Reading the Long Tail has made me think about the challenge, the opportunity and the conflict that it creates. For those who have not read the book, the fundamental premise is as follows:

The phrase The Long Tail (as a proper noun with capitalized letters) was first coined by Chris Anderson in an October 2004 Wired magazine article^[1] to describe the niche strategy of businesses, such as Amazon.com or Netflix, that sell a large number of unique items, each in relatively small quantities.

The concept of a frequency distribution with a long tail — the concept at the root of Anderson’s coinage — has been studied by statisticians since at least 1946.^[2] The distribution and inventory costs of these businesses allow them to realize significant profit out of selling small volumes of hard-to-find items to many customers, instead of only selling large volumes of a reduced number of popular items. The group comprising a large number of "non-hit" items is the demographic called the Long Tail.

In the book Blink, the author focuses on decision making and points to a study where a stall with 23 jams sold less than a stall with 6 jams, suggesting that people become confused by too much choice.

So where does that leave us? One obvious solution is a system of ‘suggestions’, where our friends and social network helps us sort through the myriad of choice to find what we like. Amazon was the first company to popularize this model. But is it enough?

While in the US recently someone explained the Zune service to me (Apple fan boys can now stop reading). It is $15 per month, I can run it on 3 Zunes, on 3 computers and pipe it to my stereo via my XBOX 360. Essentially, he was giving his entire family access to 3 million songs for the price of 10 CDs a year. From their site:

Songs you get with a Zune Pass can be copied to up to three computers and three Zune players.

Setting it up to share over the network with the XBOX 360 is explained here.

Over the years I have spent hours categorizing my music by genre (Using decade and one of three choices – Hard, Soft or General) and using star ratings (1 to 5) so that I don’t listen to the bad songs in my library. The possibility of accessing 3 million songs left me with one thought – where would I start?

I felt like the guy looking at 23 jams. But the more I think about it, the easier it sounds. No backing up my music anymore, no buying and ripping from CD, whenever I want it ……. That being said, even if I do choose to start the service, no matter how much my boys beg and plead, all Gears of War 2 items are off limits including the game.