Content’s Long Tail Is Being Weaponized
Boomboxes offering nothing more than a cassette player and AM/FM radio have grabbed my interest. While on a short vacation recently, in lieu of screens, my children turned to a boombox collecting dust for some fun. Despite having access to just a handful of the 100 million songs that are available on my iPhone, this boombox from the early 2000s was able to produce a memorable music listening experience with my kids for a few days.
Instead of betting that boomboxes will become a thing again (they won’t), the takeaway from my week away is that algorithms have weaponized content’s long tail by picking and choosing what we consume. As a result, we are losing interest in pursuing or investigating the long tail. We are still technically able to navigate through the seemingly endless sea of songs, shows, podcasts, blogs, and videos, but algorithms are designed to remove our desire for such exploration. In the process, we are seeing the decline of long-standing content mediums ranging from music and video to magazines and blogs as our imagination for what is possible declines.
Overabundance has long derived its business validity from the long tail. More than 100 million songs, tens of thousands of TV shows and movies, and a countless number of goods can be listened to, watched, or bought online. The long tail premise involving power found with the niche was
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The Spotify and Roku Squeeze
Spotify and Roku have a lot more in common than meets the eye (and ear). Both companies are fascinated with advertising-driven business models in which listener and viewer time and engagement is monetized via delivering ads. Roku is much further along in its advertising pursuit. Nearly 90% of Roku’s revenue is generated by ads while just 10% of Spotify revenue is from ads. However, both companies have signaled that advertising is where their growth and momentum will be found.
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Music’s Trouble
The number of people paying good money for music continues to rise. In the U.S. alone, 75 million people are paying on average $90 a year to listen to music through a streaming service. On its own that’s a great thing, and music rights holders are riding decades-long emotional (and financial) highs. However, we are seeing what amounts to music’s destruction continue to unfold before our eyes.
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