The Rise and Fall of the Hit
The era of the blockbuster is so over. The niche is now king, and the entertainment industry – from music to movies to TV – will never be the same.
By Chris Anderson

On March 21, 2000, Jive Records released No Strings Attached, the much-anticipated second album from NSync. The album debuted strong. It sold 1.1 million copies its first day and 2.4 million in the first week, making it the fastest-selling album ever. It went on to top the charts for eight weeks, moving 10 million copies by the end of the year. The music industry had cracked the commercial code. With NSync, a pop-idol boy band fronted by the charismatic Justin Timberlake, Jive had perfected the elusive formula for making a hit. In retrospect it was so obvious: What worked for the Monkees could now be replicated on an industrial scale. It was all about looks and scripted personalities. The music itself, which was outsourced to a small army of professionals (there are 60 people credited with creating No Strings Attached), hardly mattered.

Labels were on a roll. Between 1990 and 2000, album sales had doubled, the fastest growth rate in the history of the industry. Half of the top-grossing 100 albums ever were sold during that decade.

But even as NSync was celebrating its huge launch, the ground was shifting. Total music sales fell during 2000, for only the second time in a decade. Over the next few years, even after the economy recovered, the music industry continued to suffer. Something fundamental had changed. Sales fell 2.5 percent in 2001, 6.8 percent in 2002, and just kept dropping. By the end of 2005 (down another 8.3 percent), album sales in the US had declined 20 percent from their 1999 peak. Twenty-one of the all-time top 100 albums were released in the five-year period between 1996 and 2000. The next five years produced only two – Norah Jones’ Come Away With Me and OutKast’s Speakerboxxx/The Love Below – ranking 79 and 91, respectively.

It’s altogether possible that NSync’s first-week record may never be broken. The band could go down in history not just for launching Timberlake but also for marking the peak of the hit bubble – the last bit of manufactured pop to use the 20th century’s fine-tuned marketing machine to its fullest before the gears were stripped and the wheels fell off.

Music itself hasn’t gone out of favor – just the opposite. There has never been a better time to be an artist or a fan, and there has never been more music made or listened to. But the traditional model of marketing and selling music no longer works. The big players in the distribution system – major record labels, retail giants – depend on huge, platinum hits. These days, though, there are not nearly enough of those to support the industry in the style to which it has become accustomed. We are witnessing the end of an era.

What caused a generation of the industry’s best customers – fans in their teens and twenties – to abandon the record store? The labels cried piracy: Napster and other online file-sharing networks, along with CD burning and trading, had given rise to an underground economy of stolen music. Of course, there’s something to that. Despite countless record-industry lawsuits, traffic on the peer-to-peer file-trading networks has continued to grow, and about 10 million users now share music files each day.

But technology didn’t just allow fans to sidestep the cash register. It also offered massive, unprecedented choice in terms of what they could hear. The average file-trading network has more songs than any music store – by a factor of more than 100. Music fans had the opportunity for limitless choice, and they took it. Today, listeners have not only stopped buying as many CDs, they’re also losing their taste for the blockbuster hits that used to bring throngs into record stores on release day. If they have to choose between a packaged act and something new, more and more people are opting for exploration.

Technology also gave consumers a new way to buy music. Rather than having to purchase an entire album to get a couple of good tracks, they can buy songs à la carte for 99 cents each. The online music industry is primarily a singles business, which depresses album sales further. Meanwhile, the music marketing machine has lost its power. When consumers were buying mainly from record stores, prominent in-store displays could drive tremendous demand, which is why the labels paid so much for them. But now most of the largest record store chains, from Tower Records to Sam Goody, are either in bankruptcy or emerging from it with greatly diminished clout. MTV doesn’t play much music anymore, and money-losing Spin magazine was just, well, spun off for a fire-sale sum.

When it comes to lost marketing power, nothing compares to the decline of rock radio. In 1993, Americans spent an average of 23 hours and 15 minutes per week tuned to a local station. As of summer 2005, that figure had dropped to 19 hours and 15 minutes. Time spent listening to the radio is now at a 12-year low, and rock music is among the formats suffering the most. Since 1998, the rock radio audience has dropped 26 percent. What’s killing rock radio? A perfect storm of competition. Start with the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which added more than 700 FM stations to the dial. This fragmented the market and depressed the economics of the incumbents. At the same time, the limits of ownership in each market were relaxed, which led to a nationwide rollup by Clear Channel and Infinity, whose operating efficiencies included bringing cookie-cutter playlists to once-distinctive local stations.

