I came across Kevin Kelly’s writing on 1,000 true fans today. A great post on how the long tail may help aggregators like Amazon, Netflix as well as 6 Billion consumers, but it is a “mixed blessing” for artists. The solution is to find the midpoint of the long tail, somewhere around 1,000 true fans.
The trick with the long tail as while artists likelyhood of being a super star is still low, the chances of making a living have vastly increased. Its a lot easy to produce, record, and distribute your music right now then at any point before.

Nice article. Here is another, short merch table related piece: http://howtorunaband.com/20...