1. OCR A2 MEDIA

2.  Online media… What is it?  Online media… where did it begin?  Example of online production  Example of online distribution  Example of online consumption

3.  What did we discover?

4.  Long tail theory is named as a reference to the tail of a demand curve. The term has since been rederived from an XY graph that is created when charting product popularity to total product inventory.  The Long Tail theory suggests that a small number of products (best-selling books, hit songs, etc) dominate the market. That’s the ‘head.’ Retailers profit from selling a large number of these relatively few products by selling them at a premium.

5.  Open any online media site, the opening page will be a sea of these products.  Can you think of any examples?

6.  The rest of the products in the market (b-sides, live or unreleased tracks, niche products) make up the ‘long tail.’  If the cost of manufacturing and distribution is low enough, these products can actually be more profitable than the hit’s by selling fewer copies of a larger number of products.  At least that’s what the theory suggests. Retailers like Amazon.com have built empires on this concept.  A huge portion of their sales come from obscure titles that you can’t find in physical, brick and mortar book or record stores.

7.  The implications of this for the independent music industry are huge. With the advent of digital technology, the cost of manufacturing and distributing music has been reduced to practically zero.  That means that online retailers can offer tracks that brick and mortar stores could never afford to offer, such as obscure indie bands with no big label push behind them.  More importantly, that means that those retailers can actually make a profit by doing so. For the first time in the history of music, it may actually make business sense for retailers to carry indie music! Can anyone give examples?

8.  Use of the phrase the long tail in business as "the notion of looking at the tail itself as a new market" of consumers was first coined by Chris Anderson in 2004.  The concept drew in part from a February 2003 essay by Clay Shirky, "Power Laws, Weblogs and Inequality”.  This noted that, “a relative handful of weblogs have many links going into them but "the long tail" of millions of weblogs may have only a handful of links going into them.”  Anderson described the effects of the long tail on current and future business models beginning with a series of speeches in early 2004 and with the publication of a Wired magazine article in October 2004. Anderson later extended it into the book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More (2006).

9.  Anderson argues that products in low demand or that have a low sales volume can collectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters, if the store or distribution channel is large enough.  Anderson cites earlier research by Erik Brynjolfsson, Yu (Jeffrey) Hu, and Michael D. Smith, that showed that a significant portion of Amazon.com's sales come from obscure books that are not available in brick- and-mortar stores. The long tail is a potential market and, as the examples illustrate, the distribution and sales channel opportunities created by the Internet often enable businesses to tap that market successfully.  An Amazon employee described the long tail as follows: "We sold more books today that didn't sell at all yesterday than we sold today of all the books that did sell yesterday."

10.  Fill in your long tail sheet.  Label the ‘Short head’.  Label the ‘long tail’.  Use an example online retailer or distributer.  Give example Short head products/artists/stories  Give example Long tail products/artists/stories

11.  Go to Section 3: Theory: Long Tail.  Now fill in these boxes.  How would long tail theory inform your essay. Make sure you include the key theorist: Chris Anderson 2004.  Try to think of examples for both news & music!

12.  On your A2 Sheets in your pairs work on including Long tail theory in your essay.  Try not to just shoehorn it in!  It should form a cohesive section of your argument and reinforce your argument.

13.  Recap ready to report back next week!