Bollywood or Bust

As a paid up member of one of the Netflix clones, I do appreciate the way that each title is allocated almost equal virtual shelf space and that my own ability to drift away from the standard canon of hits is thereby facilitated. (Netflix carry 40,000 titles and claim to rent each of these at least once a month.)

Yet I've been a little surprised by some of the loose thinking that seems to thrive whenever the Long Tail model is enthused about. For example:

"The idea of a shared popular culture is a relatively recent one", Tom Standage informed us in the Economist recently. Huh? (Better still, Seth Godin's deeply ambiguous proclamation:"Give people 1m books to read and they won't all want to read a bestseller". )

In their determination to promote the existence of a one-dimensional link between certain constraints (mainly spatial) and consumer taste, a number of commentators are blinding themselves to some of the (actually quite interesting) contradictions they thereby set up. Take Chris Anderson's recent post on the Indian film industry - "a perfect Long Tail candidate".

Such is the geographical spread of the 1.7m first or second generation Indians in the US, he asserts, that up until now the 800 films a year churned out by Bollywood have never really been able to fill American cinemas or support specialist DVD rental stores, except "in urban Indian neighbourhoods".

Yet in another posting Anderson makes the following observation: "Head content satisfies us in areas where we are similar; Tail content satisfies us in areas where we are different".

Now do we really think that the primary market for Bollywood movies is driven by a geeky subculture that wants to be different, or whether in the context of dense concentrations of people with a shared cultural heritage it's actually bound up with the reinforcement of similarities?

I'm not denying that non-Hindi speakers can help to expand the market for these movies along with the range of their own tastes, but I would also expect the relationship between culture and geography to be more complex and entwined than that of liquid and bottleneck. Distributed demand has pyschographical lumps in it and it would be wrong to assume that these are all out of the same mould.

One man's niche is another man's cultural block?