This morning’s Media Guardian features a thought piece from Magic Lantern’s Anthony Lilley that had my head nodding a long in agreement.
The author of the Long Tail, Chris Anderson, has prompted a lot of the media to discuss once again his theory over the weekend.
Lilley hones in on the chapter about the “new aggregators”, noting that “Aggregation and its close cousin, search, are centres of enormous power. He raises the question, and invites answers to what happens to funding for content:
“It took an aggregator, iTunes, to break the market for digital music despite years of the labels having their own proprietary systems. But the demand from audiences for new work remains huge. Shifting the way in which production is funded is much more difficult to do than slapping up a VoD website; but it’s probably going to turn out to be more significant.”
Distribution is changing and fast. Content owners, be they media or other kinds of brands, must start to consider how they can tap into the power offered by the new aggregators.
