The DRM-free, indie music-oriented site eMusic may not contain any major label music, but it does have the sort of music that people go to great lengths to find, rather than just downloading whatever's at the top of the charts. According to the company, the long tail theory put forth by Wired Magazine editor in chief Chris Anderson, which proposes that "the future of business is selling less of more," jibes perfectly with eMusic's numbers for 2008 -- recent criticism of the theory aside.

"Approximately 75 percent of eMusic tracks sold at least once during 2008 based on a recent analysis of worldwide sales data," says an announcement detailing eMusic's 2008 sales. "This finding supports the existence of retail's 'long tail' and contradicts a November 2008 study released by British licensing body MCPS-PRS. That study claimed that of the 13 million songs on the internet, ten million did not sell a single copy."

eMusic's data, which tracks over five million songs, tells the opposite story. 75 percent of tracks sold at least once on the site, as opposed to 80 percent of tracks not selling at all in MCPS-PRS's sample. Why would eMusic's numbers be a mirror image of MCPS-PRS's numbers? Clearly, one reason is that there's no major label music on eMusic.

"eMusic is the long tail," reiterated Madeleine Milne, managing director of eMusic Europe. "Our customers buy music beyond the mainstream top 40 because we provide them with more context than any other major music retailer through Web 2.0 features, insightful editorial content, a passionate subscriber community and an easy-to-use and effective recommendation engine."

That said, lacking hits doesn't make eMusic a genius for selling non-hits. What's more impressive is that eMusic consumers didn't immediately buy another set of hits (say, Arcade Fire and MGMT instead of Britney Spears and Souljah Boy). Rather than re-concentrating themselves elsewhere, they seem to have scattered all over the place.

If the major labels keep contracting to the point when they crumble into back-catalog companies, the mainstream music scene could come to resemble eMusic much more closely and the long tail could come to dwarf the so-called "head."

In other words, when it comes to music, maybe the long tail theory was just a little early.

LINK (via Epicenter)