[NewMusic] Death of the record industry (cont'd.)

[barry threw]

This is the kind of statistic that would be made up for by the "long  
tail" thinking currently in vogue in business, particular internet  
business.

Say the average of those lower volume books is 50 copies sold.  And  
we round down to a million.  That's 50 Million books.  (One might  
postulate that they could be sold for higher prices due to low volumes.)

Do some rounding on the higher volume books...100,000 sales times 500  
different books...well, 50 Million books sold.

So I did a significant amount of number fudging there on stats, but  
the point is that the low volumes sales are many times as important  
as the bestsellers, same applies to smaller sale records/songs.

It's possible that this particular case isn't a very good long tail  
analogy for some reason I haven't caught, but it is still a very  
interesting set of economic theories to consider.  Since I did a PBR  
poor job of explaining it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Tail

The original wired article:

http://web.archive.org/web/20041127085645/http://www.wired.com/wired/ 
archive/12.10/tail.html

b


On Sep 5, 2007, at 12:33 AM, weasel walter wrote:

>> Minimum number of different books sold in the U.S. last year, as
>> tracked by Nielsen BookScan: 1,446,000
>> Number of these that sold fewer than 99 copies: 1,123,000
>> Number that sold more than 100,000: 483
>
> whoa! fuck! that's intense. sounds pretty much like the distibution of
> wealth in this country . . . hail the stupid godamn free market system
> (either you're ruling it or eating shit i guess).
>
> ww
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Barry Threw
Media Art and Technology


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