Boingboing had a piece the other day about a Long Tail blog which had been launched to help prepare and research a book of the same title. The interesting thing about it is the original article in Wired which will be the basis for the book. I'm glad he's launched the blog or I would have missed the original piece entirely.
The Long Tail is about the marketing of digital media via the interweb with all the added sales that automatic recommendations and unlimited stock bring. It seems huge amounts of money is made from stock that will never be stocked by a shop based retailer due to stocking limitations / limited demand / whatever. Low demand is still demand - an MP3 / ebook / old game / whatever takes up a tiny amount of disk space so the online retailer can potentially afford to keep everything ever thus being able to satisfy every customer. It's quite a long article but is definitely worth a read as it covers a lot of the points we made about virtual sales the other day. It goes much further (which is why he is writing a book and we just write a whingy blog!) and explores how revenue can be increased massively yet prices to the consumer would also be lowered - result for both sides. Makes sense to me. I hope the music companies are listening.
via boingboing
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