The " Long Tail" of digital distribution is a concept that will have a great impact on television, music , news/journalism and our culture. The "Long Tail" concept states that our previous markets for entertainment such as music dealt with a market that cut out the niche markets and only focused on the more popular once thought to be more profitable music. Digital distribution eliminates the cost of providing the opportunity to consumers to purchase an array of media's that are not provided by the current market. With the Internet and digital distribution these niche markets are now accounting for nearly 50% of the overall market and having a large impact on what is available to consumers.
This impact should alter the way in which the economic model for success by the media outlets should think about distribution and producing various types of media. In this model its not only the big hit that is important to the profitability and success of the media producing corporations but all the other little "misses" that are equally important. The idea of an infinite amount of "shelf space" both helps consumers and the content producers enormously by diversifying the content available. Shelf space that was once so contained and limited by big commercial retailers is now free to distribute media with out many limitations.
These concepts of infinite shelf space and the long tail can greatly impact our media culture and society. We think of our society as being a free democratic society one that allows information and ideas to pass freely amongst all people with out censorship. These two concepts provide both an economic incentive and ability or means distribute media that other wise would have been rare and obsolete to a broader consumer market. Our culture that has been so watered down and controlled now has the opportunity to make choices about what media is viewed. This gives the power back to the consumer and derails the content producer from filtering out media that could be equally as important to our society that would have been cut off by the previous formula for economic success.
Sources for this post from:
Chris Anderson article "The Long Tail ", Wiredhttp://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html
Chris Anderson video " The Long Tail" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Yku0GTrcuw&feature=fvw
