The Long Tail Hates the iPod Shuffle
Last year, I wrote about the excellent Wired essay The Long Tail by Chris Anderson. If you haven’t read it, go and do so. The essay (quoting myself here) “discusses how the future of entertainment revenue is in a million niche markets, not in big, short-lived hits.”
Chris Anderson is writing a book about the subject. On his site, he recently discussed how the iPod Shuffle doesn’t adhere to long tail thinking:
So that, in a nutshell, is the case against the Shuffle. For anyone with a big music collection (thousands of tracks) a random walk through their entire library is statistically likely to be an unwelcome reaquaintance with mistaken purchases, whim rips, filler album tracks and embarrassing ghosts of music taste past. And if you’re anything like me, that gets annoying real fast.
Amen. When I listen to iTunes using Party Shuffle, which is nearly always, I skip at least one in four songs in my 5000 song collection (hello, I just skipped Jewel singing ‘Rudolph The Red Nose Reindeer’ acapella–don’t even ask). This is why I was pretty excited about Synapse AI, which was a predictive music player that worked astonishingly well. Unfortunately, it proved unstable, and they haven’t released a new build for a year and a half.
On an unrelated note: should Mr. Anderson be capitalizing the ‘Long Tail’ when he discusses it as a concept? I know he’s the Editor-in-Chief of Wired, and no doubt could punctuate circles around me, but is that kosher? Isn’t it analogous to a philosophy, like, say, libertarianism? Maybe a closer analogue is ‘tipping point’ (the concept, not the book). I note that his magazine doesn’t capitalize that.
joke 
Isao