A very interesting post at Wired about The Long Tail. You’re better off reading the whole thing to understand what it is, but the executive summary is this: Imagine a sales curve with big “hits” high on the left, and lower-volume “misses” trailing out on the right. It turns out that Amazon, for instance, sells more from that “long tail” than from the hits. But you need both parts.
There is plenty of great entertainment with potentially large, even rapturous, national audiences that cannot clear that bar. For instance, The Triplets of Belleville, a critically acclaimed film that was nominated for the best animated feature Oscar this year, opened on just six screens nationwide. An even more striking example is the plight of Bollywood in America. Each year, India’s film industry puts out more than 800 feature films. There are an estimated 1.7 million Indians in the US. Yet the top-rated (according to Amazon’s Internet Movie Database) Hindi-language film, Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India, opened on just two screens, and it was one of only a handful of Indian films to get any US distribution at all. In the tyranny of physical space, an audience too thinly spread is the same as no audience at all.