Where to get the music: the long tail

For those of you who are asking yourselves what in the world is a long tail, here’s a quick definition. The Long Tail refers to having a small amount of a large variety of items. The best example of this in music today is probably iTunes. iTunes has an extremely wide variety of songs, artists, genres, podcasts, videos, etc. and you can buy them instantly with the click of a button.

There are, as always, advantages and disadvantages to this type of obtaining music. A few of the major advantages are obvious: No CD to worry about, you don’t have to go to the store to purchase it, and you can pick only the songs you want instead of buying an entire CD with only one song on it that you even like listening to. In today’s fast paced world, we thrive on programs like iTunes. They allow us to get obscure music that you might not be able to find in a store and we can get it in an instant. Because the iTunes program has a large variety of music, people are buying music that is not so, for lack of a better term, “mainstream.” There are a lot of bands that can make a lot of money because of this long tail trend that is occurring.

While most people may think there couldn’t possibly be any disadvantages to the iTunes program, I have found just one. Because you don’t have a CD to worry about, you can lose all your songs if your computer crashes. This can be potentially problematic if you have all of your music purchased from iTunes. I, personally, had this experience happen to me about six months ago. Luckily, I only had about 50 of my 1500 songs purchased with iTunes and therefore was able to get most of them back from my CD’s.

The iTunes program has given the music industry a new way to release their music. It has become a catalyst of the long tail of media. It has contributed not only to the way that society buys music, but the way that they perceive and use it. I believe it will continue to grow and change the way that society utilizes music.