What Comes After the Blockbuster? The Nichebuster
I am at the Entertainment Gathering conference in LA and there is a lot of talk about the death of the blockbuster. Wired editor Chris Anderson showed some nifty charts from his upcoming book on the Long Tail documenting the decline in hit albums …
Context & Ripple Effects
This lands three weeks after Slate's Hollywood's New Zombie framed the studios' hit-or-bust economics as undead — profitable in form, decaying underneath. Now Wired editor Chris Anderson is previewing charts from his upcoming Long Tail book at the Entertainment Gathering conference, putting hard numbers behind the same diagnosis: declining hit albums, rising niche consumption.
First-order effects
- Anderson's charts give music labels and Hollywood studios a quantified, mainstream-platform argument that their blockbuster-led revenues are eroding relative to catalog and niche sales.
Second-order effects
- Distributors and retailers whose business is aggregating deep catalogs rather than launching hits — the model Anderson's data favors — gain the analytical cover to pitch long-tail inventory as the growth story to investors and advertisers.
Third-order effects
- If the hit-decline pattern holds, content businesses restructure around storing and recommending vast backlists rather than concentrating marketing budgets on a few tentpole releases, changing which projects get financed.
The trend: Entertainment economics is shifting from blockbuster concentration toward aggregated niche demand, with Anderson's Long Tail thesis emerging as its defining framework.