That was not my reading of The Long Tail at all. Anderson didn't argue that the zipf distribution was going away; rather, he argued that with collapsing inventory and transactions costs, it is now possible to make money selling a large number of individually-marginal items as well as a few blockbusters.
This is excellent, but I have to wonder what happens to blockbusters when broadcast TV and radio suffers the same fate as Time magazine, HBO, big-city newspapers, and other former media giants and thought leaders? The reason why many blockbusters in the music and film industry do so well is because of the marketing power of broadcast media, in which ownership is concentrated in the hands of a few and millions of people watch or listen to their programming -- and make viewing/listening choices based on what they see in ads and in programs like GMA or The Late Show. When those audiences shift to niche channels on the Internet or elsewhere, what will happen to the blockbusters who used to enjoy such a high national profile?
<i>Another way of rescuing less popular stuff is to charge more for it.</i><p>We're talking about IP, where conventional understanding of supply-and-demand is turned on its ear because supply is effectively infinite.<p>But even considering that, isn't this suggestion backwards? If you've got a product that's in high demand, shouldn't that be what you charge more for?<p>Doing this would allow fixed costs for less-popular products to be amortized more quickly, and I think that would make their ROI less risky.
Related: Modern Warfare 2 earns $550 million in five days. <a href="http://kotaku.com/5413847/3-billion-worth-of-call-of-duty-sold?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+kotaku/full+(Kotaku)" rel="nofollow">http://kotaku.com/5413847/3-billion-worth-of-call-of-duty-so...</a><p>The blockbuster is very healthy it seems.