I came across an odd story in Brand Republic today about the Long Tail in the world of music sales;

A new study of digital music sales by Will Page, chief economist of the MCPS-PRS Alliance, the not-for-profit royalty collection society, challenges the idea that niche markets are one of the most important economic models of the internet -- a theory known as the "long tail". [...] The study found that online sales success still relies on big hits, revealing that of the online singles market, 80% of all revenue came from around 52,000 tracks. In the albums market, the figures were even starker, with only 173,000 albums purchased online from the 1.23m available to buy.

The "old" idea is that the "head" is where the business is- so by having all the "hits" in stock, record shops were doing good business; they could have more records for sale, but they would be better off using their shelf space for more copies of the hits than more choice for the customers.

The "new" idea is that, when presented with more choice, there is more demand- so there comes a point where there is actually more business is selling everything outside the "head" (ie. the Long Tail) than in selling everything in it.

The "1.23 million albums available to buy" is actually an irrelevant number. The mere fact that a product is created doesn't magically create a demand for it; its about how, when a product is available and findable, the demand that already exists for it can be satisfied.

Imagine one person spending a whole day wandering from shop to shop looking for a book, the lack of networking means that none of the bookshops he looks in will even register that a demand exists. If just twenty people in every town in the UK does the same for a different book, then it's the same effect; no copies being sold mean that no demand is recognised. But when those books suddenly become a) available to buy and b) easily findable (as happens when something like Amazon or iTunes opens up the range of choice that's available) then it can change the way the business works. All those little things, those interests, obsessions and fascinations with things outside the mainstream hits of the day add up. Everybody's tastes differ from the mainstream somehow.

Although the rest of the numbers given are pretty meaningless without a bit more of a context, we can try to make some sense out of them to put them into some perspective. So lets say for arguments sake that the study has been counting legal digital downloads since the iTunes Music Store launched in 2003 and first made legal downloads a realistic option 5 years ago. And, for the sake of simplicity, lets say those 52,000 tracks were released evenly over the course of those 5 years. (Obviously this isn't true- the market has been growing, as has the library of music available- this is just for illustration.)

That would mean that 80% of singles sales came from 200 singles that were released a week, every week. Now I don't think I've ever been into a record shop with 200 singles on their shelves— let alone 200 different singles every single week. (Remember, there's another 20% of sales that fall outside of even that wide range.)

The same calculation for the albums would mean that 665 albums every week were released and sold. Again, have you ever seen a record shop that had over 600 different new album releases on their shelves every single week?

Of course, the assumption that those were all evenly distributed is nonsense- in actual fact there would have been more releases (and more sales) as time went on and the digital market grew, so the number of singles/albums released right now that are being sold (not just one or two sales, but making up a part of that "80% of revenues") would actually be significantly higher than those numbers.

Also, singles aren't just available for a single week, so lets say that each single was available for 4 weeks- so at any given time, there would be 1,000 different singles available that are being bought. Again, try to imagine a music store with 1,000 different singles filling the shelves.

So, the Long Tail theory says that the future of business is "selling less of more"... and this is supposed to DISprove it? Seems to me that it validates the theory perfectly well (that is, if you understand the theory to mean something other than "increased choice magically creates a market for everything that is being sold"...)