They played the studio version of this song by Colin Hay on the day that we learned that Greg Ham had died. It was a good choice.
I saw Colin Hay play this song back in 2002 at Woodford. Back then it was just him, a guitar and his gorgeous wife.
Here he is playing it at the Corner Hotel Richmond, with a very tight band, and the same gorgeous wife.
This wasn’t supposed to be the theme of part two (Part One is here) but Jessica Irvine’s recent and timely column on superstardom and One Direction prompted me to add my two cents’ worth – well someone else’s two cents’ worth but at least inserted by me.
First; highlights from Jessica’s column:
US labour market economist Sherwin Rosen in his 1981 paper ”The Economics of Superstars” identified two preconditions that lead to superstardom. First, every customer in the market must want to buy the good supplied by the best producer. The second condition for the birth of a superstar is that the good provided must be able to be distributed cheaply to all customers in the market. You don’t see superstar plumbers, because their services are only available to one geographic area.
Rosen’s theory of superstardom as an efficient outcome of the market was challenged by another US economist, Moshe Adler, who pointed out that whether people preferred one singer over the other was not necessarily determined by how talented they were. There is, after all, no standard unit to measure increments of talent. The key thing about groups like One Direction, according to Adler, is not that they are the most talented – for such a thing can never be measured – but that they are simply the most popular.
According to Adler, consumer desires are not innate preferences – as standard economics assumes – but are influenced strongly by society. We desire the same art, culture and music that is desired by other people.
To which I would only add the graph below which features in Paul Ormerod’s forthcoming book. In a controlled experiment with people listening to music if they were not ‘networked’ which is to say they didn’t know what other people thought was good, there was a fairly big inherent difference between songs. If they were networked, they ‘herded’ strongly.
Typical outcome of the music download experiments; number of each of the 48 songs downloaded over the course of an experiment, participants only know the names of the song and band and can listen to songs before deciding whether or not to download. The average number of downloads is set equal to 100 for comparative purposes
Same experiment as before except the participants know the number of previous downloads of each of the songs before they decide themselves
Of course the upshot of this is that we’re all madly herding from one place to another, but the extent to which there’s signal in the noise of our herding is greatly attenuated. Further; large amounts of rent are being expended trying to get people’s attention with marketing to get into people’s headspace and win the battle for the next hit.
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.