Introduction
Wow, this took a long time to get to, didn't it? Sorry about the delay, folks, but June was an extremely busy month as it turned out. Anyway, this hopefully means that plenty of people have managed to pick up The Long Tail and start reading.
Don't know what I'm talking about? Go check out my earlier post/podcast on this subject for all the details. In essence, I'm podcasting and blogging through this fascinating book, looking for insights relevant to the life and future of the church, both generally the Christian church and also as it specifically applies to New Christianity (Swedenborgianism).
Anyway, welcome to the first real installment: "The Introduction".
First, for those who don't (yet) have this fantastic book, here's a quick synopsis of what you missed from the Introduction:
SYNOPSIS
Chris Anderson, editor in chief for Wired magazine and author of this book, opens up by noting how as a society we are obsessed with tracking "hits". Best-seller lists, music charts, movie box-office figures, television ratings, and all that. He then notes that hits are becoming harder to achieve, and that fewer people are watching the "best" shows and buying the "best" albums.
A major cause of this decline of the economic popularity of "hits" is the Internet. Anderson contrasts his own teen years with that of an adolescent of the early 21st century. Today's teen uses TiVo, iTunes, Web comics, Slashdot, Fark, BitTorrent and instant messaging to enjoy a huge host of niche versions of standard media in a way that caters to his very particular tastes, and all in a manner that is independent of schedule and location. This is a big jump from those of us that sat in front of the TV in the living room for Gilligan's Island and whose parents learned about the world from the city newspaper and the nightly network newscast.
Back in the day, most information, media and entertainment consumption was done by means of a small number of "big buckets". This was an economic necessity in the era of broadcast media that dominated the 20th century. Today, though, the idea of one-size-fits-all media marketplaces is ending. As Anderson puts it, what we once thought of as "the mainstream" is "shattering...into a zillion different cultural shards". Traditional media companies don't like this. New technologies that allow information consumers to pick from scads of "little buckets" are resulting in a decline in the economic power of "hits". Bottom line: more and more money is flowing to a larger number of "non-hits" and away from the small number of big bucket "hits".
The category of "non hits" has of course always been bigger than the category of hits. Only a select few movies can be blockbusters; only a handful of books make the best-seller lists. These non-hits may have audiences in the millions, but put into the larger context of the overall human population, they don't make even a blip on the radar. And yet, that is where people are increasingly turning. This doesn't mean the mass market is going away, to be replaced wholly with millions of niches; it's just that the balance is shifting.
This synopsis is running long, but it's important to get this idea clear in everyone's heads up front. Future synopses will be briefer.
Anyway, Anderson says "This book began with a quiz I got wrong." Want to take the quiz yourself? There is a company called Ecast that places digital jukeboxes in public places (bars, restaurants, etc.) which through a broadband connection to the Internet are able to offer a huge selection of music to paying customers. Here's the question: "What percentage of the 10,000 albums available on the jukboxes sold at least one track per quarter?"
Heard of the 80/20 rule? Well, Anderson used it as a starting point, and then guessed, somewhat outrageously, that 5,000 of the 10,000 available albums sold at least one track every three months. And he was wrong. The answer? 98 percent! It turns out that the combined market for niche music is, as Anderson puts it, "effectively unbounded." It turns out that this phenomenon appears in a number of places today. NetFlix and iTunes are two examples of services that capitalize on this effect, making a good deal of money renting out niche BBC documentaries and anime series, and almost-never-heard-on-the-radio indie rock bands and classical recordings. It turns out that the market for all the millions of niche titles, aggregated together, is the same size as the traditional market for hits and near-hits combined!
This may seem like strange economics. Economics are usually driven by scarcity, right? Well, the invnetion of digital media and the decreasing costs of digital storage and transmission are creating a situation in which there is effectively no inventory cost in certain industries. This means there can be unlimited supply. Unlimited. Factor in the fact that there are as many peculiar tastes in the market as there are individual people, and you get a really cool situation: effectively unlimited supply serving the needs of what turns out to be an effectively infinite variety of niche markets. Traditional supply/demand curves show the interplay of those two basic economic factors. But if supply no longer counts as a constraining force, you get something more like a "pure" demand curve—something that describes what people actually want or need, not merely what they can manage to get given artificially limited selection.
