May 1, 2009 12:00 PM, By Blair Jackson

WIRED EDITOR'S BOOK THE LONG TAIL SHEDS LIGHT ON THE CHANGING MUSIC BUSINESS MODEL

With so much free stuff out there, has the relative success of iTunes and Rhapsody surprised you?

They're not selling music as much as they're selling convenience. It's a time-money calculus. If you're young, you've got more time than money, so you're more likely to use peer-to-peer more. If you're older, you've got more money than time and you will pay for convenience. So to me, iTunes and Rhapsody are simple convenience: “I can't be bothered to track things down on peer-to-peer, and 99 cents here or there, or $14.95 a month is just not meaningful to me compared to my time.”

Is there anything that you said in The Long Tail that has been changed by circumstances of the market since?

Not really, but there were a lot of misunderstandings about The Long Tail, which I attempted to deflect in the book, but which were misunderstood anyway. The first was this notion that I was announcing the death of the blockbuster, which is not true. It's the death of the monopoly of the blockbuster. The second is sort of my own fault because of the subtitle we put on the book. Fundamentally, The Long Tail is about culture. It's true that you can build businesses around the long tail [concept], but most people won't. Most of the long tail's effect is just cultural diversity and variety, and I think everyone assumed they could make money on the long tail, which is not the case. Only the aggregators really make money in the long tail. You can build an audience in the long tail, you get more choice as a consumer in the long tail, but by and large the long tail is dominated by nonmonetary forces. I wrote it as business book, so it's my own fault if people read it entirely through a business lens. But it's a business book because culture books don't sell. [Laughs]

So is Free a tangent from The Long Tail?

Somewhat. The chain of logic goes like this: Infinite variety — which is what The Long Tail is about — was enabled by unlimited shelf space. Unlimited shelf space is only possible when shelf space costs nothing. Free shelf space created a cultural revolution that we're all enjoying today. What else can free do? So that's what the new book is.

How much of all this is generational?

A lot!

I'm a baby boomer. I've never downloaded something peer-to-peer. I still love CDs, but I've certainly benefited from the long tail of e-commerce. I've gotten incredible things from Amazon and other places I thought I'd never find.

It's not entirely generational, but it's heavily generational. Basically, everything I do divides readers into two camps. There's people over a certain age — I'm not sure what that age is; maybe 30 — and they're like, “No way. This is complete bullshit.” And there are people under 30 who say, “Duh! You wrote a book about that?” My kids can't believe what an idiot I am for writing a whole book on “free.”

My teenagers haven't really explored peer-to-peer, which I personally think is to be admired, so they buy from iTunes or, actually, they prefer the sound quality of CDs, as do I. And they'd never listen to music on an iPhone. But then, when I think about this issue historically, we listened on shitty transistor radios, and commercial cassettes were pretty bad.

That's right. MP3s are worse quality than CDs — I guess. I can't really hear the difference, to be honest. I suppose that disqualifies me from talking about music because I'm such a cretin. Unfortunately, I'm often listening to music on headphones on airplanes, so I'm not really the guy to be telling the difference between MP3 and WAV. [Laughs]

When you go around the country speaking, do you find that people are desperate for solutions to all this?

I think some people are desperate for solutions. I find the words “music industry” to be really limiting. When they say “music industry,” what they really mean is record labels. And frankly I don't have an answer for the labels. Maybe they're going to go away. It happens. But when you look at the rest of the music industry — the artists themselves who are by and large able to get an audience — it's okay for them. The fans get extraordinary exposure to the diversity in new music. The touring, the licensing, the merchandise — in some ways it's never been better. For the labels it's never been worse. I don't really feel music needs to be fixed. I don't think there's anything wrong with it. I think there's something wrong with the very narrow slice of professional, classic distribution of music.

Blair Jackson is the senior editor of Mix.

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