The premature death of hits

In The Long Tail, Chris Anderson divides most of what we consume into “hits” and, for lack of a better term, “misses,” and spends a long time explaining how thoroughly our culture is set into the “hit” mentality.

Everything has, since capitalism began, been tied inexorably to the physical world and therefore to the economic limits that go with it (in other words, the “long tail” gets chopped off in favor of the hits).

What’s fascinating is how digital goods (via the internet) have all but eliminated the restrictions held on goods in the physical world, so that the “virtual” inventory of a retailer can extend into infinity, covering the entirety of demand instead of merely the hits.

That’s the light version. Read the book for the full one.

But the basic idea that comes across is that, for some businessess the era of hits is over. Hits are selling less in movies, music, books (ironically, I think The Long Tail is selling extremely well), and office chairs.

In the book, Anderson relays the success story of the Lonely Island crew (from hollywood failure to internet video to SNL Chronicles of Narnia rap) as an example of how the long tail of media production (millions of people producing content that they think is cool) is actually a powerful force.

This is really a fascinating concept - almost like a million monkeys writing shakespeare, except that we can see it at work. The problem is that while it’s an amazing social phenomenon, I don’t see how it works to kill the hit in media (or journalism - or basically any field where people are paid for their time).

To play fast and loose with Marx: where is the money? In a capitalistic society, understanding anything starts with following the transactions.

The Long Tail works by reducing the cost of offering something to practically (or literally) zero. For retailers, this is an obvious thing - if you can offer each person in the world a chance to buy a product, and it costs you absolutely nothing to do so, then if it sells just once, ever, then it’s worth carrying.

For something like a movie or a comedy sketch or a newspaper, even if it costs next to nothing to offer it to someone (floating around a P2P network on the internet), it still costs money to make. The one commodity that is not dropping to zero with new technology is talent. I hope it never will.

The Lonely Island Crew is a success story because they went from the fringe to the tip, from a miss to a hit, from a freebie to something that could be monetized.

From a business standpoint, the long tail is useless unless it can pay itself back. In the long tail, producing a short film is never going to pay for itself. Producing a shitload of long tail shot films is just going to not pay for itself on a larger scale.

Only when a short film crosses over into the territory of the hit will it begin to pay for itself. So it looks like we’re still trapped in the same system we started with (as far as business is concerned) until we can make the long tail pay for the time people put into it.