Then came the cell phone, which gave people something else to do during their commutes. And finally, the iPod, the ultimate personal radio. With 10,000 of your favorite songs on tap, who needs FM?

Practically every other sector of mass media and entertainment has witnessed a similar shift away from hits. Last year the Hollywood box office take fell 6 percent, continuing a decline in attendance per capita that started in 2001. The average top 25 blockbusters in any given year so far this decade have accounted for 5 percent less of the total box office gross than in the 1990s, even as they’ve cost 57 percent more to make.

Network TV ratings continue to fall as viewers scatter to cable channels; since 1985, the networks’ share of the TV audience has dropped from three-quarters to less than half. Ratings of the top TV shows have fallen dramatically since the 1960s. Today’s top-rated show, American Idol, is watched by just 18 percent of households. During the ’70s, American Idol wouldn’t even have made it to the top 10 with that kind of market share. Collectively, the hundreds of cable channels have now surpassed the networks in total viewership. No single one dominates.

Even television mega-events have lost their allure. In 2005, the World Series had its worst TV ratings of all time, 30 percent lower than the previous year. Ratings for the NBA playoffs last year reached record lows as well, down 43 percent from 2004. The ratings for the Grammy Awards in 2006 were down 31 percent from two years ago. And the Winter Olympics this year had their lowest ratings in 38 years, down 36 percent from the 2002 Games in Salt Lake City.

The trend holds for other media. Just 52 percent of Americans read a daily newspaper, compared with 81 percent four decades ago. Magazine newsstand sales are at their lowest level since 1970. And the number of weeks the average best-selling novel remains at the top of the list has fallen by half over the past decade.

Before you shed too many tears for the declining hit, remember that the era of the blockbuster was an anomaly. Before the Industrial Revolution, culture was mostly local – niches were geographic. The economy was agrarian, which distributed populations as broadly as the land. Distance divided people, giving rise to such diversity as regional accents and folk music, and the lack of rapid transportation and communications limited the mixing of cultures and the propagation of ideas and trends.

Influences varied from town to town, because the vehicles for carrying common culture were so limited. There was a reason the church was the main cultural unifier in Western Europe: It had the best distribution infrastructure and, thanks to Gutenberg’s press, the most mass-produced item (the Bible).

But in the early 19th century, modern industry and the growth of the railroad system led to a wave of urbanization and the rise of Europe’s great cities. These new hives of commerce and hubs of transportation mixed people like never before, creating a powerful engine of new culture. All it needed was mass media to give it flight.

In the mid- to late 19th century, several technologies emerged to do just that. First commercial printing technology improved and went mainstream. Then the new “wet plate” technique made photography popular. Finally, in 1877, Edison invented the phonograph. These developments led to the first great wave of pop culture, carried by such media as newspapers and magazines, novels, printed sheet music, records, and children’s books.

Along with news, newspapers spread word of the latest fashions from the urban style centers of New York, London, and Paris. Then, at the end of the 19th century, the moving picture gave the stars of stage a way to play many towns simultaneously and reach a much wider audience. Such potent carriers of culture had the effect of linking people across time and space, effectively synchronizing society. For the first time, it was a safe bet that not only did your neighbors read the same news you read in the morning and know the same music and movies, people across the country did too.

We are a gregarious species, highly influenced by what others do. And film was a medium that could not only show us what other people were doing but could endow it with such an intoxicating glamour that it was hard to resist. It was the dawn of the celebrity age.

The arrival of broadcast media – first radio, then TV – homogenized our adulation even more. The power of electromagnetic waves is that they spread in all directions essentially for free, a trait that made them as mind-blowing when they were introduced as the Internet would be some 60 years later. Broadcast emerged as the best vehicle for stardom ever.

From 1935 through the 1950s, the Golden Age of Radio led to the rise of national broadcast celebrities like Edward R. Murrow. Then television took over. By 1953, an astounding 72 percent of TV households watched I Love Lucy on Monday night.

This marked the peak of the so-called water-cooler effect, the buzz in the office around a shared cultural event. In the 1950s and 1960s, nearly everyone you worked with had seen Walter Cronkite read the news the previous night, and then tuned in to whatever top program followed: The Beverly Hillbillies, Gunsmoke, The Andy Griffith Show.

Throughout the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, even as more channels arrived, television continued to be the great American unifier. Nearly every year, TV advertising set a new record as companies paid more and more for prime time. And why not? Prime-time TV defined the mainstream.

