‘In 2011, there were eight million unique tracks that sold at least a copy in the US. That’s eight million individual songs that were in the market. That’s a very long tail. But then if you look closely, of those, 74 per cent sold fewer than ten copies. And a full third of all the songs that sold at least once, sold exactly once.’ Music streaming service Spotify has been around for five years and has a library of 20 million songs. According to Elberse, four million of those—a full 20 per cent—have not been played at all.
via The myth of the long tail – Big Ideas – ABC Radio National (Australian Broadcasting Corporation).
Four million songs on Spotify that have never sold even once, and 2.6 million on iTunes that have sold exactly once. I guess I’m glad I’m not trying to make a living as a musician.
I suppose that most of these are utter rubbish, but still, even if 95% are really bad, that still leaves more than I’ll have time to listen to in my lifetime. Well, lets see. Five percent of four million songs, say an average of three minutes each, is ten thousand hours of good music.
But lets pursue this a little further. 26% of 8 million songs on iTunes did sell more than 10 copies. Not Platinum, and not enough to make a living, but still. Two million songs times three minutes is a hundred thousand hours of music. Played continuously, each song only once, that’s more than eleven years.
The thin tail is really, really long, but the fatter part of the tail is not so very short.