IT'S TIME to wag the long tail again. First spotted, nailed and framed by Chris Anderson in Wired magazine last year, the long tail is the idea that products which are in seemingly low demand possess a collective market share that often rivals or exceeds the big ticket items which everyone wants.

In music, the long tail is made up of those acts and albums which you won't find in your average local music store because these bricks-and-mortar concerns just don't have the physical space to carry every album released by every act who ever pressed a CD. But go online and between your eBays, Amazons, Boomkats and a myriad of local Irish indie online operations,you can usually find absolutely everything you're after. If it exists, it's out there and someone wants to buy it or sell it.

Naturally, there's been much chat and comment about the long tail. Anderson is currently writing a book about the phenomenon, which will probably become the new Tipping Point or Lovemarks pop-psychology bestseller, while you will hear "long tail" analogies been used to hawk all manner of marketing ideas and notions.

When applied to music, the long tail makes sense. Say you think that a CD featuring you sampling your toaster burning toast will sell 40 or 50 copies in Ireland. Multiply this by the number of markets you're prepared to foist this work of art on and you have some quite decent sales figures. It stands to reason and human nature that what works in one place will work in other places.

The high tail kicks in when bands who are happily chugging along on the long tail or who are steering a long tail course suddenly break out and become mega-sellers. The process by which an act suddenly starts to sell thousands rather than dozens of CDs is one which has baffled industry observers for years.

It's something which cannot be simply copied (look at the amount of no-hope Brit singer-songwriters who have been sent to Ireland to try to become "the new David Gray") or predicted (no one saw Damien Rice or The Killers flogging so many little plastic discs). Acts who get a swish of the high tail usually have little in common with their fellow beneficiaries. It's not down to talent or hard work, just luck and that word-of-mouth that no amount of promotion, hype or money can buy.

A year or so ago, The Killers were just another band with "The" in their name. The Las Vegas swingers played Oxegen in 2004 and the Irish buzz began. People saw them, liked them, talked about them and decided they wanted some of that Hot Fuss to call their own. They may have read an article on the band or heard them on the radio, but it was word of mouth that persuaded thousands to part with their cash. A year on, The Killers returned to Punchestown and everyone knew the words to the songs.

Few but his most deluded fans would argue that Damien Rice is the greatest live performer who ever hitched up his trousers using a bit of old rope. In his case, it was hearing the songs on radio or word-of-mouth recommendations which persuaded people to invest emotionally and financially in the Kildareman. Isolated sales spurts here and there took on a momentum of their own as the dots joined up. Rice's O shows absolutely no sign of running out of steam.

Thanks to their success with the high tail, The Killers and Rice are now long-distance runners and can expect much more attention in the future. It doesn't guarantee that the follow-ups to Hot Fuss and O will sell in the same quantities, of course, but there will be a lot more expectations for these releases than for their debuts.

And, if it all falls apart, there's always the long tail to fall back on.