The online music retailer eMusic has put out some interesting data that, it is claimed, supports the famous “Long Tail” theory of online retail. Chris Anderson (picture), the editor in chief of Wired magazine, coined the phrase in a 2004 article, claiming that Internet retailers would sell more niche products at the expense of mass-market items. However, this theory was challenge in a recent study by Will Page and Andrew Bud, which claimed more than 10 million of the 13 million music tracks available on the Internet failed to find a single buyer last year. In response, eMusic has reported that 75% of the tracks in its catalogue were bought at least once in 2008.

One of the great things about Hitwise is that the sheer volume of search data we track allows us to provide insight into the Long Tail. Therefore I though it would be interesting to see if eMusic’s search traffic was benefitting from its Long Tail approach. In order to do this I’ve compared eMusic, a small site without a nationally recognized brand, to some to its larger competitors: Amazon UK, Play.com and HMV.

Amazon is one of the undisputed leaders of search engine optimization (SEO) and it receives a huge amount of traffic from tail terms. During December it picked up 1.18% of all UK search traffic from 727,625 distinct terms. So how did this compare with eMusic? In December Amazon received 211 times more traffic from search engines than eMusic, but from only 142 times as many individual search terms. In other words, eMusic is more reliant on the Long Tail than Amazon, but only just.

However, when comparing eMusic with Play.com and HMV the contrast is even greater. Play.com received 66 times as much search traffic as eMusic from 27 times as many terms; while HMV received 28 times as much search traffic from just six times as many terms. For reference, the amount of search terms sending traffic to eMusic in December was 5,135.

Madeleine Milne, eMusic's managing director for Europe, says that "eMusic is the Long Tail...Our customers buy music beyond the mainstream Top 40 because we provide them with more context ... [and encourage] experimentation."

This is quite a revealing quote. Like Amazon, eMusic does provide a lot of “context” in the form of professional and user reviews, and that all helps it pick up Long Tail search traffic. However, the site also based on a subscription model and credits cannot be carried over to the next month. From my own experience, when using the service I did indeed “experiment” by downloading tracks that I might not have otherwise chosen to, but I sometimes did this to use up my credits before they expired.

Therefore my conclusion would be that eMusic does indeed benefit from the Long Tail, but that it is not be typical in this respect. There are a number of factors that differentiate the service from more mainstream, transactional music retailers: better than average ‘content’ (i.e. professional and customer reviews, magazine, etc.), the focus on independent music (and lack of major label acts), and the subscription approach which encourages people to download more obscure tracks.

Robin Goad

Robin Goad is Research Director, Hitwise UK. This piece was originally published on Hitwise analyst blog here.  

Image by Esthr