Many of you are probably already familiar with Chris Anderson’s theory known as ”the long tail”:

The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of “hits” (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-target goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.

And while his theory is well researched and has some excellent evidence to back it up, a new study just released seems to shed new light:

The researchers used the Internet to create an artificial market for singles, all recorded by bands not on the current Top 40 hit parade in the United States.

They then persuaded more than 14,000 young Internet users to log onto the site and choose their favorites.

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While people do genuinely seem to like some songs better than others, their preferences change once they know what other people like, Watts and colleagues found.

“The popular things become more popular and the less-popular things get less popular,” Watts said.

People, it seems, do not entirely trust their own taste when it comes to music. The same may hold true for books and movies and may explain why the top sellers vastly outsell the rest, the researchers concluded in their report, published in the journal Science.

In Anderson’s theory the reason that we see such a large gap between hits and less successful fare has to do with marketing budgets. It appears however that he is only partly right. Instead it is a more complicated scenario: people buy what their peers tell them is “cool.” So while a marketing budget can help spread the word, the Internet will not eliminate hits, just change the way hits are marketed.

We can’t wait to see what happens with this new research…