Well said, dugfromtheearth. I logged in to post essentially the same point. The article's author seems to have no idea what The Long Tail really is. The points he tries so hard to make about how "things in the tail tend to stay in the tail" prove nothing, as The Long Tail never said things would move out of the tail--only that a market exists for these more obscure items if you can make them available without putting yourself out of business in doing so.

What's unfortunate is there is a real question about the validity of a key part of The Long Tail (at least as it is presented in the book), which this article completely misses. The Long Tail was a fantastic magazine article about how the Internet was changing things. But, when he expanded it to book length, Chris Anderson tried to push the theory into the brick and mortar world, as well. And his examples of this in action weren't very strong. (In one instance he points to special-order appliances in designer colors being an example of The Long Tail, but these require special parts and paint to be stored someplace and the manufacturing process has to be modified to produce them. That's a far cry from the concept of uploading an old, obscure song to a server and waiting for a few people to buy it.)