IN 2004, CHRIS ANDERSON writes in The Long Tail, Lagaan opened on just two screens in the US. And yet, there were 1.7 million Indians living in the US, a large enough market to justify bigger exposure. But these 1.7 million Indians were thinly spread out in terms of geography, and there were few places which had enough of them around for a theatre to justify showing Lagaan. That’s the economics of scarcity in play; and yet, as Anderson ex-plains in his seminal book, our world is gradu-ally becoming a “world of abundance”.

The Long Tail has its genesis in an essay An-derson wrote in Wired Magazine, which he ed-its, in 2004, in which he described how the shape of business is changing fundamentally because of new ways of doing business, en-abled by technology. His basic insight deals with the removal of the biggest limitation of traditional business, the ”tyranny of physical space”. Consider places that retail music, for example. Even the largest megastores have a limit on how many albums they can display, and the result is an industry focussed on cre-ating and pushing hits, and not looking much beyond. Anderson informs us, for ex-ample, that 90 per cent of the music sales of Wal-Mart, America’s largest music retailer, comes from just 200 albums.

But all that has changed, and the Internet is responsible. Anderson tells us, “ITunes of-fers nearly forty times as much selection as Wal-Mart. Netflix (a DVD rental store on the net) has eighteen times as many DVDs as Blockbuster and would have even more if there were DVDs to be had. Amazon has al-most forty times as many books as a Borders superstore.” The result, in Anderson’s words, is the “largest explosion of variety in history”.

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