A good article in Wired, about The “Long Tail”. Basically, it discusses how the economies of scale and vastly increased information about products that the Internet and other technologies have produced have expanded the market for entertainment. A wider availability of products and more fluid pricing now mean each product gets a demand and supply mechanism of its own, rather than being crowbarred into a single inflexible market designed for only the biggest-selling products. Couple that with “People who liked this also liked this…”-type metadata and it means niche products are now able to be discovered and bought much more easily.

I found it especially interesting as it coincides neatly with a set of lectures I took on the Socioeconomics of Innovation - I may take on the topic and use it for one of my termly essay papers.