Nicholas Carr is very familiar with the Long Tail. A blog post of his from ten years ago was among the most interesting comments I've seen on the topic. Even back then Carr notes that even though more and more of the web's page views were concentrated in fewer and fewer sites, the fact that some of those sites, like Facebook, basically aggregated user generated content perhaps the basic idea behind Long Tail "theory" still held. But Carr noted:
What’s being concentrated, in other words, is not content but the economic value of content. MySpace, Facebook, and many other businesses have realized that they can give away the tools of production but maintain ownership over the resulting products. One of the fundamental economic characteristics of Web 2.0 is the distribution of production into the hands of the many and the concentration of the economic rewards into the hands of the few. It’s a sharecropping system, but the sharecroppers are generally happy because their interest lies in self-expression or socializing, not in making money, and, besides, the economic value of each of their individual contributions is trivial.Because Carr clearly is familiar with the Long Tail I would have expected that he'd mention it in his review of the store. But perhaps the fact that he didn't is simply proof of how much things have changed.