The long tail

The inspiration to share things with you can sometimes come from pretty unlikely places. This definitely comes under that category. I was listening to a programme recently about how powerful the i-tunes store is and the statistics that were being chucked around like cheap confetti made my head spin.
You ready? OK. There's 26,000,000 tracks on i-tunes. What percentage of those tracks do you think have been bought/downloaded 100 times or more? I'll tell you - just 6%. That means over 24,440,000 tracks have been bought less than 100 times. I found that 6% figure surprisingly low.

Now it gets weird.

Although I still love buying music that comes in a physical form (CD's and vinyl) I also love Spotify.
Guess how many of Spotify's 20,000,000 tracks have never been played?
It's 4,000,000.
That means 20% of all tracks on Spotify have NEVER been played. Not even by the singer's mum. Amazing.

Why am I telling you all this? Because the situation with e-music is not dissimilar to what happens with our e-books and e-journals. In online publishing this situation is known as 'the long tail'. Basically you get a few things which are used a lot (the head bit) and then a long, long tapering down to the things that are hardly used at all (the tail bit).

Here's the hopefully interesting bit; if you're an unknown author writing an e-book you need readers to be able to find it among the potentially thousands of other books. How you do that is tricky because if you write a book on 'Social Policy' and call it 'Social Policy' it's probably going to get buried. If, on the other hand, you go with a wacky title or (even riskier) a pun in the title then the student may never think of trying those words without prior knowledge.

So once again, it ultimately comes down to the words and how imaginative and specific you need to be. Those of you who are experienced in using Dawsonera (our e-books database) will know how beneficial and crucial these skills can be. If you're new to finding e-resources then don't be afraid to wander off the path and try some weirder keywords. After all, the interesting stuff is quite often found pushing at the edges of a subject. What's more, lecturers usually enjoy coming across a new reference for the first time in a similar way that many of us love hearing a new band on Spotify.