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The first major example is about the availability of TV shows and movies on Netflix, but this isn't a reflection of consumption at all, or even of Netflix. Movies went down because other studios pulled their movie content. But it also shows that TV shows quadrupled from 530 to 2,108. That's big-time long tail increase.
The next example is about more sequels in theaters, but theaters have never exhibited long-tail characteristics to begin with, so that's irrelevant.
Then it goes on to Spotify and admits that it hasn't reduced its long tail, but says he "wouldn't be surprised". That's not evidence -- that's nothing. Then he claims that long-tail artists can't make a living on Spotify -- but the long tail has never been about content creators making money, that would be nonsensical in the long tail. It's always been about the platform making money from it.
Then he finally moves to a fast-food restaurant and discovers that loyal customers make up most of revenue. Which, once again, has nothing to do with "long tail" because the long tail is about products, not customers.
He finally concludes:
> We live in a Short Tail society. And it’s getting shorter all the time.
Yet provides zero evidence for this, and it's easily refutable just by looking at television. We used to all watch the same shows, now we all watch different shows. It's common to mention your favorite show and not only has your friend/coworker not scene it, they've never even heard of it. Same with your favorite band, same with your favorite author. Total available content has exploded. We live in a Long Tail society.
> Long tail/"short tail" paradigm was about the distribution of purchases/views/streams etc. A statistical property, not about mere quantity.
The author doesn't provide any evidence that the decades-long trend of "more options = broader distributed viewership" has broken, and the person you're replying to has shown that the "more options" trend is largely continuing. The author is cherry-picking also-not-relative-distribution numbers from a relatively small time frame and extrapolating wildly.
Let's look at the longer timeframe.
From Wikipedia for I Love Lucy:
"The episode "Lucy Goes to the Hospital", which first aired on Monday, January 19, 1953, garnered a then-record rating of 71.7, meaning that 71.7% of all households with television sets were tuned to the program, the equivalent of some 44 million viewers.[71] That record is surpassed only by Elvis Presley's first of three appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show, which aired on September 9, 1956 (82.6% share, 60.710 million viewers and a 57.1 rating ).[71] The overall rating of 67.3 for the entire 1952 season of I Love Lucy continues to be the highest average rating for any single season of a TV show.[72]"
MASH: "The series premiered in the US on September 17, 1972, and ended on February 28, 1983, with the finale, showcased as a television film, titled "Goodbye, Farewell and Amen", becoming the most-watched and highest-rated single television episode in US television history at the time, with a record-breaking 125 million viewers (60.2 rating and 77 share)"
By the time we get to something like Friends we're down to 52M live viewers for its finale, and it's only shrunk since then. Netflix doesn't give equivalent counts or US-only ones, as far as I can find, just "at least two minutes within N weeks" type stuff and similar; I believe if they had that level of cultural ubiquity, they'd be shouting it to the rooftops more explicitly.
And if they did, the linked article would be citing it. But instead, they're just speculating that all the numbers and trends we do have better measured are wrong.
If you look at ticket sales counts instead of box office for movies you'll see a similar large representation of older stuff, and that's a quantity comparison even with a smaller population to boot .
But this is pretty observably true - TV viewership spread is wider than ever before.
Remember that we started with a ~dozen TV networks showing one show at a time. The concentrating effect was so immense that the viewership numbers from the 70s and 80s have never been surpassed.
The only modern programs that even rank is literally the Super Bowl. The last shows to break 100mm viewers was in 1977 and 1983.
For primetime programming things peaked in the 80s with the Cosby Show, with ~30m households tuning in every single night for a single TV show. Viewership of linear broadcast programs has been on a slow downwards slide since.
And that's not because people are watching less programming overall - but because they're now watching a vast array of other programs, including non-traditional programming like YouTube.
The tail has never been longer. Not only can you find a much wider variety of content than ever before, but the long tail is immensely popular! People are making a living doing shows with a few tens of thousands of fans, and major high-profile, high-budget productions get nowhere close to the viewership from TV's heyday (Succession's finale had ~3m viewers!) because the distribution of viewership is so much wider than before!
>> Remember that we started with a ~dozen TV networks showing one show at a time
Lol, a dozen? There were ABC, NBC and CBS that might (or might not) have all been available in your area. Plus PBS if you counted that. I didn't like Masterpiece Theatre, so just 3 for me.
The largest cities might have had a few independent channels (not networks), but for most of the country, that was it.
>Long tail/"short tail" paradigm is about the distribution of purchases/views/streams etc. A statistical property, not about mere quantity.
not exactly, it is also about narrowing of people's interests based on the wider range of opportunities.
If the wider range of opportunities means that the people can now stop wasting their time on Sexy nurse stories and Voracious Space Aliens by narrowing in on their true interests - Sexy Nurses that marry voracious space aliens to exclusion of other stories - but if instead what happens is a wider range of media being consumed without narrowing in on very specific sub categories then what has happened is not a long tail but simply consumers expanding their range of choice.
