Counterpoint to the Long Tail

In November of 2008, Will Page, chief economist of the MCPS-PRS Alliance, UK's royalty collection society, presented a counterpoint to the Chris Anderson's famous Long Tail argument.
Working with Mblox founder Andrew Bud and his colleague Gary Eggleton, they analysed millions of transactions from an undisclosed large digital music provider in UK. According to the Register, they produced a spreadsheet with 1.5 million rows - so large it required a special upgrade to their Excel software (and more RAM).
I quote the Register: they discovered that instead of following a Pareto or "power law" curve, as Anderson suggested, digital song sales follow a classic Log Normal distribution. 80 per cent of the digital inventory sold no copies at all - and the 'head' was far more concentrated than the economists expected.
Key findings:

• Of the 13 million available tracks [on iTunes UK], 10 million don't sell at all. They don't say over what period.
• 80% of the singles revenue came from the top 52,000 songs (In Anderson's original Rapshody research, the equivalente number would be only 60%);
• Moreover, approximately 80% of sales revenue  came from around 3% of the active tracks. Factor in the dormant tail and you’re looking at a 80/0.38% rule  for all the inventory on the digital shelf.
• Finally, only 40 tracks sold more than 100,000 copies, accounting for 8% of the business.
• Of the 1.23 million albums available, only 173,000 were ever bought, meaning 85 per cent did not sell a single copy all year.

Page highlights this insight: “scarcity forces a competition-like structure to pass the cut-off point, which paradoxically creates value by increasing the effort of content suppliers to win”.


Comments: The Register calls The Long Tail a manifestation of "Policy Based Evidence Making". I find that funny. More intriguing and relevant is whether Mr. Page work is biased in any form.
Sources: a short interview with Will Page; Chris Anderson's response; a long interview with Page and Register's opinionated take.