Heads and tails: the long tail in Australian media markets

This paper analyses sales of products within three Australian media markets--cinema box office, DVD retail and book retail--from 2002 to 2011. Several conclusions are drawn. First, significant long tail characteristics emerged in the books and particularly DVD markets, but not cinema, over the period. Second, where the number of titles selling in a market is changing rapidly, the choice of metric is vital for analysing the existence of a long tail. Third, across all three media, the analysis shows the oldest and most open market--books--has, by a narrow margin, the strongest blockbuster characteristics. Fourth, although the tail has grown for books and DVDs, it is very long and very, very thin. Finally, although this analysis has used three media products that involve comparable consumer transactions and analysed them as discrete markets, there are significant relationships between them which we hope to analyse in further research.