Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
on-line commerce makes it possible to invert the traditional form of
the market from selling large amounts of a few things, to selling
small amounts of a large number of things. This is the 'long tail' of
his topic's title, the shape of the graph showing the distribution of
sales according to popularity, which is shaped somewhat like a tick,
with the vertical stroke representing the small number of items in a
market that sell in great quantities, and the horizontal stroke,
extending almost infinitely, the far greater number of items that sell
very little and which are normally ignored by conventional forms of
marketing. But with new technologies this is changing, and an
almost infinite array of niche micromarkets can be catered for.
Accompanying this is a far greater sense of control on the part of the
consumer: Anderson quotes Rupert Murdoch as claiming that
'young people don't want to rely on a God-like figure from above to
tell them what's important. They want control over their media,
instead of being controlled by it'.
7
An example of this and of how consumers are controlling their
media can be found in 'peer to peer' systems such as BitTorrent,
which enables large files, such as films and television programmes to
be downloaded, or Napster, which allowed users to share audio files
by treating each user's computer as a host. Naturally much of the use
of such systems contravenes copyright law, and the maker of Napster
has been famously involved in a court case on those grounds. To
some extent such activities are a more technologically sophisticated
and widely distributed successor to the way that audio- and video-
cassettes have been used to share or illegally sell copyrighted material.
It also parallels the illegal distribution of films and software on CD-
Roms, characterized by those in authority as 'piracy'. This said, peer
to peer file sharing is also bringing about a new paradigm of
consumption, in which the consumer not only gains far more
control over the range and types of music he or she consumes but is
able to become part of distributed networks of like-minded individ-
uals with similar tastes.
