MUSIC • TECHNOLOGY • POLICY

It should come as no surprise that we don’t have much time for Chris Anderson around here. We do have a lot of time for Will Page, the economist who provided the analysis for the Radiohead “In Rainbows” project and a very bright lad with a lot of promise for a Scot.

As reported by Andrew Orlowski, Will and his team have articulated a serious debunking of Chris Anderson’s “Long Tail” what anyone who had actually sold records knew intuitively was BS–“80 per cent of the digital inventory sold no copies at all – and the ‘head’ was far more concentrated than the economists expected.” In other words, the “Long Tail” is gibberish because “[t]here are Tails where the Tail lives as a kind of welfare state. Not this one. You starve in this Tail.”

Or as we say around here, don’t play grabass with the Wrong Tail.