Club Troppo

Well I can’t say I really agree with the criterion of quality – but anyway, at least by our intrepid old friend Joel’s lights file sharing hasn’t harmed music making.

Recent technological changes may have altered the balance between technology and copyright law for digital products.   While file-sharing has reduced revenue, other technological changes have reduced the costs of bringing creative works to market.   As a result, we don’t know whether the effective copyright protection currently available provides adequate incentives to bring forth a steady stream of valuable new products.  This paper assesses the quality of new recorded music since Napster, using three independent approaches.   The first is an index of the quantity of high-quality music based on critics’ retrospective lists.

The second and third approaches rely directly on music sales and airplay data, respectively, using of the idea that if one vintage’s music is better than another’s, its superior quality should generate higher sales or greater airplay through time, after accounting for depreciation.  The three resulting indices of vintage quality for the past half-century are both consistent with each other and with other historical accounts of recorded music quality.  There is no evidence of a reduction in the quality of music released since Napster, and the two usage-based indices suggest an increase since 1999.   Hence, researchers and policymakers thinking about the strength of copyright protection should supplement their attention to producer surplus with concern for consumer surplus as well.

Download more here.

When I was in the market for young kids music entertainment, my favourite entertainer was Peter Combe (pronounced Coom). The Wiggles were nice enough but very anodyne - so much so that, when Disney took them up they never even really had to be Disnefied – they came readymade. Peter Combe is in the same market of recording, selling and performing songs to young kikds – from say 3-7 or thereabouts.  He’s much more lively, quirky, energetic and much more musical. His songs are very enjoyable, and, I’ve discovered, etch themselves into your memory (though this was via a great deal of repetition.)

(And if you are in need of a little kids band, the Hooley Dooleys are (probably this verb should be in the past tense) a lot better than the Wiggles too – far more musical and inventive. But I digress.)

Anyway about three years ago, Peter Combe agreed to do a set at (I think) a beer festival in his home state of South Australia (this is from memory but you can check in the link below).  This was for adults but mainly involved him singing his kids songs with a backing band. . . And it caused a sensation.  He could barely hear himself sing, so loudly were the audience of 18-30 year olds who’d grown up with his songs singing back to him. So he put on a couple more shows. Same reaction. So since around 2007 when he’s done his national tours of kids matinees, he adds evening performances for the adults.  The result is the same.  I didn’t grow up with Peter Combe’s songs but my kids did and I think I’ll pop along if I can manage it.

And you can hear all about it, as I did on ABC RN’s Music Show. I chose the video above, not because it’s his best song, but to illustrate his manic energy (though the second video below will do that for you as well). You can click here to check out some riffs from some of his best loved kids songs.   And you can play the videos below the fold should you wish.  (Continued)

Yes folks, the guy I probably very unfairly was rude about here, has done something with his life.  He’s lent some of his famous empirical skills to showing something we all know in our bones, namely that people are still producing records, even though the bottom has been sliding gracefully out of the market since Napster launched peer to peer sharing on an unsuspecting world.

People’s natural abhorrence of radicalism, their anchoring of commonsense to what is, along with some deep scepticism that there is ever such a thing as a free lunch leads them to instinctively recoil from the idea that the music market would be just fine without any IP whatever.  I suspect that’s broadly right, just as the market for recipes has never been better even though there’s no IP in them. Why? Because it’s so much fun to make recipes, and if you need to make money from them you can – by flicking the switch to charisma, being a bit of a charmer on the tele and coming up with some nice recipes.

Anyway, here’s the paper – and the abstract.

In the decade since Napster, file-sharing has undermined the protection that copyright affords recorded music, reducing recorded music sales. What matters for consumers, however, is not sellers’ revenue but the surplus they derive from new music. The legal monopoly created by copyright is justified by its encouragement of the creation of new works, but there is little evidence on this relationship. The file-sharing era can be viewed as a large-scale experiment allowing us to check whether events since Napster have stemmed the flow of new works. We assemble a novel dataset on the number of high quality works released annually, since 1960, derived from retrospective critical assessments of music such best-of-the-decade lists. This allows a comparison of the quantity of new albums since Napster to 1) its pre-Napster level, 2) pre-Napster trends, and 3) a possible control, the volume of new songs since the iTunes Music Store’s revitalization of the single. We find no evidence that changes since Napster have affected the quantity of new recorded music or artists coming to market. We reconcile stable quantities in the face of decreased demand with reduced costs of bringing works to market and a growing role of independent labels.

About to book United Airlines to the United States, I thought I’d let any Troppodillians who don’t know of this video, that it exists, and that it’s fun (and it lopped around $170 million off UA’s market cap according to some factoid crazed journalists). And looking it up, I just discovered the other video, which kind of comes with the territory of any video that’s getting to the 10 mil download limit!

And there’s this one which, for reasons that escape me, refuses to be embedded.

