The Long Tail - 2nd part

But most of us want more than just hits. Everyone's taste departs from the mainstream somewhere, and the more we explore alternatives, the more we're drawn to them. Unfortunately, in recent decades such alternative have been pushed to the fringes by pumped-up marketing vehicles built to order by industries that desperately need them.

Hit-driven economics is a creation of an age without enough room to carry everthing for everybody. Not enough shelf space for all the CDs, DVDs, and games produced. Not enough screens to show all the avaiable movies. Not enough channels to broadcast all the TV programs, not enough radio waves to play all the music created, and not enough hours in the days to squeeze everything out through either of those sets of slots.

This is the world of scarcity. Now, with online distribution and retail, we are entering a world of abundance. And the differences are profound.

To see how, meet Robbie Vann-Adib, the CEO of Ecast, a digital jukebox company whose barroom players offer more than 150,000 tracks-and some surprising usage statistics. He hints at them with a question that visitors invariably get wrong: "What percentage of the top 10,000 titles in any online media store (Netflix, iTune, Amazon, or any other) will rent or sell at least once a month?"

Most people guess 2 percent, and for good reason: we've been trained to think that way. The 80-20 rule, also known as Pareto's principle (after Vifredo Pareto, an Italian economist who devised the concept in 1906) is around us. Only 20 percent of major studio films will be hits. Same for TV shows, games and mass-market books - 20 percent all. The odd are even worse for major-label CDs, where fewer than 10 percent are profitable, according to th Recording Industry Association of America.