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Such a weird, bad take. I am very interested in outsider/experimental/extreme music. It has NEVER been more accessible. I am very interested in a rather niche

Such a weird, bad take. I am very interested in outsider/experimental/extreme music. It has NEVER been more accessible. I am very interested in a rather niche subcategory of tea. It has NEVER been more accessible. Art house cinema, indie videogames, bespoke accoutrements... you get where I'm going with this. This author is the reason the Long Tail is not flourishing. This author is content with Netflix and Spotify. This author is the problem.

coldtea 3y ago
>I am very interested in outsider/experimental/extreme music. It has NEVER been more accessible. That's orthogonal to a long tail discussion though, which is about the distribution of streams (how many views/streams go to a small part of the catalogue, and how many to the long tail), not their mere availability.
- majormajor 3y ago
  The author doesn't give compelling evidence to suggest that the long term trend of "more options leads to more distribution of the audience" that you can see through the rise of cable TV, indie movies, streaming radio, etc, has been broken. It's especially hard for me to believe when the pre-modern-internet-platform availability of that long-tail content was zero. The percentage of views/listens going to that content literally had nowhere to go but up.
  - coldtea 3y ago
    That's all well, but it's not my point. First, TFA author might very well be wrong (or not give numbers to prove himself right), but I wasn't supporting the author. I was clearing up what someone could imply from the parent comment that just because obscure music "has NEVER been more accessible" this necessarily means we have a long tail effect. Your point shows the same misunderstanding in a more explicit way: "The percentage of views/listens going to that content literally had nowhere to go but up", still doesn't automatically translate to long tail consumption. If it has gone from being 0% to being 20% of the content consumption for example, the "long still" would still be nowhere competitive with the fat powerlaw "head" (the stuff still getting 80%).
    - majormajor 3y ago
      > If it has gone from being 0% to being 20% of the content consumption for example, the "long still" would still be nowhere competitive with the fat powerlaw "head" (the stuff still getting 80%). Was it only ever claimed that it would eliminate the head? It doesn't have to flatten the curve entirely to "expand the scope of the arts" or "nurture alternative voices" or "get indie films to larger audiences" or let "music be more surprising" (paraphrasing from the claimed benefits as restated by the author). Or, if you move to the author's economic claims, "make a lot of money selling to these microscopically small groups of customers"... I would take more issue with that in general, but without a better defined "lots" we don't need Etsy to make its sellers more money than Walmart makes theirs - we just need them to make a "lot" more than they would otherwise. The author prevents and argues against a perverse strawman of the least likely results of there being a flourishing long tail of both content production and content consumption and tries to disprove it by focusing on the profit margins of middlemen and high volume producers. I would argue that a healthy long tail will force the profit margins of middlemen down because they have more competition so there's less ability to extract from consumers. Same for high-volume producers - some of the market will shift to lower-volume competitors. And that's exactly what we see happening: incumbents have had to respond to markets moving away from them. A film or TV show has to compete with entire new worlds of types of video content, so those incumbents go broad. But that's because the long tail is thriving on its own, and doesn't need them, not because the production or consumption worlds are short-tail. You can't monopolize and extract rent from the long tail the same way you used to from the short tail because the barriers of entry for producing long-tail culture products have gotten so much lower. The struggles of the former kings and incumbents shows that their relative market share is being eaten into by cheaper-to-produce alternatives that their business model simply can't sustain itself by competing with. If demand was short-tail then the biggest incumbent players would face far fewer barriers to raking in profit. Relative demand for short tail stuff goes up -> ability to charge a higher price for short tail stuff goes up. But that's not happening. (Disney is the closest thing we have to this, they have a pretty firm grip on tons of non-free family TV and film, but that's one of the few areas (along with live sports) that have been less vulnerable.)
      - coldtea 3y ago
rob74 3y ago
That's my impression as well - the long tail is definitely there, you can listen to music by tens of thousands of niche artists on Spotify, browse Patreon to find and maybe support creators who might write/draw/build/produce just what you were looking for etc. etc. The odds for these creators getting filthy rich have not improved unfortunately, because as their reach has widened, so has everyone else's, so they now have to compete with more people for attention, but it's definitely easier to get niche content today than it has ever been. If you're interested to actually look for it and not content to go with the mainstream of course...
sbergot 3y ago
Same. I am into niche table top rpg, boardgames and video games. The number of high quality low budget productions has never been higher. Just check the number of submissions on the Fishblade jam: https://itch.io/jam/fishblade-2023-game-jam https://itch.io/jam/fishblade-2023-game-jam. I am following a youtube streamer publishing a let's play/analysis of a different indie game every single day. A lot of those games have strong communities. The world is really big.