Then came the great unraveling. A new medium arose, one even more powerful than broadcast, and its distribution economics favored infinite niches, not one-size-fits-all fare. The Internet’s peer-to-peer architecture is optimized for a symmetrical traffic load, with as many senders as receivers and data transmissions spread out over geography and time. In other words, it’s the opposite of broadcast.

It will take decades for our entertainment industries to internalize the lessons of this shift. If your goal is to make a hit movie – but not necessarily a good movie – you must follow the Hollywood rules. Do pay as much as you can for the biggest-name star you can lure to the project. Don’t try to be “too smart.” Do have a happy ending. Don’t kill off the star. If it’s an action movie (and, all things being equal, it probably should be an action movie), more effects are better than fewer. Certainly it’s possible to break these rules and still have a hit, but why take chances? After all, you’re investing a lot of money.

This hit-driven mindset has leaked out of Hollywood boardrooms and into our national culture. We have been conditioned by the economic demands of the hit machine to expect nothing less. We have internalized the bookkeeping of entertainment risk capital. This is why we follow weekend box office results like we do professional sports – to keep score and separate the clear winners from the seemingly obvious losers.

Fixated on star power, we follow the absurd lives of A-listers with attention that far exceeds our interest in their work. From superstar athletes to celebrity CEOs, we ascribe disproportionate attention to the very top of the heap. We have been trained, in other words, to see the world through a hit-colored lens.

If it’s not a hit, then it’s a miss. It has failed the economic test and, therefore, never should have been made. This Hollywood mindset is now how we allocate space on store shelves, fill time slots on television, and build radio playlists. It’s all about allocating scarce resources to the most “deserving,” which is to say, the most popular.

Ultimately, our response to hit culture is to reinforce hit culture. The world of shelf space is a zero-sum game: One product displaces another. Forced to choose, each link in the entertainment industry naturally selects the most popular products, giving them privileged placement. By putting our commercial weight behind the big winners, we amplify the gap between them and everything else. Economically, this is the same as saying, “If there can be only a few rich, let them at least be super-rich.”

But now the audience is turning to a distribution medium that doesn’t favor the hits alone. We are abandoning the tyranny of the top and becoming a niche nation again, defined not by our geography but by our interests. Instead of the weak connections of the office water cooler, we’re increasingly forming our own tribes, groups bound together more by affinity and shared interests than by broadcast schedules. These days our water coolers are increasingly virtual – there are many different ones, and the people who gather around them are self-selected.

The mass market is yielding to a million minimarkets. Hits will always be with us, but they have lost their monopoly. Blockbusters must now compete with an infinite number of niche offerings, which can be distributed just as easily. Justin Timberlake still makes albums, but today he has thousands of bands on MySpace as rivals. The hierarchy of attention has inverted – credibility now rises from below. MTV and Tower Records no longer decide who will win. You do.
Adapted from The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More, copyright © 2006 Chris Anderson, to be published by Hyperion in July. Chris Anderson (canderson@wiredmag.com) is Wired's editor in chief.

Very utopic sounding to me.
Interesting situation that has come up lately is having to fill out a form that needs references.
Something you have to include;references,when applying for a job,credit or anything where you are going to be evaluated as far as your worth and availablility,and etc..is concerned.
References include associations for clubs,schools organizations,friends..etc...
The form always includes a place for:
Name:
address:
phone #:..sometimes cell#
So far I haven't had any place to include "email" address of the referenced affiliate.
I was explaing this to a business person -last night.
I have friends,my wife and I go to lunch,dinner the movies with a "few" select friends.But we have many people we are friends with from around the globe that we know more about than we do our fellow cube-mates at work,and all I have is their email address,for the most part anyway.

Clickplay is right. Hollywood movies are starting to go down and down over a little and a little. I think that get-togethers are really scare these days. They only happen every now and then and that people actually are busier then they seem. If you actually had to think of things in a different light why not see it from a pirate's perspective. They see movies that are "hits" before they become hits.

Then, their next move is to put it out all over the internet. You could say that those pirates are those to blame, as hence, like CIA agents are the ones to blame for all the worlds problems. Oh and one more thing. I'd say that it really doesnt make sense to say the "hit era" of hollywood is over because I dont remember anything really when was the last time you saw a hit movie? TITANIC? That was big in the nineties.