Orpheus and Eurydice by Carlo Cignani (1628-1719)

O everlasting gods! I see your lovely eyes and
your beautiful face, and yet I cannot believe my
own eyes!

These are the sentiments of Orpheus on being reunited with Eurydice in Hades, but they are also the standard reaction to a Pinchgut Opera performance. Or, more precisely: I cannot believe my ears that something so sublimely beautiful could be extracted from that neglected material.

L’anima del Filosofo, Joseph Haydn’s version of Orpheus and Eurydice, is their ninth production, and since all the others have been brilliant I have no hesitation in recommending it without yet having seen it.

Pinchgut is an opera company that stages a baroque opera once a year, for four performances in Sydney’s City Recital Hall in the first week of December.

Rather than produce tried and tasted repertoire, Pinchgut usually resurrect forgotten masterpieces, rarely (or never) performed. When these are pieces by first-rank composers like Vivaldi (Juditha Triumphans, 2007) or Charpentier (Jonathan and David, 2008), the question is ‘How on earth did this get lost?’; when they are by obscure people like Francesco Cavalli (L’Ormindo, 2009), it becomes ‘Why on earth isn’t this guy better known?’. (Continued)

Joan Sutherland has passed on. Inevitably, obituarians are taking the opportunity to contend that she was the greatest soprano, or even the greatest singer, of the post war period, or even of the 20th Century. Others are content just to raise the question.

When it comes to choosing between artists in the highest rank, it’s a partly matter of taste. Some will prefer one singer for her ability to convey emotion; others will prefer a different one for the ‘purity’ or ‘warmth’ of her tone, whatever those words mean (the vocabulary of the voice critic is as specialised as the wine taster’s). But when it comes to something called technique, I suspect that Martin Kettle (linked above) is expressing conventional wisdom in saying that:

…it’s the once-in-a-lifetime combination of instrument, ambition and technique that makes [Sutherland] such a complete artist. Of course, it was the amazing security of her top notes and the dazzling accuracy of her coloratura that always brought the house down. But it was Sutherland’s soaring, flowing line that really marked her out from the others…

However, this is actually the worst time for ranking exercises. (Continued)

A while ago, I was rung by Richard Letts of the Music Council of Australia, a kind of peak body of music organisations asking – to my amazement – if I would give the Annual address at their annual conference. Robyn Homes of the National Library of Australia had seen me speak at the National Library’s 2010 Innovative Ideas Forum and had suggested I give the address. So, having braved the quite extraordinary incompetence of Virgin Blue last Sunday, and not got to Brisbane on time to give my talk, I got there to give the talk after lunch on Monday. Its title was that given in the heading above. As a bit of light relief, but with some intent beyond that, I included in the lecture, a bunch of cartoons from a former life.  They are displayed in the text below at the point where I clicked the remote control and brought them onto the screen behind me displaying PowerPoint slides. It doesn’t seem like such a long time ago, but I did those cartoons nearly 25 years ago. Anyway, I hope you enjoy the speech – and the cartoons.

I.

You may be surprised that I am standing before you giving your Annual Address. But not as surprised as me. Richard Letts rang me a few weeks ago and asked me to speak to you. I didn’t know why. He said that someone had heard me speak and that they had recommended me. They certainly didn’t hear me play any music.

I am an economist, though I like to think not of the marauding kind, and in 2009 was the chair of the Federal Government’s Government 2.0 Taskforce. It was in prosecuting the cause for Government 2.0 that I was heard and recommended for this address tonight.

If you’ve wondering what Government 2.0 is, you’re not alone, though I’m hoping you know what Web 2.0 is. The term Web 2.0 was popularised in 2005 to signify the internet’s transition from being a medium for point to point and hub and spoke medium communication and interaction – as in the case of e-mail and websites respectively – to being a medium, or as it has become fashionable to say, ‘platform’ on which people who might not even know each other could discover each other and collaborate. Wikipedia is the iconic example.

I think Web 2.0 offers extraordinary possibilities in our society, our economy, our government. It’s been said, I think with only mild exaggeration that its significance is like that of the book. If that is so, then one would imagine some of its most exciting, its grandest possibilities to arise in the world of culture. Over the course of my time as Chairman of the Government 2.0 Taskforce, to my own surprise, I morphed into a motivational speaker. Perhaps that’s why the person who heard me recommended me. And tonight, in my own way, I’m going to give you a motivational speech.

I’ve titled this talk “The life you could be leading” to refer to that golden age that beckons. And it’s not inconsequential that it comes from a cartoon by one of the world’s best cartoonists Michael Leunig.

II.

You see just as you are musicians, in addition to being an economist, I am a cartoonist. Or was a cartoonist. It all began in the mid 1980s dull and depressed on one of Melbourne’s cold, drizzly winters days sitting in my bedsit next to a small radiator. I sketched out this cartoon on a card and sent it to a friend in Canberra. (Continued)