Chris Anderson does a good job of describing the long tail and how business are able to profit off “misses” not just “hits.” Before itunes and rhapsody people- who obeyed the law, that is- had to purchase an entire CD to get the one, maybe two songs they were interested in. If a company, like Wal-Mart, could not afford to keep this CD on the self because of low profits that CD was inaccessible to consumers who were still interested in the album. This material is what makes up the long tail. The long tail has all music, not just the hits, and consumers who want this music can still have access.
This changes the business model because not we look to selling music as singles, rather than the whole CD; we realize now that we can profit on other things than just hits. It also changes the way we market new products and scale of our marketing efforts. If you are a band you now encourage your fans to follow you on Facebook, and go to itunes to buy a new song or album. Business is conducted online and reaches consumers on a much larger scale. Especially with Anderson’s third rule of the long tail business model, help me find it, consumers are finding new things they may have never been introduced to and are consuming things that once could have been considered as a “miss”.
Anderson’s concept of “Free” as the future of business is the model that we have seen in so many recent companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon. His idea is to give away the product for free and make revenues in another way; By charging for an upgrade, another related product, with adverting, etc. This also changes they way we approch business models in this changing media culture. In the past revenue has been the most important aspect of a business. Now, Anderson suggest, the product come first then devise a plan to create revenue once you have enough followers.