Both of these phenomena - long tail and expansion of choice would lead to limits of viewership because there is in either case more media fighting over the viewership but while the result is pretty much the same the causes are slightly different.
Yeah, the long tail on Spotify is longer than the music long tail has been EVER. I bounce between literally hundreds of artists in a year, per their stats. I was never doing that twenty years ago with CDs and mainstream radio.
Same with mainstream movies + 4 broadcast networks + a few premium cable channels compared to all that plus all the streaming stuff, all the stuff on Youtube, etc. Hardly anything gets the population share of viewers that something like I Love Lucy or Mash or Friends used to get.
Indie video games, blogs, self-published novels, the list goes on and on and on and on.
What actually happened is various platforms moved to monopolise distribution. Only some of those are true open markets with low access and marketing costs.
There are always a few exceptions. Like the TikTokers - always cute/hot - who make millions producing lowest-common-denominator content. And some writers on Amazon who make millions producing... lowest-common-denominator content.
The premise of the book was that creators of all kinds of content - including those making exotic, experimental, and generally not-lowest-common-denominator work would find it easier to make a living.
There's some great original music on Spotify and Bandcamp, but it's almost impossible for anyone to find it.
There are quite a few niche YT channels in the 25k -> 100k range who are getting by, but most of them only make any money from sponsorships and product placements.
The real cost of entry isn't access to a distribution platform, it's access to expensive marketing, advertising, and sometimes sponsorship.
That's what publishers of all kinds used to pay for - and still do, but only for TV/movies and the top music headliners.
Everyone else doesn't get access to that kind of reach and influence.
If you're marketing a cold project you can throw some money at Amazon and Facebook ads and try to get some TikTok virality. But producing that extra content and keeping track of impressions and ROI is practically a full-time job in itself and requires a much broader skill set than just being a good creator and requires spare cash to burn on paid marketing that may be a complete failure.
The 2008 book promised that good content/products would pretty much sell themselves. All you had to do was find your niche with a bit of Googling and start selling into it.
> There are quite a few niche YT channels in the 25k -> 100k range who are getting by, but most of them only make any money from sponsorships and product placements.
Isn’t this a pretty good definition of the long tail though? They are able to sustain making content for a niche audience, driven by access to a platform that enables distribution that will allow them to reach that audience who would not otherwise be able to find the content at a scale that would make sponsors interested.
The assertion isn’t supported by experiential evidence either. Large newspapers and media outlets have steadily decreased in traffic and relevance. Small brands have mushroomed. “Soundcloud rappers” became big enough to lead entire new mainstream genres (trap, mumble rap).
Yesterday, I discovered a musician on Spotify who has just 3,000 monthly listeners and 300 YouTube subs. The bulk of my news comes from substacks and small YouTube channels. Even my entertainment is spread across half a dozen platforms big and small.
Also the author mentioning how Netflix, Disney etc are "tightly managing the titles they feature" without mentioning how much viewship has shifted to Youtube and TikTok seems like a pretty massive oversight.
For example, in October 2022 Youtube on TV matched Netflix's July 2022 record number of 8% TV viewing hours. That is all long tail.
It's very hard to make a living out of music. It's easier than ever to create some but making a living wage? I think a lot of "long tail" bands are doing it on the side. Patreon was supposed to change this but https://graphtreon.com/top-patreon-earners/ there's like one "creating music videos" on the top earners here and even this list ends with a $26k monthly income which is not much.
The first major example is about the availability of TV shows and movies on Netflix, but this isn't a reflection of consumption at all, or even of Netflix. Movies went down because other studios pulled their movie content. But it also shows that TV shows quadrupled from 530 to 2,108. That's big-time long tail increase.
The next example is about more sequels in theaters, but theaters have never exhibited long-tail characteristics to begin with, so that's irrelevant.
Then it goes on to Spotify and admits that it hasn't reduced its long tail, but says he "wouldn't be surprised". That's not evidence -- that's nothing. Then he claims that long-tail artists can't make a living on Spotify -- but the long tail has never been about content creators making money, that would be nonsensical in the long tail. It's always been about the platform making money from it.
Then he finally moves to a fast-food restaurant and discovers that loyal customers make up most of revenue. Which, once again, has nothing to do with "long tail" because the long tail is about products, not customers.
He finally concludes:
> We live in a Short Tail society. And it’s getting shorter all the time.
Yet provides zero evidence for this, and it's easily refutable just by looking at television. We used to all watch the same shows, now we all watch different shows. It's common to mention your favorite show and not only has your friend/coworker not scene it, they've never even heard of it. Same with your favorite band, same with your favorite author. Total available content has exploded. We live in a Long Tail society.