Elephant in the Room of the Long Tail
Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief of Wired magazine, gave the first-ever Boalt.org/BCLT breakfast lecture entitled, "The Elephant in the Long Tail". Chris allowed me to record the audio; you can listen to the mp3.
What is the elephant in the long tail room? Well, it's rights and clearing rights. That is, you can graph many markets where you see the power law characteristic of Chris' long tail argument and many have truncated tails. For example, if you graph the box office return of the last three year's of movies in ranked order, you see a dramatic drop off. Why is that? Because you quickly run out of screens (the US market is saturated at about 300 movies per year; there are roughly 13,000 movies made each year). It the movie case, this is due to running out of screens to show movies on. If you distribute movies via the internet, you have many many more screens at your disposal. This is evidenced by graphing iTunes tracks by number of downloads vs. rank; even the 800,000th track on iTunes gets downloaded once per month.
Chris argued that a lot of the long tail is now being produced by individuals or artists that don't but into the strong proprietary rights model that makes the "hits" so successful. Unfortunately, for small-budget music and movies, it often costs orders of magnitude more money to clear the rights for ancillary artwork used in their works. Television, Anderson claims, is ground zero of this dilemma. The show WKRP in Cincinnati is a classic example because it was a sitcom about a music radio station; there is no way that you'll ever see WKRP on DVD because of the logistical and financial nightmare associated with clearing the rights for the music that is in the background.
As for solutions, it's clear that legislation is very unlikely to happen given the power of the content lobby. Practically, 12 people could solve this problem (the heads of BMI/ASCAP and major labels to start) if they got together and created their own policy. Anderson hoped that there would be some smart student that comes up with a solution that will solve this. So do I.
