I'm reading in Frank Zappa's biography. Somewhere in the book he wrote a chapter about failures. It's a collection of proposals he made to the political establishment and to the music industry. This is what he proposed in 1983:

"We propose to acquire the rights to digitally duplicate and store THE BEST of every record company's difficult-to-move Quality Catalog Items, store them in a central processing location, and have them accessible by phone or cable TV, directly patchable into the user's home taping appliances, with the option of direct digital-to-digital transfer to F-1 (SONY consumer level digital tape encoder), Beta Hi-Fi, or ordinary analog cassette."

In other words: in 1983, more than 10 years before the world wide web as we know it was invented, Frank Zappa proposed an itunes-like system in order to deal with the problem of the long tail. The idea was born out of frustration about limited shelf space in physical outlets. This limited shelf space prevented consumers from finding great music in the long tail of music that once was produced but was very hard to find.