I really think that hollywood needs more producers films, but they dont have those. If they did there would be more room for ideas from other people. Hollywood doesnt however allow creativity for other people to share their ideas, thoughts, and actions.

"I really think that hollywood needs more producers films..."

Actually I think Hollywood needs an original idea. How many sequels and redo's have we endured in the last 12 months alone? Hmmmmmm??

GOING LONG
In the new “long tail” marketplace, has the blockbuster met its match?
by JOHN CASSIDY
Issue of 2006-07-10
Posted 2006-07-03

A quick test of your pop-culture knowledge: How many of the twenty-five best-selling albums in American history can you name, and what proportion of them were recorded in this century?

If your first thought was Michael Jackson and your second was seventies guitar bands, you should do pretty well with the first part of the question. The most popular album of all time is the Eagles’ “Greatest Hits, 1971-1975,” which has sold about twenty-nine million copies in the United States since its release, in 1976. The No. 2 album is Jackson’s “Thriller,” which has sold twenty-seven million copies since 1982. Next on the list are albums by Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, AC / DC, and Billy Joel.

The second part of the question is a little trickier: none of the top-twenty-five albums were released after 2000. Indeed, only three recent albums make the Recording Industry Association of America’s top-one-hundred list: Shania Twain’s “Up!” and Norah Jones’s “Come Away with Me,” from 2002; and OutKast’s 2003 double album, “Speakerboxxx / The Love Below.” Not one album released in the past three years has made the list.

What are we to make of this, other than to point out that it must have something to do with online file-sharing and iPods? A lot, according to Chris Anderson, a business journalist who formerly worked at The Economist and now edits Wired. In his new book, “The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More” (Hyperion; $24.95), Anderson argues that we are witnessing the decline of the blockbuster. The “emerging digital entertainment economy is going to be radically different from today’s mass market,” he writes. “If the twentieth-century entertainment industry was about hits, the twenty-first will be equally about niches.”

Anderson’s inspiration for writing “The Long Tail,” which grew out of a story in the October, 2004, issue of Wired, was a visit he paid to a digital jukebox company called Ecast. In business, it’s often said that twenty per cent of the products generate about eighty per cent of the revenue. This version of the so-called 80 / 20 rule might suggest that most of a retailer’s inventory—in the case of Ecast, about ten thousand albums ready to download—is worthless. But when Anderson spoke with Ecast’s chief executive he found that ninety-eight per cent of the albums in the library sold at least one track every three months. “And because these were just bits in a database that cost nearly nothing to store and deliver,” Anderson writes, “all these onesies and twosies started to add up.”

Anderson began to suspect that he was onto something. Another online music retailer, Rhapsody, which has a library of about 1.5 million songs, provided him with monthly sales statistics that he presents in a series of graphs, with the horizontal axis showing songs ranked by popularity and the vertical axis showing the number of times each one was downloaded. In a typical month, each of the top thousand tracks, which appear on the extreme left of the graph, was downloaded more than ten thousand times. But these hits represented less than one-hundredth of one per cent of Rhapsody’s vast catalogue. What about the other 1,499,000 songs? Anderson writes:

What’s extraordinary is that virtually every single one of those tracks will sell. From the perspective of a store like Wal-Mart, the music industry stops at less than 60,000 tracks. However, for online retailers like Rhapsody the market is seemingly never-ending. Not only is every one of Rhapsody’s top 60,000 tracks streamed at least once each month, but the same is true for its top 100,000, top 200,000, and top 400,000—even its top 600,000, top 900,000, and beyond. As fast as Rhapsody adds tracks to its library, those songs find an audience, even if it’s just a handful of people every month, somewhere in the world.
This is the Long Tail.

Once you’ve seen one long tail, you start seeing them everywhere. Netflix, a DVD-rental company that allows its customers to order films online and receive them in the mail, has a library of more than sixty thousand titles. At Blockbuster stores, ninety per cent of the movies rented are new releases; at Netflix, about seventy per cent are from the back catalogue, and many of them are documentaries, art-house movies, and other little-known films that might never have had theatrical release. “The lesson is that what we thought was a naturally sharp drop-off in demand for movies after a certain point was actually just an artifact of the traditional costs of offering them,” Anderson notes. “Netflix changed the economics of offering niches, and, in doing so, reshaped our understanding about what people actually want to watch.”

