eMarketer’s Geoff Ramsey looks at the fragmentation of media and the opportunities for those willing to work with the shards.

In 1991, a European musician by the name of Momus spun a radical vision for the future of music:

“The future will be a lot of musical shrapnel… The old unifying stars like Madonna and Michael Jackson will be seen as the last of their kind, global monoliths, relics of an age of monopoly capitalism which has been smashed to smithereens.”

Putting his own spin on Andy Warhol’s “fifteen minutes of fame” adage, Momus suggested a different dynamic. In the future, he wrote, “Everyone will be famous for fifteen people.”

Momus’s vision of a fragmented music world is probably only half right. I doubt that mass media stars like U2 or Britney Spears will cease to exist. And yet, Momus was prescient, predicting (nearly 15 years ago!) the democratization and fragmentation of music. The internet -- coupled with the MP3 devices and digital music payment models -- can create markets for even the most obscure bands.

His predictions hold true when considering the wider universe of online content and user activity. The “mass” is under pressure while the margins sizzle with action. Big stars are unlikely to disappear, but marketers, publishers, investors and futurists are increasingly looking at this marginal activity -- now known as “The Long Tail,” thanks to an excellent article by Wired’s Chris Anderson -- as business opportunities.

The long tail upsets the fundamental notion of the order of markets. Consider the typical pie chart showing the distribution of market share for a given industry. Prevailing wisdom says that we should be focusing on the top two, three or four leaders in the market, with little or no attention paid to the “all others” segment. But what if the value of the “all others” segment were to exceed the collective value of the leaders?

For every trend, there are underlying forces. I believe the long tail, and its ultimate successful applications in business, emerges from five consumer and marketing realities:

1. The consumer, through digital technologies, is increasingly in control of media and content.
2. Broadband, which will be in 36 percent of American homes by year’s end, is allowing more and richer content to be distributed across the Internet to homes and offices around the world.
3. The rapid escalation of search, used by 77 percent of internet users and comprising a $5.7 billion ad market, makes it increasingly easy for users to find what they’re looking for online.
4. The growth in the number of American shoppers and buyers online, at 114 million and 96 million, respectively, means there is now a critical mass of consumers that can potentially monetize the long tail.
5. Marketers, recognizing thes shifts in consumer behavior, are figuring out business models and payment systems that can take more friction out of the process of connecting people with other people as well as pieces of information, content, music, video and other material.

I attended and spoke at the Piper Jaffray Global Internet Summit in June. Most of the attendees were investment banking executives, and since many of those in the financial world were burned by the dot-com bust, the underlying theme of the conference was: “What’s different with the Internet now?”

Surprisingly, by the end of the conference, the attendees seemed to be in agreement that many of the big internet ideas of the 1990s, including the oft-mentioned (and later maligned) “network effect,” were, in fact, right. The problem was not bad ideas but bad timing.

Previously, the internet was in less than 50 percent of American homes, and few of those homes were connected to high-speed lines. Consumers had not yet embraced the web. Trust issues inhibited people from doing anything more than browsing news pages of branded sites or sending emails.

Today, consumers are actively engaged with the internet -- downloading music, watching videos and even full-length movies, posting and sharing photos, blogging, podcasting, shopping and buying, bidding on auctions, networking for careers and social reasons -- and they are doing it all from multiple locations and at any time of the day or night.

Marketers are realizing that, through the power of the internet and its long-tail effects, the economic role of social behavior is rising and being monetized in new and efficient ways.  In the vast, unregulated reaches of the deep, dark web, there is money to be made, if only organizations are prepared to abandon some of the old ways of doing business.

Geoff Ramsey is the CEO and co-founder of eMarketer. This article is drawn from the latest issue of The Ramsey Review, a monthly report on e-business and interactive marketing trends.