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What Vann-Adibe had discobered was that the aggregate market for niche music was huge, and effectively unbounded. He called this the ’98 Percent Rule.’ As he later put it to me, “In a wordl of almost zero packaging costs and instant access to almost all ocntent in this format, consumers exhibit consistent behavior: They look at almost everything. I believe that this requires major changes by the content producers – I’m just not sure what changes!”… Everywhere I went the story was the same: Hits are great, but niches are emerging as the big new market. The 98 Percent Rule turned out to be nearly universal. Apple said that every one of the then 1 million tracks on iTues had sold at least once (now its inventory is twice that). Netflix reckoned that 95% of its 25,000 DVDs (that’s now 90,000) rented at least once a quarter. Amazon didn’t give out an exact number, but independent academic research on its book sales suggested that 98 percent of its top 100,00 books sold at least once a quarter, too.