coldtea 3y ago

>I am very interested in outsider/experimental/extreme music. It has NEVER been more accessible. That's orthogonal to a long tail discussion though, which is about the distribution of streams (how many views/streams go to a small part of the catalogue, and how many to the long tail), not their mere availability.

majormajor 3y ago
The author doesn't give compelling evidence to suggest that the long term trend of "more options leads to more distribution of the audience" that you can see through the rise of cable TV, indie movies, streaming radio, etc, has been broken. It's especially hard for me to believe when the pre-modern-internet-platform availability of that long-tail content was zero. The percentage of views/listens going to that content literally had nowhere to go but up.
- coldtea 3y ago
  That's all well, but it's not my point. First, TFA author might very well be wrong (or not give numbers to prove himself right), but I wasn't supporting the author. I was clearing up what someone could imply from the parent comment that just because obscure music "has NEVER been more accessible" this necessarily means we have a long tail effect. Your point shows the same misunderstanding in a more explicit way: "The percentage of views/listens going to that content literally had nowhere to go but up", still doesn't automatically translate to long tail consumption. If it has gone from being 0% to being 20% of the content consumption for example, the "long still" would still be nowhere competitive with the fat powerlaw "head" (the stuff still getting 80%).
  - majormajor 3y ago
    > If it has gone from being 0% to being 20% of the content consumption for example, the "long still" would still be nowhere competitive with the fat powerlaw "head" (the stuff still getting 80%). Was it only ever claimed that it would eliminate the head? It doesn't have to flatten the curve entirely to "expand the scope of the arts" or "nurture alternative voices" or "get indie films to larger audiences" or let "music be more surprising" (paraphrasing from the claimed benefits as restated by the author). Or, if you move to the author's economic claims, "make a lot of money selling to these microscopically small groups of customers"... I would take more issue with that in general, but without a better defined "lots" we don't need Etsy to make its sellers more money than Walmart makes theirs - we just need them to make a "lot" more than they would otherwise. The author prevents and argues against a perverse strawman of the least likely results of there being a flourishing long tail of both content production and content consumption and tries to disprove it by focusing on the profit margins of middlemen and high volume producers. I would argue that a healthy long tail will force the profit margins of middlemen down because they have more competition so there's less ability to extract from consumers. Same for high-volume producers - some of the market will shift to lower-volume competitors. And that's exactly what we see happening: incumbents have had to respond to markets moving away from them. A film or TV show has to compete with entire new worlds of types of video content, so those incumbents go broad. But that's because the long tail is thriving on its own, and doesn't need them, not because the production or consumption worlds are short-tail. You can't monopolize and extract rent from the long tail the same way you used to from the short tail because the barriers of entry for producing long-tail culture products have gotten so much lower. The struggles of the former kings and incumbents shows that their relative market share is being eaten into by cheaper-to-produce alternatives that their business model simply can't sustain itself by competing with. If demand was short-tail then the biggest incumbent players would face far fewer barriers to raking in profit. Relative demand for short tail stuff goes up -> ability to charge a higher price for short tail stuff goes up. But that's not happening. (Disney is the closest thing we have to this, they have a pretty firm grip on tons of non-free family TV and film, but that's one of the few areas (along with live sports) that have been less vulnerable.)
    - coldtea 3y ago

rob74 3y ago

That's my impression as well - the long tail is definitely there, you can listen to music by tens of thousands of niche artists on Spotify, browse Patreon to find and maybe support creators who might write/draw/build/produce just what you were looking for etc. etc. The odds for these creators getting filthy rich have not improved unfortunately, because as their reach has widened, so has everyone else's, so they now have to compete with more people for attention, but it's definitely easier to get niche content today than it has ever been. If you're interested to actually look for it and not content to go with the mainstream of course...

sbergot 3y ago

Same. I am into niche table top rpg, boardgames and video games. The number of high quality low budget productions has never been higher. Just check the number of submissions on the Fishblade jam: https://itch.io/jam/fishblade-2023-game-jam https://itch.io/jam/fishblade-2023-game-jam. I am following a youtube streamer publishing a let's play/analysis of a different indie game every single day. A lot of those games have strong communities. The world is really big.