The long tail is better than you think

Reductions in entry costs allow producers to “take more draws,” and given the unpredictability of quality at the time of investment, taking more draws can generate more “winners.”  Our illustrative estimates for music show that the production mechanism could generate almost 20 times as much benefit as the consumption mechanism for an equal-sized increase in the number of products.

That is from a new working paper by Luis Aguiar and Joel Waldfogel, @pmarca oh we miss ye I bet you would have retweeted this.