> Page and Bud found that most of the songs available for purchase had never been downloaded, and that the concentration of hits was more pronounced than ever before.
The question not answered by this statement is whether the concentration of hits produce more revenue than the larger tail. The hits might be even more concentrated in a digital world, but do they compete with the huge back catalog?
Yeah, most of those songs available for purchase would not have been available at all to most consumers in the pre-Internet era. With online shopping, small producers may not be dramatically better off (as some Long Tail hucksters would claim) but they're not worse off and they might be marginally better off.
The question not answered by this statement is whether the concentration of hits produce more revenue than the larger tail. The hits might be even more concentrated in a digital world, but do they compete with the huge back catalog?