Anderson starts looking at data from music download site Rhapsody. When you graph their "best sellers", you get this huge spike at the left of the chart, showing their top downloads. The curve falls off steeply, but it doesn't drop right to zero. Trailing off to the right is a flattening curve showing all the other downloads, ranked by popularity. Even the 100,000th most downloaded track has been downloaded thousands of times, and the curve keeps going like that past the 400,000th download. This is called a "long tail distribution" and is the source of the title of this book.
Anderson makes three important observations here:
(1) the tail of available variety is far longer than we realize; (2) it's now within reach economically; (3) all those niches, when aggregated, can make up a significant market
This effect shows up in non-entertainment industries as well. It's not just about the economics of digital media, but of abundance itself. Think of produce. You can go into a Whole Foods today and select from twenty different varieties of flour, some of them quite niche. We are all becoming "mini-connoisseurs", engaging in things labled as "massclusivity", "slivercasting", and "mass customization". The Long Tail is everywhere.
It's easiest to see, though, in the world of digital entertainment media. Prime examples are found in the economics of Amazon, Netflix, iTunes, eBay and in Google advertising. And exploring this phenomenon is what the book is all about.
COMMENTARY
I'm going to keep my commentary short after that long synopsis. This is the reverse of how future installments of the "Church and the Long Tail" podcast blog series are going to go. I just wanted to get everyone on board with the basic premise, and hopefully inspire some laggards and inquirers into actually borrowing or buying the book so they (you!) can follow along with future installments.
I don't know if you see what I see, here, so let me give you my own premise in a nutshell: the world of "church" is a long-tail world, with a handful of megachurches getting giant crowds along side zillions of very small "niche" churches scattered among the billions of communities of the world. Furthermore, the world of "religion" is a long-tail world, with a handful of religious denominations getting the limelight while an increasing number of niche religious movements and independent churches, are gaining interest among more and more people.
Add into this the fundamental nature of the "preaching industry", of you will. The lifeblood of religion is moral behavior. Church is only effective when lives are transformed so that people do more good and less evil in the world. To stretch the image of lifeblood a little, the oxygen that binds with the red blood cells of the church and makes religion possible is, essentially, information. It is truth wed to good that is the very breath and heartbeat of any effective church. The job of the preacher is to provide instruction in truth, and then to use that truth to guide people to live a life of goodness.
And this puts priests, pastors, ministers and preachers squarely inside the realm of the information economy. (For those of you that are squeamish about putting "priest" and "economy" in the same sentence, let not your heart be troubled; "economics" isn't the study of commercialism, but the study of human interactions with regard to resources. Yes, economics often is about currency and commerce, but more broadly it's really about human behavior. Why do you think Jesus sometimes taught by means of parables that use economic frameworks?)
Anyway, this means that the primary activities of a pastor—instruction and leadership—are clearly susceptible to long-tail market forces. In other words churches, through blogs, podcasts, social networking sites and other Web 2.0 technologies, are in a position to have surprisingly important effects on the world, out of proportion with traditional expectations.
So, in short, I see my field of religions, congregations and priests to be one squarely placed for taking advantage of long-tail effects. I see this from the perspective of my niche denomination (General Church of the New Jerusalem), my niche congregation (Pittsburgh New Church) and my own personal niche ministry (TheoBlog.com). The question is—as it always is—what are we going to do about it?
I invite comments via email, phone call, and (of course) comments posted directly to this blog. Next installment, I will go over any interesting feedback I've received, synopsize (briefly!) the first full chapter of Anderson's book, and then provide some thoughts on what I think this all means.
Oh, and spread the word. More minds on this task will make it a better project by far. I look forward to hearing from you all!
(This special blog series is also available in audio. Click here to listen to the audio of this post, or click here to subscribe to the free podcast.)