Internet piracy is very appealing. It’s free and easy. The expansion of the internet has led to the opening of piracy and has hurt the entertainment industry in certain aspects. However, it is impossible for piracy to be adopted by everyone without a complete collapse of the industry occurring. There are also inconveniences to the piracy option. You must do the work of all the labeling of the downloads for the most part, there is no guarantee that your computer will be protected from risk, and there is a decent chance that you will download a corrupted or low quality file (extremely low in many cases). A paid online option allows for easy access to large amounts of media. The problem comes with the payment part. The young crowds tend to be the driving force of much of the entertainment business but we youngsters tend not to have the cash to back up the desire for endless entertainment. In the Wired.com article titled The Long Tail by Chris Anderson, he explains how the internet has affected the industry. The future of the business seems to be huge libraries of media with varying price ranges depending on the size of the target market. This will push the consumers down “the long tail” of markets. Buyers will also be introduced to a system wherein they will more easily find other media they may be interested in purchasing but would never have heard of before due to the limited shelf space in a physical store. These predictions go or music as well as movies and books.
The problem with the world of physical space-time is the distance. In our ever-expanding digital world of the web, space is no problem. In the physical world, stores have limited shelf space and limited customers due to travel issues. I agree with Anderson in his belief that the internet will help niche markets get their target audience. The problem with these niche markets is that the titles are typically not found in big stores due to a lack of popularity in the store's local market. When the constraint of space and shipping is dissolved, the entire target audience can access the website and drive the market or the product.
Anderson, in his article, provides the example of Rhapsody. They have over 735,000 songs in their library of music. Clearly, the top 40,000 are the most popular and have the biggest streaming audience. However, in a record store or a store like Wal-Mart, once you get below their top sellers they do not even have a need to carry the more obscure titles. On the web there is an audience for it. It is shown in the fact that Rhapsody’s top 100,000 are played at least once a month as well as the 200,000 and 300,000 and even 400,000. Another great example is Barnes and Nobles online bookstore. They make more money from the books below their top 130,000 than inside that top number. Anderson uses the analogy of a “Long Tail” to describe this effect. He believes (and I agree with him) that that the future of the entertainment business is in the ends of this tail. The sum total of the so-called niche markets may be a greater selling force than the most popular and fewer numbers of titles in any category including film, music and books.
If used correctly, this model can continue to spread as more and more new young generations become more and more internet savvy. The kids (not only of our age) but of the future will have virtually unlimited media at their hands. They will also be able to communicate through the net in ways we cannot imagine. Our hit-driven entertainment culture seems to be taking a back seat to the rise of The Long Tail. I can only hope that it leads to a more culturally diverse and well-rounded youth because the current state has led a lot of people into useless attachments to celebrities. Perhaps the age of the huge celebrity is coming to an end. Or perhaps it is not.
Source:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html?pg=5&topic=tail&topic_set=
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