paidContent points to a Bear Stearns report titled “The Long Tail: Why Aggregation & Context and Not (Necessarily) Content are King in Entertainment” recently released that takes a hard, analytical look at the way media has transformed in the past and what that might imply for the future of the Long Tail in th media landscape.

Spencer Wang lays out several key points in the presentation. I’ll summarize them here, to the best of my own understanding:

  1. Entertainment Supply Chain (seen below) is transforming based on various competitive forces (technology, economics, regulations).
  2. Internet has truly blown the doors off of the Content Distribution mechanism, yielding more power to the Content Creators (though less than might be expected due to simultaneously decreasing costs of Content Creation).
  3. An increase in choices will lead to an increase in demand, with one major caveat - hits get smaller. While there still will be hits, they will occur in a form different than before: smaller in scale (and potentially revenue). Today, we still think of our personal media properties in terms of Mainstream Metrics - hence the quest for “eyeballs”.
  4. The ultimate penetration and reach of new, smaller niche audiences cannot be overlooked, but don’t expect it to happen overnight. TV took a significant amount of time to make these adjustments.We’re still in the infancy of the social media landscape - hills have yet to form.
  5. Infinite Choice = Overwhelming Confusion. Amen. The problem with choice is someone has to make one. This has been evidenced in the perpetuation of phrases such as information overload, continuous partial attention, and others in that family that all allude to our decreasing attention spans and increasing river of data to consider.Information overload is a problem for not just servers but people.
  6. Systems that serve to filter the river will ultimately prove invaluable to the wider population. These systems include Brands, Editorial Discretion, Ratings, User Recommendations, and Software.In reality, these seem all like citizens of a wider Reputation Economy.

I’ve added a number of my own comments to the end of each of these points. While there is a great deal more that can be said about this particular topic, I’ll return to these topics over time. Considering SocialRoots‘ ultimate goals, this topic is particularly of interest.

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