Newsworthy: Does The Long Tail Apply to Mobile Music?

October 17, 2008 in Newsworthy, the future of music
Tags: Chris Anderson, Mobile, mobile music, music, music mobile, the future, The longtail, Wired

Fascinating article on Wired this afternoon on Chris Anderson’s theory on providing free content / platforms for greater financial reward (you have to read the full article for this to resonate fully).

full article here

Mobile music hasn’t yet been able to tame the long tail, according to details unveiled at the Popkomm conference in Berlin, but that could be due to cellphone providers’ inability to embrace the openness and integration that have become second nature to web 2.0 developers.

Chris Anderson’s long tail theory posits that technology has enabled companies to earn significant revenue by selling seemingly insignificant amounts of lots of lesser-known media, in addition to the tried and true method of selling millions of copies of a few hits. While there’s plenty of evidence to support his theory in the music world, attendees of the conference heard one executive claim that the long tail is dead, insofar as mobile music goes.

Frank Taubert, CEO of 24/7 Entertainment, which provides 4.5 million songs to a wide variety of digital music services including the unlimited mobile music services Omnifone we liked so much, toldPopkomm attendees on Monday that a full 66 percent of those songs had never been purchased or downloaded — not even once.

However, Taubert’s assertion that the long tail does not apply to mobile music was challenged on Friday by Madeleine Milne, managing director of eMusic Europe. “Three quarters of eMusic’s entire four million track catalog sells at least once every year — or, to put it another way, we sell more than 50 percent of our catalog at least once every quarter,” she said.