Nicholas Carr does a neat summary of the Bear Stearns analyst Spencer Wang’s presentation : “The Long Tail: Why Aggregation & Context and Not (Necessarily) Content Are King in Entertainment.”

I’ve not had a chance to read the pdf yet, but if Carr’s precis is spot on, it reinforces much of what we’ve been saying here for quite a while :

Wang argues that both ends of the value chain — content creation and content distribution — are increasingly characterized by oversupply and hence weak profitability. Value, as a result, is migrating to the center of the value chain, where content aggregation and branding take place. The profit, in other words, is in packaging. Which means that, economically anyway, the middleman is still sitting pretty.

Consider the middleman as publisher and you have : content selection and branding are God.