THE LONG TALE?.
Although "The Long Tail" discusses the waning prominence of hits, Anderson would prefer to look past the top of the head of hit singles at a larger group of tracks to gauge broad shifts in demand. "In short, this isn't enough data to draw any proper 'Long Tail' conclusions about," he wrote in an e-mail, "since it doesn't use Head and Tail the way the theory does." Since the publication of "The Long Tail," some studies have confirmed the book's thesis, while others have cast doubt on it. In a 2008 paper, Harvard Business School associate professor Anita Elberse found that hit titles still dominated sales even though some consumers were venturing further down the tail. This year, two researchers at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Tom F. Tan and Serguei Netessine, examined Netflix user data from 2000 to 2005 and found that new titles are appearing faster than customers can discover them. Perhaps more surprisingly, a study by PRS for Music chief economist Will Page and BigChampagne CEO Eric Garland found that the demand for songs on file-sharing services—which offer users almost unlimited choice—closely mirrors that of purchased tracks. Only 5% of songs accounted for 80% of downloads, resulting in what the authors called a "hit-heavy, skinny-tail distribution."
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