itself in order to stay modern, however how do they do that and still make money? Because in a lot of ways everything they're trying to do to prevent pirating has only made them seem like the "bad guys". I hope spotify is able to do well, because I think a lot of people are appreciating the things they're trying to do, while still reaping the free benefits of it :D
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