The long tail is alive and well and the OP is incorrect.
just kidding, I'm almost sure you meant beer ;)
I suspect the investment though for indie bands now is a lot cheaper (cheaper than say filling up the van at every college-town stop).
Easy means, less effort. Less effort means less creativity.
It's a race to the bottom.
Lacking a long tail, culture becomes a race to the banal.
I sold music (i.e. dance / electronic music) from 1990 (pre-internet) and into the mid+ 00s. I saw what easier production and easier distribution did for quality.
Ask any DJ who has lived long enough, and no one will tell you there's less noise.
The alternative is worse though.
We do have more choice. Unfortunately, there's been a disproportunate increase in friction / noise.
A net loss, which supports the article's theory.
If you worked out how to crack the distributor game, you could make a VERY comfortable living back in the 90s producing mediocre dance music under many different names.
You could make a VERY comfortable living as a writer in 80s and 90s writing for niche literary or special interest magazines. Or producing mid-market fiction. Especially romantic novels.
Until around 2000, you could make a VERY comfortable living as a competent but not outstanding orchestral sessions musician, as long as you lived in one of the bigger music cities (London, LA, NY, Tokyo, Berlin.) Until around 2010, likewise for pop session musicians (add Nashville and a few others.)
Most of those opportunities have disappeared.
The Long Tail hasn't added anything. It has shuffled around the opportunities. So now you can make a VERY comfortable living as a niche YouTube star, as long as you're the right kind of extrovert and - ideally - at least a little good looking.
And so on for all the other current market slots.
They're not really new at all - just updated variations on the old "self-employed creative" roles which happen to favour a different set of skills.
Before the internet, long tail effects were present with the 1M that could get past the gauntlet of labels and distribution conglomerates. After the internet, musicians had better avenues to get money more directly from fans and fans had better tools for discovery.
You characterize it as being a zero-sum game but I don't believe this is right. I think it's easier now than ever to generate a (small, potentially liveable) income stream from 'mediocre dance music', niche writer, etc.
There are more full-time musicians and musicians earning a living than there were 20 years ago [0] [1]. This is directly due to the internet being the distribution channel.
I would imagine other fields have been effected similarly though I haven't seen a broad study.
[0] https://www.techdirt.com/2013/05/30/massive-growth-independe...
[1] https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/features/raine-group-indepe...
But I can read those things on the Kidle app mostly. I own the books, which were not expensive in money but we’re in effort, because they remind me that in living memory you could be a rockstar celebrity from writing books. I’m not making a moral judgement, maybe I’m just dating myself, but that’s just important to me.
I don’t see how anyone can argue against there being more choice than ever before across all sectors of products and content.
Anderson's point was somewhat different as I recall. It wasn't that individual long tail content is necessarily financially viable for its creators. (Which seems mostly true even if there are some breakouts who wouldn't have existed at least in the same form 25 years ago.) It's that long tail content in aggregate could be financially viable for distributors and other sellers--which seems at least somewhat true.
With a hindsight lens, you could argue that the long tail was about profiting off the labor of free and low-paid content creation--although a somewhat counterargument is that consumers get a lot of value too and much of the content is stuff that would never have seen the light of day at least beyond a tiny circle of friends and fans in past times.
I don't disagree with that point, rather I never cared that the long tail would be "financially viable for distributors". In fact, I suppose I prefer that it is not viable for them.
Long live the long tail!
If long tail content isn't financially viable for YouTube, then YouTube either doesn't exist, charges for hosting, or gatekeeps.
If nobody is paying for it except with their eye-balls how much should you expect to profit, and thus how much should you invest in producing your content? Not much hence quality goes down and everybody suffers from poor cultural offerings.
Bandcamp has always been pretty transparent about their sales numbers and they are at $200 million annually now. They are about as “long tail” as it gets.
Forums for sci-model builders — where kit-makers can sell you a resin kit made in their garage of Luke Skywalker's "T-167 Sky Hopper" (or whatever).
Electronic kits you would not have found in Radio Shack: Kim-1 replicas, Apple-I replicas, a SCSI emulator for vintage computers, etc.
Fan films that you would have been lucky to catch at a sci-fi convention are now a click away on YouTube.
And never mind how many of these garage kits, fan films, etc, would have even been produced if there were not a niche forum where these could be sold/displayed.
He talks about the "long tail" but then turns around and talks about mainstream (ha ha) companies like Netflix, talks about "Hollywood", etc. The long tail is not going to come from corporate America, and never was.
The game is different and it's too early to tell if things are better now than before. We're seeing a lot of no-talent rich kids ("influencers") as they take over the commons. Facebook used to be a way that anyone, in theory, could gain social influence. Now, it seems to ratify one's lack of influence; if people (e.g., employers, literary agents) look you up on Twitter and see less than 5,000 followers, they assume they can get away with shit.
This being said, I think we are past the nadir. We're going from an age in which we had incompetent curators to one in which we don't know who the curators are. As they say about traditional vs. self-publishing, the problem for self-publishing is that there are no gatekeepers, and the problem with traditional publishing is that it has lousy gatekeepers (lousy because they care more about short-term marketability than literary merit). How this is all going to shake out is anybody's guess.
What concerns me is the amount of power tech companies now have. It's great that a talented nobody can become a Youtube star, at least now... but what happens if Youtube decides to change its algorithm to punish leftist content? How do we prevent spurious copyright strikes? How do people who are de-platformed for illegitimate reasons (this literally happened to me) seek justice? How do we make sure we're not just building another reputation market that rich people will corner? That's what the tech companies want, after all, for the sole reason that it's most profitable.
It may be the case that the long tail/niche market/counterculture market is also winner-take-all [1], so that non-mainstream content is much more available, yet almost no one actually producing such content can really make a living at it.
[1] Per the article, in the context of "solving a Long Tail problem": "And when I looked at products instead, I found the same distribution: 80% of sales came from 20% of the products."
If that is successful, what does the long tail look like?
I mean, there are a lot of people making videos. But I don't really believe many of those get their full income from it.