Chris Anderson of The Long Tail is skeptical of the iPod Shuffle:

[C]ommercial services provide recommendations, editors' picks, bestseller lists and collaborative filtering to suppress most of the junk. This is important: a key element in extracting value from any Long Tail is the ability to find the diamonds in the rough, which gets harder the further into the rough you go. In other words, a Long Tail without good filters is just noise.