First I Was a Hippie

… then I was a stockbroker, now I am a hippie again.

In the words of The Bobs.

Here is the album.

Review: In Praise of Commercial Culture

In his 1998 book In Praise of Commercial Culture, Tyler Cowen, the prolific co-author of Marginal Revolution, makes two arguments. The first, about the effects of capitalism on art, is convincing, but the second, about critiques of art, is not.

Dr. Cowen argues that production and distribution via market mechanisms benefits artists and art consumers. Competition and consumer taste do a good job of selecting the best artists and eliciting innovation and masterworks. Technological advances and increasing wealth open up new possibilities and greater independence for artists. Many great artists of the past, from the Renaissance to the Impressionists, explicitly operated as businessmen in a market. On the whole, market forces have been salutary for art and artists; therefore commentators should not fear commercialism in film, publishing, music, or other art markets.

This is the primary argument of the book and Dr. Cowen supports it well. Recent applications of technology to facilitate “long tail” markets provide yet another illustration of the benefits of capitalism for the arts.

However, Dr. Cowen also spends a lot of space beating up “cultural pessimists,” which I found less convincing. Cultural pessimists seem to come in two flavors: those that say the market corrupts, homogenizes, or otherwise damages the production of art, and those that decry the perceived moral or political effects of certain artworks.

Fantasia

James Lileks bites yet another madeleine. He’s talking about Fantasia:

…this was one of the moments that fixed my aesthetic sense in a particular time and place, and I’ve never shook those impressions. It was 1939. It sounds, and looks, like the last plea for grace before the world fell apart.

And how. I saw it in kindergarten, on a reel-to-reel projector (remember those?). For me, it was the Pegasus in Beethoven 6, particularly the moment when the stallion alights in the aerie. Those few seconds bit into my brain and became part of the mortar for Lewis, Tolkein, Stewart, and the rest. The rest I forgot – even that I had seen the film – until years later, when I saw it again and those memories fired up.

Free Music

Fred Wilson at A VC has been outlining his vision for the future of music marketing and distribution (short version: music will be free). He is a maven for rock and pop and a regular commentator on technology and venture capital, so I listen to him.

I think free music can be a great business. In this post, I’d like to make explicit something Fred is leaving implicit, a key feature that I think is necessary for mass adoption. The payment model itself has to respond to consumer preferences. There is too much variation in taste for “one-size” monetization.

First, it’s worth reading all of Fred’s posts:

• The Free Music Business: “The print companies went free, accepted advertising dollars instead of subscriptions, plugged into Google for traffic, and the money is now pouring in.”
• Vinyl Records: “[G]iven the ubiquity of digital music on the Internet, there really is no reason to own mp3s. If we want to collect it, I am thinking it should be vinyl.”
• Free Music Continued (Responding to Steve and Dawn): “The ads are going to be served in the stream between songs. Just like radio. … The royalties to the artists is the only significant cost factor and I think they can be covered with something like 2-5 minutes of ads for every hour of listening.”
• Pay Per Use: “The analog method of selling you music in a physical package which you can use to your heart’s desire is not artist friendly or consumer friendly. … Pay per use is way better than pay for packaging.”
• According to the New York Post (via Fred), “Peter Rojas of Engadget fame is starting a record label based entirely on the free music concept.”
• SEE ALSO: Great minds think alike, as Chris Anderson of The Long Tail has started talking publicly about his next book, tentatively titled “Free.” The publisher’s blurb says it will explore “the most radical price of all — zero — in the context of the economics of abundance.” Mr. Anderson has also argued that live performance can support a free music model, which I rather doubt because of the limits on scale for live performance.
• SEE ALSO: Zeal and Activity’s previous roundup of music business blogging.

Here’s the core of Fred’s idea, from the original post, The Free Music Business:

Economics of Music

A quick post to collect a recent flurry of writing on the economics of music:

• UPDATE: Joe Malchow links to a blog, Recording Industry vs The People, that monitors RIAA activity.
• UPDATE: Boing Boing: “DMCA’s author says the DMCA is a failure, blames record industry” (via Instapundit).  Chris Anderson comments: “Music in an abundance economy.”
• Alex Ross: Dead or Alive. Are classical music sales up or down? No one knows. “[T]he whole point is that there are no hits in classical music.”
• Norman Lebrecht in La Scena Musicale: What are the top-selling classical albums of all time? “In a whole century of recording, no more than 25 classics topped a million sales, the oldest being Enrico Caruso’s ice-breaker of 1903 and the most recent, in 2002, the first appearance of a Japanese conductor, Seiji Ozawa, at the internationally televised New Year’s Day concert from Vienna.” (Via Tyler Cowen).
• New Music Box is midway through a three-part series on the economics of new music (via Tyler Cowen):
  • Part 1: Free to Compete, by Marc Geelhoed of Deceptively Simple: “New music presenters are well aware of the potential draw as well as the pitfalls of giving a free concert.”
  • Part 2: The Malady Lingers On, by Matthew Guerrieri of Soho the Dog: “Baumol’s cost-disease (sometimes more prosaically referred to as the Baumol-Bowen effect) is well-known among economists and arts administrators, but not many working musicians have even heard of it.”
• Free Exchange (economist.com): Music Wants to be Free. “[D]o we say farewell to the recording industry? iTunes sales are not, and may never be, enough to support a large recording business. What would the world look like without the major labels?” (Via Megan McArdle.)
• Free Exchange (economist.com): “[T]he problem that artists have is not the recording industry. The main problem musicians face is other musicians. There are too many of them.” (Via Megan McArdle.)
• Joe Malchow: The Recording Industry Association of America is demanding money from college students for allegedly downloading music illegally, though it probably can’t link illegal activity to specific individuals. “[R]ecord companies have let loose on colleges and universities another barrage of extortion letters, each demanding around $5,000 from students.”
• Amazon.com launches a “Classical Blowout” store with CDs priced under $10. Chris Anderson notes “Amazon’s listing is customized for classical music, while iTunes isn’t.” Barry Ritholtz asks what might be the profit-maximizing price for music: “Shouldn’t an online store, with theoretically infinite shelves, and extremely low cost of marginal product manufacturing, offer a wide variety of products at very competitive prices?” I’ve written about a related topic in the past: Catching iTunes with Classical Music.

