The Long Tail was a profound cultural insight. When we created YouTube, Amazon, Roon, recipe websites and Netflix, the culture changed. When you give people a choice, they make a choice.
We went from the Top 40 to millions of songs. From Blockbuster to every movie ever made. From the local bookstore to all the books, all the time. Pick what you want instead of what other people picked.
There are still hits, but the majority of what we consume are titles that weren’t even available to us a few years ago.
It’s hard to believe this was a breakthrough idea only 21 years ago.
Now, with LLMs, it’s all going to change again.
That’s because it doesn’t matter how many cookbooks you own… Claude can invent a new recipe for you, one that’s never been seen before. You can do this today, the tech works.
Soon, it won’t matter if you have 400 Grateful Dead albums; AI systems will be able to generate live recordings from 1974 that never happened.
And eventually, Netflix will generate TV shows that no one has ever seen, for an audience of one.
The generative long tail will go on and on and on.
Most of the time, it’ll degenerate into slop and banality. The humanity of the movies, books and recordings it creates will fade, and we’ll be left with mindless airport music.
But that will evolve over time, and the arc will go in the other direction. Things that work, done more often. Combinations and evolving insights that move even faster than we can keep up with.
Slop and magic, in an eternal braid, a lot like the stuff humans have been producing for decades.
A golden road to who knows where.