Why the long tail may just be shortening as we become less adventurous.

I have mentioned Chris Anderson's Long Tail theory a few times on this blog.

Let me remind you of the theory as explained by the author himself

The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of "hits" (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-target goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.

The concept has been particually prevelent in the world of entertainment,the theory being that when we buy online there is an unlimited world of product available and the consumer is unrestrained in his/her needs.

However Slate magazine reports that

Anita Elberse, a marketing professor at the Harvard Business School, recently examined several years' worth of American movie- and music-sales data

and concluded that while

It's true that we're now buying more obscure movies and music than ever before. But we're merely nibbling on these, while we continue to gorge on a small selection of hits

And the reason is?

We're not very adventurous. However not surprsingly Anderson dismisses some of the findings,saying that

there is a subtle difference in the way we define the Long Tail, especially in the definitions of "head" and "tail", that leads to very different results.

and the reason

The best example of this is in what she describes as a growing "concentration" of sales around a relatively small number of blockbuster titles. In the Rhapsody data, she finds, the top 10% of titles (out of more than a million in that data sample) accounted for 78% of all plays, and the top 1% account for 32% of all plays. That sounds pretty concentrated around the head, until you reflect, as she notes, that "one percent of a million is still 10,000--[...]equal to the entire music inventory of a typical Wal-Mart store."
This is a good moment to remind everyone of the normal definition of "head" and "tail" in entertainment markets such as music. "Head" is the selection available in the largest bricks-and-mortar retailer in the market (that would be Wal-Mart in this case). "Tail" is everything else, most of which is only available online, where there is unlimited shelf space.
So in the data she cites, the head of the online music market represents 32% of the all plays, and the tail represents 68%. That's certainly no challenge to the Long Tail theory; indeed, it's even more tail-heavy than the data I cited in my book (probably because I used a more generous estimate of 50,000 tracks for Wal-Mart's inventory).

Confused-you bet