Chris Anderson defined the Long Tail as an economic state where products have a longer sales pattern when they don't rely on shop storage because they're either sold online (Amazon). If you add up all the revenue from the Niche market films the profit can be greater or equal to the profit from one blockbuster of best selling product. Pre-broadband Niche products were hard to find and expensive to buy, now online shopping/ sharing makes it easy to cater for everyone's taste.
An Amazon employee described the Long Tail as follows:We sold more books today that didn't sell at all yesterday than we sold today of all the books that didn't sell yesterday."
Chris Anderson's Theory applied to Spotify.
The above graph shows that the revenue for Niche artists is considerably lower than the revenue for Heritage artists, in regards to Spotify, which disproves Anderson's claim that sales are increasing for Niche artists in the music industry.
However, on Spotify, there are 944 different genres, with thousands of different artists.
According to Spotify, with 20 million subscribers, a “niche/indie artist” could expect to generate $1.2m a year in Spotify payouts, while a “heritage artist” would generate $2.6m.
However:
'Chris Anderson was right that the falling cost of distribution has made more music available to consumers than ever before: most digital music services have catalogues of more than 20m tracks.' (Quote taken from the Financial Times)
A summary of your findings would be good: is The Long Tail applicable to the music industry?
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