In my burning books post, I linked to an article discussing Wal-Mart’s attempts at censure of the American mind – how they pick and choose the CDs and DVDs and books and magazines the big box store serves up.
This morning, I found another Wal-Mart music related post that claims they account for about a fifth of America’s music sales. The author, Chris Anderson is editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine. He is writing a book about the long tail. The long tail is a term used to describe a new market phenomenon made possible by the infinite market access of the internet. In short, it describes the situation where it is not economically feasibly for my local independant bookstore to stock every obscure title known because their market reach is so small in the big scheme. For someone like, Amazon.com who has a huge market and little added overhead (when compared to their market cap) to stock hundreds of thousands of little read books. This in itself creates a market for obscurity.
A mathematical definition from WikiPedia:
In a long tail distribution, a vast population of events occur very rarely in the yellow (or more generally have low amplitude on some scale, e.g., popularity or sales) while a small population of events occur very often in the red (or have high amplitude). The huge population of rare (or low amplitude) events is referred to as the long tail. In many cases the rare events—the ones on the long tail—are so much greater in number than the common events that in aggregate they comprise the majority.
A brain twister definition from WikiPedia:
A former 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 did sell yesterday.”
And from Chris:
The theory of the Long Tail is that demand for products not available in traditional bricks and mortar stores is potentially as big as for those that are. In other words, the potential aggregate size of the emerging “niche” market rivals that of the existing “hits” market.
Back to WallyWorld, from Chris’ post …
Wal-Mart is the Short Head. And I was soon to discover just how short short really is.
But it’s a depressing way to buy music. Although the size of the inventory varies from store to store, the average number of titles in each, which was 5,000 last year (there are, as a point of reference, 800,000 CDs available on Amazon), has reportedly fallen since then as shelf space for music has been given over to DVDs. At the store I visited in Oakland, California there were about 4,100 titles, distributed as follows:
* “Rock/Pop/R&B”: 1800
* “Latina”: 1500
* “Christian/Gospel”: 360
* “Country”: 225
* “Classical/Easy Listening”: 225
If it ain’t at Wal-Mart, it ain’t popular music. No wonder listening to the radio now sounds like a 45 minute mix tape on repeat.
Popularity: unranked
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