The Shape of Days

So the meme of the week — of which we’re all already incredibly tired — is called the “long tail.” It kinda started with an article in Wired from a few months back, but it’s gained currency lately.

In a nutshell, the principle of the “long tail” says that as the number of choices increases, the likelihood that one choice will dominate diminishes. In other words, if there are only three videos for rent at the corner store, those three are going to be very popular. But if there are ten, the odds that any one of them will get most of the attention are reduced.

And if there are a million, the curve is flatter still.

I don’t know why it took a big thinker to first notice this, because we see it every day with iTunes.

I have hundreds of CDs. I don’t know how many, precisely, because they’re all sitting on the top shelf of a closet right now, but it’s in the hundreds. It used to be that I’d listen to 10 or 20 CDs a lot, and the rest would gather dust. It wasn’t because I didn’t like the rest of my music; it’s just that my access to it was limited due to physical constraints. My CDs were in a closet or the garage or wherever I found space to store them, so going to get one was a significant investment of time and trouble. (Not “liberating France” significant, but you know what I mean.) Also, my car had a 10-disc changer in it, so I’d load it up with 10 CDs and just leave them in there for weeks or even months at a time.

Then, a few years ago, I loaded all of my music into iTunes. It took months, because I was encoding just a few CDs a day, and each CD could take half an hour to encode, but I got it done. Immediately my listening patterns changed.

I’ve had my music library on my computer ever since, and two distinct trends have emerged: I’m listening to a hell of a lot more music, and I’m listening to a hell of a lot more music.

Obviously some clarification is in order.

As a writer — starving, to be sure, but a writer nonetheless — I spend most of my time in front of my computer. Because it’s there, I have iTunes running practically all the time. That means that most of my day is filled with music. Heck, I’ve even been known to crank up the volume and listen to music while I’m in the shower. So I’m listening to more music, you see?

But more than that, I’m listening to a greater variety of music. Most of the time, my entire library is on shuffle. That’s some 14,000 tracks, or 40 days of continuous music, on random play. As I’ve been writing this, for example, I’ve heard “Ride” by BT, the theme from Shaft, the “binary sunset” theme from Star Wars, and “Misterioso” by the Thelonious Monk Quartet.

One of the neat things iTunes does is to keep track of how many times you’ve listened to each song in your library. For fun, I told iTunes to show me all my music sorted by play count. I found out, to my surprise, that I’ve got no songs in my library that I’ve heard more than 10 times. That counts my iPod too, incidentally. I’ve got a great many songs that I’ve heard from five to 10 times, a few thousand songs I’ve heard three or four times, and more than ten thousand songs that I’ve heard only once or twice.

That, right there, is the “long tail” in action. Given the choice of listening to any one of 14,000 songs (songs that I like already, obviously, by virtue of the fact that they’re in my library), I tend to listen to a greater variety rather than a small set of favorites. The curve, in other words, is very shallow.

The “long tail” principle isn’t a law of nature or anything; it’s more like the “80/20 rule,” a principle that holds true often enough to make it a useful predictor of behavior. And, just like the “80/20 rule,” it’s one of those things that, once you’re aware of it, you start seeing everywhere you turn.

Even in iTunes.

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This post is part of a series. You can read the whole thing here, if you’re into that sort of thing.

• Cause, effect and the ‘long tail’
• ‘House’ still not on iTunes
• Apple implicitly renews stance on Fair Use