Long Tail

After reading about "Long Tail" I really got different sense of understanding today's society, and current and past book favorites, music albums, and movie sellers. For example, a man wrote a book about his near death experience with mountain climbing and entitled it: Touching the Void, it was a short lived seller back in 1998. Then another person wrote a book about their mountain climbing tragedy and called it Into Thin Air. It was a huge success, which lead people to read other near death tails on mountain climbing which brought back the sales of Touching the Void. This brings me to relate what's popular in current book sales today, which is vampire love stories among teens and woman. Authors are writing more and more about vampires, which cause older books to be brought back in the lime light. (I myself, am a little embarrassed to say that I have found my self reading other vampire stories after reading the Twilight Saga, and am now looking for older and current similar books).There is an entirely new way to view movies, listen to music, and read books, which all never existed a mere 10 years ago. With the introduction to Netflix, Pandora, and the brand new Amazon Kindle and Barnes and Nobles Nook, it is getting even lazier and easier view the things you enjoy. Most of these new gadgets are making it almost impossible for poeople to venture out past their comfort zones. For example, we have Pandora, where you simply have to type in an artist you enjoy and it somehow manages to find multiple, similar artists with similar sounds. Although, these new trends are amazing, it just means that people are less likely to go into a music store and manually search and listen to music. Also, a lot of great movies get made each and every year by great production companies, yet they are not advertised or even shown because like Long Tail said "an average movie theater will not show a film unless it can attract at least 1,500 people over a two-week run". So even if people do want to rent a movie, even the video stores have that same mind set, and same goes for music shops and book stores. Juke boxes do some justice, I know a local restaurant that I attend almost every week with a group of my friends, and because the restaurant doesn't play music regularly we are almost forced to put our money into the juke box just have some sort of background music playing. The upside in this, is that we (along with other patrons) are able to pick and choose what we want to hear, and sometimes sitting at the table I hear songs I haven't heard of or haven't heard in years. We are basically paying for a type of radio, not once have I heard of anyone going up there and requesting a song and not being able to play it. Yes, it does get costly after week after week, but entertainment comes at a price. This type of juke box in restaurant after restaurant, and bar after bar and I whole heartily agree with Kevin Laws, when he says "The biggest money is in the smallest sales." At .50 a song, play after play, there is bound to be a great bundle of revenue to be made. If we just listened to the simple rules, I believe we could go somewhere by "making everything available" and "cutting the price in half, then lowering it".