Companies are talking a lot about the Long Tail. They look at sales of obscure back catalogue increasing and wonder how they can stay ahead of the consumer. They wonder why sales of CD's are declining. They try to figure out how they can find the next ring tone gold mine. They worry about P2P, which in spite of iTunes, still accounts for more than 80% of the network data traffic according to some of the industry insiders that I have talked to.

And all the time they keep applying conventional wisdom to their problems. No wonder they never find the solution.

I like jazz guitar and discovered No Idle Frets. Its a regular podcast by Nick Carver who seems to really know his stuff. However, he is constrained by copyright owners not allowing music copyrights to be distributed in the podcast medium. So he only uses "podsafe" material. This material is all music that is not published by mainstream music publishers. It is new music, often composed by the performers. The recordings Nick plays are all outstanding in quality. The compositions are excellent. And I get exposed to music that I wouldn't normally hear, because in a normal jazz radio program, for instance, there would be a strong tendency to play a reasonable proportion of standards.

So, because of the inability of the music publishers to understand and respond to the innovative communications medium that podcasting represents, they actually foster the growth of interest in new music.

Conventional wisdom and action is driving the Long Tail further and faster.