In addition to having strong yet fragmented tastes, classical music fans are potentially very heavy music users. Asking a classical music buff how many Beethoven recordings he should have is like asking a wine connoisseur how many bottles of Bordeaux she needs.

Admittedly, I’m an extreme case: I probably have 15 sets of the Beethoven symphonies, mostly on LP. I would buy another set, but for a very low price – say, $6 for the nine symphonies. Amazon is going in the right direction. I am happy to see that “Classical Blowout” purchases are still eligible for free shipping.

The next step is deeper discounting on large bundles. The Napster/Grokster file sharing phenomenon, and the success of downloading services like Rhapsody, showed that there is large unmet demand for music at prices lower than iTunes and retail CDs. How about a quiet market test of 60-CD bundles for, say, $279?

St. Patrick’s Day

Inspired by Soho the Dog, here is a lovely, unaffected performance of O Danny Boy by an a capella trio.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day.

Keith Jarrett

Last night I had the chance to see the great pianist Keith Jarrett perform a solo concert in his trademark, entirely improvised manner to a packed, joyous hall. To see a great American master performing works that have never been heard before and will never be heard again (except perhaps on a recording) was profoundly moving. The concert-goers showed great affection for Mr. Jarrett and complete accord with his musical vocabulary.

Mr. Jarrett’s concert improvisations are were often quite massive, but last night he played a series of relatively short pieces. Some were of a distinct genre – ragtime and blues – but others were as spiky and “difficult” as anything by Boulez, Schnittke, or Nancarrow. I heard echos of Debussy and Shostakovich. His well-known vocalization and his physicality were much in evidence, as he stood erect, crouched, marched, and danced.

If you are new to Keith Jarrett, I suggest his Koln Concert as a starting point. The La Scala and Paris concerts are very good; the Vienna Concert might be his best. He also has a good Goldberg Variations on harpsichord and a complete set of Shostakovich’s 24 Piano Preludes & Fugues.

UPDATE: I should add one improvisation anecdote. Mr. Jarrett played five encores. Sitting down for the third to sustained applause, he remarked, “I need all the time I can get. [Laughter] If I had brought Debussy or Beethoven or Schumann, I would know what the first note is, and I’d just be waiting to play it. Since I don’t, your applause is that much more important to me. [Laughter]” (Close paraphrase, not exact quote.)

MORE: Marc Geelhoed was there too.

The sections of Friday night’s concert added up to something as powerful as the totality of the Cologne concert, but achieved that in different ways, in different amounts of time.

Interactive Sacre

James Lileks reacts to Le Sacre du printemps, as performed by the Minnesota Youth Symphony:

Holy FREAKING God, and by that I mean the ancient god of fertility who needs an annual virgin to convince him to let the earth flow forth with vines and grains. The Symphony orchestra did “Rite of Spring,” and I don’t mean a watered-down Reader’s Digest 4/4 version, I mean the Rite of Spring, uncut.

Heh. Before the show, the conductor enlisted the audience in a fun reenactment:

I thought: this isn’t going to work with Minnesotans. No one’s going to dare to heckle. The orchestra sailed into it, and with three measures everyone in the hall had assumed their roles. Catcalls! Cheers! Hushing shhhushes, boos and bravos.

Nice.

The End of an Era

Today is the final broadcast (in reruns) of George Jellinek’s radio program The Vocal Scene, through which he “shared his knowledge and love of singing” for 40 years. Here is a New Yorker appreciation of Mr. Jellinek’s career from 2004, when he recorded his last episode. His memoir, My Road to Radio and “The Vocal Scene”, is available here.

* * *

Posting resumes after a needed break. Happy New Year.

Catching iTunes with Classical Music

Yesterday, The Wall Street Journal ran a piece by Ethan Smith titled “Can Anyone Catch iTunes?” looking at strategies of iTunes competitors such as Yahoo, Microsoft, and Napster. Most focus on pricing, rights management, and device compatibility. But there is still opportunity to innovate on product performance – for example, in classical music. How would a category killer work in the online classical niche?

• Charge for works, not tracks. Usually, each movement of a piece is a separate track, making a work like Ravel’s Mother Goose (7 movements) uneconomical. Pricing tiers should reflect the scale of a work – you would pay more for Ravel’s single-movement Bolero (15 minutes) than you would for his Pavane for a Dead Princess (6 minutes).
• More robust searching. The iTunes heirarchy of Artist > Album > Track isn’t enough for classical music. I’d like to be able to search by the title and composer of the piece, as well as the conductor, orchestra, and soloists.
• Shuffle pieces, not movements. Symphonies are meant to be heard as complete works, but current shuffle features can’t keep the movements together. I’d like to be able to listen to symphonies in random order while maintaining each movement as a separate track.

Naxos is the leading online classical music provider, with its entire library of 11,500 CDs online for $150 per year (I haven’t tried the service). But there’s no ecosystem to support it. As anyone knows who has typed in a track title like “Beethoven, Harnoncourt, The Cleveland Orchestra: Beethoven Symphony No. 3 ‘Eroica,’ Mvt. III Scherzo – allegro vivace,” there is still opportunity to delight classical music fans.