new economy of internet distribution

squashed

Wired has a long article a while back. It's worth reading. It discusses how the internet suddenly makes "smaller' hit, things that giant record company couldn't make money of, into a profitable business.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html

Hit-driven economics is a creation of an age without enough room to carry everything for everybody. Not enough shelf space for all the CDs, DVDs, and games produced. Not enough screens to show all the available movies. Not enough channels to broadcast all the TV programs, not enough radio waves to play all the music created, and not enough hours in the day to squeeze everything out through either of those sets of slots.

This is the world of scarcity. Now, with online distribution and retail, we are entering a world of abundance. And the differences are profound.

and this

With no shelf space to pay for and, in the case of purely digital services like iTunes, no manufacturing costs and hardly any distribution fees, a miss sold is just another sale, with the same margins as a hit. A hit and a miss are on equal economic footing, both just entries in a database called up on demand, both equally worthy of being carried. Suddenly, popularity no longer has a monopoly on profitability.

The second reason for the wrong answer is that the industry has a poor sense of what people want. Indeed, we have a poor sense of what we want. We assume, for instance, that there is little demand for the stuff that isn't carried by Wal-Mart and other major retailers; if people wanted it, surely it would be sold. The rest, the bottom 80 percent, must be subcommercial at best.

chart
http://ly.lygo.com/ly/wired/wired/archive/12.10/images/FF_170_tail2_f.gif

edised

great article! something to think about regarding visibiliy...
thanks for that!

btw if you want to download wired copyleft cd they released last year, it's available here:
http://www.musique-libre.org/static.php?op=musiqueIndex.php&npds=-1&album=5+-+Wired+CC+'rip,+sample,+mash,+share'+cd