Both eBay and Google turn out, in Anderson’s account, to be long-tail businesses, too. On any given day, about thirty million individual items are bought and sold on eBay, many of them cheap and obscure. Barely a decade after Pierre Omidyar founded eBay, more than seven hundred thousand Americans report it as their primary or secondary source of income, according to a study by the market-research firm AC Nielsen. For Google, the long tail is populated by small advertisers. Major corporations pay to get their ads placed next to the results of popular search terms, such as “luxury S.U.V.s” and “flat-screen televisions.” But much of Google’s annual revenue, which now exceeds five billion dollars, comes from tiny companies whose ads appear next to queries like “Victorian jewelry” and “Hudson Valley inns.”

Even an industry as old-school as book publishing exhibits long-tail behavior. In 2004, Nielsen BookScan tracked the sales of 1.2 million books and found that nine hundred and fifty thousand of them sold fewer than ninety-nine copies. And yet these scattered individual purchases add up to a surprisingly large market, especially at online booksellers. At Amazon.com, for example, about a quarter of all book sales come from outside the site’s top-one-hundred-thousand best-sellers. “What’s truly amazing about the Long Tail is the sheer size of it,” Anderson writes. “Again, if you combine enough of the non-hits, you’ve actually established a market that rivals the hits.”

The forces behind the long tail are largely technological: cheap computer hardware, which reduces the cost of making and storing information products; ubiquitous broadband, which cuts the cost of distribution; and elaborate “filters,” such as search engines, blogs, and online reviews, which help to match supply and demand. “Think of each of these three forces as representing a new set of opportunities in the emerging Long Tail marketplace,” Anderson suggests. “The democratized tools of production are leading to a huge increase in the number of producers. Hyperefficient digital economies are leading to new markets and marketplaces. And finally, the ability to tap the distributed intelligence of millions of consumers to match people with the stuff that suits them best is leading to the rise of all sorts of new recommendation and marketing methods, essentially serving as the new tastemakers.”

Among the “tastemakers” Anderson cites are Daily Candy, which sends e-mails telling fashionable women what to buy and wear, and Boing Boing, a technology blog that is read by geeks the world over. “In today’s Long Tail markets, the main effect of filters is to help people move from the world they know (‘hits’) to the world they don’t (‘niches’),” Anderson writes. “In a sense, good filters have the effect of driving demand down the tail by revealing goods and services that appeal more than the lowest common denominator fare that crowds the narrow channels of traditional mass-market distribution.”

All this is snappily argued and thought-provoking, if not quite as original as Anderson’s publishers would have us believe. Back in 1980, another futurologist, Alvin Toffler, anticipated the “de-massifying” of society in his best-selling book “The Third Wave” (Bantam; $7.99), which is still in print. “The Second Wave Society is industrial and based on mass production, mass distribution, mass consumption, mass education, mass media, mass recreation and entertainment,” Toffler said in a 1999 interview. But no longer: “The era of mass society is over. . . . No more mass production. No more mass consumption. . . . No more mass entertainment.”

Not only did Toffler, writing a decade before the advent of the World Wide Web, recognize information as the basic resource of the modern economy; he also discussed concepts like knowledge workers, customization, peer production, and several other “big-think” concepts that are still providing stories for magazines like Wired, Fast Company, Business 2.0, and, indeed, The New Yorker. The Internet has accelerated the trends that Toffler identified, but that’s not news, either. In 1998, Kevin Kelly, a technology writer who also worked for Wired, published a book called “New Rules for the New Economy,” in which he described the emerging order thus: “Niche production, niche consumption, niche diversion, niche education. Niche World.”

The real novelty of Anderson’s book is not his thesis but its representation in the form of a neat, readily graspable picture: the long-tail curve. For decades, economists and scientists have been using this graph, which is formally known as a power-law distribution, to describe things like the distribution of wealth or the relative size of cities. By applying the long tail to the online world, Anderson brings intellectual order to what often looks like pointless activity. The teen-ager who spends his weekends updating a blog that nobody reads and shooting silly videos to post on YouTube.com? He is, as Anderson’s chapter on “The New Producers” tells us, a valiant citizen of the long tail.

The least convincing part of Anderson’s book is his treatment of what he calls “the short head,” the part of the curve where popular products reside. Although he acknowledges that best-selling books and blockbuster movies won’t vanish overnight, he suggests that demand for them will gradually decline: “the primary effect of the long tail is to shift our taste towards niches.”

