The reading ‘The Long Tail’ by Chris Anderson details the impact that these new networks of media have had on they way we consume entertainment media, and the way in which it is marketed and sold to us.

Anderson describes the phenomenon of the Long Tail, the idea that any media “can find an audience, even if it’s just a few people a month, somewhere in the world”. The Long Tail incorporates expansive back-catalogues and archives of all different mediums of media.

Anderson identifies that the “future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream”. These online networks mean that media distribution is no longer shackled by the constraints of physical sales. Mediums no longer have to find a local audience in order to be stocked, now we have “infinite shelf space with real-time information about buying trends and public opinion”.

This has resulted in the rise of niche and alternative products, as it is no longer subjected to a ‘lowest common denominator’ style of marketing, if a product has the potential to be sold anywhere, to anyone, it will be stocked. As Kevin Laws says, “the biggest money is in the smallest scale”.

The Long Tail is best exemplified by services such as Netflix, iTunes, and Spotify, where near-infinite back-catalogues of music, films, television shows etc are up for sale to people, allowing ‘cult’ media to become popular again.

This related most to our course because it describes how these networks that we have identified and studied can have a very real and highly significant impact on ‘physical’ things. The networks created by services such as ‘recommendations’ on online sales and links to similar products have facilitated the Long Tail, and in doing this, has drastically altered they way in which media is marketed and sold.

As Anderson says, “we live in the physical world, and until recently, most of our entertainment media did too”, but now it is becoming prevalent for media to be primarily sold online, in a way that can benefit both the consumer and the sellers.

Anderson says that “what matters is not where customers are, or even how many of them are seeking a particular title, but only that some number of them exist, anywhere”. This jumped out at me as relating to our own blogs, and our possible, imagined audience. Anyone, anywhere, can access our writing; we have a huge potential audience that is historically unrivaled.

At the article’s conclusion, Anderson talks about the idea of a “celestial jukebox of music services that offer every track ever made, playable on demand”, accurately predicating the dominance of services such as Spotify, that provide online streaming to nearly every song ever for a monthly subscription. This is the Long Tail, and much of Spotify’s profits would rely on people who want to access obscure, ‘cult-like’ songs, rather than those people that just want to listen to Lady Gaga.

I really enjoyed this reading as a very different and contrasting piece to much of what we have done previously, especially in that it displayed the exciting potentials that these networks of media have, and how big an impact than can have on media and entertainment.