The thing is to keep material available, since especially bands tend up to spring back from obscurity after their songs are featured in, say, a movie. Having a fuckton of old CD’s lying on storage for this eventuality is infeasible, but having the same albums available on an on-line store is much more so. So, essentially I don’t believe the long tail philosophy works as a steady stream of income, more like an added bonus of surprising spikes for certain products. Of course, packaging stuff well and selling bundles might help other, less known stuff get traction.

But in any case, it’s important in my opinion to keep stuff available, although no-one is buying it at the moment. The steady everyday revenue stream obviously comes from stuff that’s on the headlines – but you never know when something is going to pop up in the charts. For this it’s important that the actual shops don’t have to pay just for the pleasure of having something on their virtual shelves, only for the items actually sold. Then it’s just the matter of paying for the hard drive space.