Bollywood's distributed demand

I've often pointed to the Indian film industry as a perfect Long Tail candidate. Each year Bollywood makes at least 800 films. In American alone, there are 1.7m people who are first or second generation Indians, most of whom can speak Hindi (the main language of Bollywood films)."

USA Today, Longtailing bigtime

There's a start-up called Akimbo that's about to ship a product. Its initial programming will be soccer from Europe. It'll have things from India and from other cultures that have never been available because they don't have large-enough audiences to go on satellite or cable, but they have a plenty large-enough, and certainly devoted-enough, audience to go over the Internet."

"Last fall, Wired magazine identified a trend it dubbed "the long tail," and the term has since caught fire in tech and media circles. Basically, it says that in an era of almost limitless choice, many consumers will gravitate toward the most popular mass-market items, but just as many will move toward items that only a few, niche-market people want.

Take music in an age of Amazon.com and iTunes. A lot of music buyers want the hot new releases. But just as many buy music by lesser-known artists or older music — songs that record stores never would be able to carry but that can be offered online. All that small-market, niche music makes up the long tail.

Until the past few years, mass-market entertainment ruled the industry. In this new digital era, the long tail is becoming at least as powerful a force."

Eric Schmidt, Longtailer

How Google serves the longtail.

The origins of "The Long Tail"

"To be precise, what I coined was the notion of looking at the tail itself as a new market. The use of the proper noun (including "The") is not incidental, but is intrinsic to the observation that we have historically looked at the market at the head of the curve in isolation, and we can now shift our gaze to the right and see that the tail is another market."

The Economist does the Long Tail

"Perhaps the most profound implication of the long tail, however, is its impact on popular culture. As choice expands and people can more easily find niche content that particularly interests them, hits will be less important: so what will people talk about when gathered around the water cooler? In fact, says Mr Anderson, the idea of a shared popular culture is a relatively recent phenomenon: before radio and television, he notes, countries did not operate in "cultural lockstep". And the notion of shared culture is already in decline, thanks to the rise of cable television and other forms of market fragmentation. The long tail will merely accelerate the effect. There will still be blockbuster movies, albums and books, but there will be fewer of them. The companies that will prosper, says Mr Anderson, will be "those that switch out of lowest-common-denominator mode and figure out how to address niches."