Is this what we’re seeing? In the film industry, more movies are being produced than ever before, but seven of the ten all-time top-grossing films worldwide have come out since 2000: three “Lord of the Rings” movies, three “Harry Potter” movies, and “Shrek 2.” It’s true that over-all attendance at movie theatres has been slipping, but the biggest films are still doing well, as was demonstrated recently by “The Da Vinci Code” and “X-Men: The Last Stand,” both of which enjoyed highly successful opening weekends despite tepid reviews. Four of the top-selling novels ever published—the works of J. K. Rowling and Dan Brown—have appeared since 2000, too.

The music industry, on which Anderson bases much of his argument, may be a special case. Album rock reached its peak in the late nineteen-seventies, and, with the rise of genres such as hip-hop, house, and grunge, the music market had begun splintering well before the Web arrived. File-sharing and the iPod accelerated this trend, but this hasn’t eroded the demand for the most popular songs: if illegal downloads are included in the “sales figures,” the over-all demand for songs by supergroups like U2 and the Rolling Stones may be greater than ever.

A widening of choices doesn’t necessarily lead to cultural fragmentation and a defection from mainstream fare; sometimes it has the opposite effect, as befuddled consumers congregate around the same things. To be sure, some curious individuals will rent Japanese anime and science documentaries from Netflix, but far more people will turn up for the fifth “Harry Potter” film and “Shrek 3,” because they’ll want to see the movies that everybody’s talking about. Big-time movie releases aren’t merely stories and images on a screen; they’re news events—a fact that Hollywood studio executives have long recognized. Sony’s “The Da Vinci Code” was a good illustration. By the time the movie came out, it had received so much publicity that millions of people wanted to feel part of a social event, whatever the reviewers had to say.

It’s the same for books and popular music: the more copies a thriller or a pop song sells, the more likely you are to pick it up to see what all the fuss is about. Even in the online era, to be human is to follow the herd. Far from undermining this “network effect,” the Internet strengthens it by providing instant communication and feedback. In a recent online study conducted by researchers at Columbia, participants were allowed to download free songs from a list of unsigned bands. When they were informed about the preferences of their peers, the popular songs got more popular—and the unpopular songs got more unpopular. Blockbusters and niche products will continue to coexist, because they’re flip sides of the same phenomenon, something economists call “increasing returns,” whereby the big get bigger and the rest fight for the scraps. A long-tail world doesn’t threaten the whales or the minnows; it threatens those who cater to the neglected middle, such as writers of “mid-list” fiction and producers of adult dramas.

There’s another blind spot in Anderson’s analysis. The long tail has meant that online commerce is being dominated by just a few businesses—mega-sites that can house those long tails. Even as Anderson speaks of plenitude and proliferation, you’ll notice that he keeps returning for his examples to a handful of sites—iTunes, eBay, Amazon, Netflix, MySpace. The successful long-tail aggregators can pretty much be counted on the fingers of one hand. Although the online economy has existed for only a decade, businesses like these—and you can add Google and Yahoo—have already established seemingly impregnable positions. If you’re a typical Internet user, when you need to find information you go to Google; when you’re looking for a book or a CD, you go to Amazon; when you want a new golf club, you go to eBay; when you want to download a song, you go to iTunes.

There’s an ugly name for industries that are controlled by three or four big firms: oligopolies. A few decades ago, these lumbering creatures were easy to spot. In the skies, cosseted airlines like American, United, and Delta charged passengers a small fortune for the privilege of flying; in broadcast television, ABC, CBS, and NBC dictated what viewers could watch. Today, thanks to globalization, deregulation, and technological progress, many of the twentieth-century industrial behemoths have fallen by the wayside. But don’t assume that giant, exploitative firms are a thing of the past.

In recent years, eBay has sharply increased its commission rates; Amazon has admitted charging its customers different prices for the same goods; and Apple Computer has stubbornly refused to make its iTunes service compatible with portable music players other than iPods. Has the New Economy really moved past the familiar “winner take all” dynamic? That depends on whether you’re looking at the long tail—or at who’s wagging it.

Great Article
It drives by one of my points about what's wrong with the RIAA/corperate backed music industry; either yer a "blockbuster" hit or yer a nobody. Ignoring a soild selling musical "middle class" is a mistake they will pay for forever.
Evolve or die dinosaurs; new technology is here and the Independants were embracing it as the RIAA was trying to outlaw it and sue it.

Quote "The era of the blockbuster is so over"
Really????
Can anyone here say.....Pirrrr...ates? as in Johnny Depp?

Every "niche" needs a good scratch.

~PUNS-r-US