Chapter 3: Mobile Personal Content Uncovered 71 advance a career of a no-name artist is one way. Picking up an unrec- ognized artist with unique talent is another. For every Top 20 artist there are hundreds of Top 200 artists, and millions of Top 2 000 000 artists, and so on. At the end of the tail, there are millions of people creating good stuff, but it is only enjoyed by maybe a handful of other people, or even the “audience of one”. The same effect manifests itself in the rosters of megabuck content houses. For every megastar they have to support dozens of less famous artists, and nurture hundreds of promising talents, and keep track of thousands of wannabees. Being able to select the widely appealing content and invest into making it a success is their central competence, and a reason for their existence. Even if the content creation channels change, in the end it remains costly to maintain the machinery needed to make megastars. For this reason, we consider it likely that the content industry will in the future still be dominated by a handful of major labels. And, by the way, they will still get their money from us consumers. Because they have the machinery to craft widely appealing content, they will receive our money. Thus, the emphasis of non-mainstream content creation and distri- bution is known as the Long Tail phenomenon (Anderson 2004). And there is indeed life at the end of the tail. It is often pointed out that the Internet is a great equalizer for those lesser-known content cre- ators. We are seeing many artists and bands who have recently gained fame from humble beginnings, fi rst contributing free music to the Web, and later selling their content commercially. It seems evident that there is space in all parts of the long tail: in the high end dominated by megastars and blockbuster movies; in the middle populated by locally famous artists and not-so-successful inde- pendent movies; and in the tail, zillions of bedroom musicians and amateur home video makers. There is room to succeed in all these places. However, the measures for success, the mechanisms for mon- etizing, distribution, and everything may be radically different in the different parts of the long tail. The notion of Web 2.0 (O’Reilly 2005) has been much discussed in the past few years. This loosely defi ned term is often used to refer to applications that are based on the Internet, use Internet technologies as the main application and UI platform, enable the creation of social networks, and gain signifi cant power out of them. A signifi cant aspect of so-called Web 2.0 applications is that they target not only main- stream content, such as Hollywood movies or Madonna songs, but also cater for the lesser known talent that reaches far smaller audiences – that is, the long tail. Clearly this is near to our topic, personal content.