The Long Tail/Anderson 26-40

33 Customers have shifted to less mainstream fare, fragmenting to a thousand different subgenres.

37 Culture has shifted from following the crowd up to the top of the charts to finding your own style and exploring far out beyond the broadcast mainstream, into both relative obscurity and back through time to the classics.

38 We are now a nation of niches.

39 Like venture capitalists, they spread their bets over a number of projects, investing in each one enough money to give it a fighting chance at becoming a hit. They expect that, at best, most of the projects will break even, and a few will flat-out fail. That means that the few that are hits must compensate for the drag of the others.

40…we ascribe disproportionate attention to the very top of the heap. We have been trained, in other words, to see the world through a hit-colored lens.

We are turning from a mass market back into a niche nation, defined now not by our geography but by our interest.