Sliding Down the Long Tail

I apologize in advance that Blogger seems to want to blob all text into one loooong paragraph :( While reading Wired.com's article about the Long Tail theory, I found myself nodding along emphatically. As a regular user of sites like Netflix, I've become more savvy from a consumer perspective about the benefits of marketing directly to consumers in the digital world. I regularly rate the films and shows I watch on Netflix, knowing that it will improve the site's ability to recommend additional content that will "hit the spot" for me. While some may be concerned about an invasion of privacy, I see it as a great way to allow Netflix to reach into it's hundreds of thousands of titles, and pull out those that I will most enjoy. In short, it will save me a great deal of time. I've always been confused by the film and music industries' resistance to new media. As this article easily explains, marketing old titles via electronic download or inexpensively produced hard copies will actually help the studios make more money on its back catalogue than it would by allowing those titles to languish away in a vault somewhere. The digital age is allowing so many new opportunities for revenue, and clearly consumers have jumped on board, so why are studios in both the film and record industry dragging their feet? Ironically enough, I just wrote a review of an article printed last month in The Economist. In it, the current marketing strategy of the film industry was analyzed, and summed up with the following: "The studios are old-school advertisers: every year they spend billions of dollars in scattershot campaigns that often hit the wrong people. Every dollar spent trying to persuade a grandmother to see a Quentin Tarantino film is a dollar wasted (Quentin's granny excepted)." Why not embrace the fact that though they will lose money when their existing hard copy distributors go away, they will save billions in a more effective marketing campaign? In short, when will they see the long tail for what it is: a golden (cha-ching!) opportunity?