The Liberal Order

Are Physical Books Dead?

The book publishing industry is dead and they don’t know it. Its like how the typewriter industry died. And how companies like Blockbuster and Borders can’t survive. And the entire music industry is dying. And broadcast television might be on the way.  And the tablet industry is the first sign that companies like DELL might be in major trouble. And companies like Sirius mean the radio industry is dead.

Serious, Sirius? I'm not so certain.

A Diversion From Studying

Here's a neat two-minute diversion for students studying for finals.  

 

Keynes v. Hayek, Round II

Munger is great; John Papola John Papola's father looks eerily like Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke.

 

Go Ahead, Steal His Music

A very good interview with Ken Weiss, former producer of highly successful 1970s bands like Crosby, Stills and Nash, Fleetwood Mac and Firefall. He's been teaching at UNC-Chapel Hill and understands well the importance of marketing and how to profit in a market where you can distribute your primary product at near zero marginal cost.

Weiss, 62, co-teaches an arts entrepreneurship class at UNC-Chapel Hill nowadays, and he's done a little of everything in the business. But mostly he has worked in publishing - getting songs recorded and/or used in movies, commercials and so forth. And that gives him a perspective that is somewhat unusual.

"If only more people would take my songs without paying for them, I know what value that can create," Weiss says. "The more pervasive my music is, the more opportunity there is for ancillary uses. So my job with a song is to make it more pervasive. I'd rather 2 million people steal it than 50,000 buy it, any day of the week."

He also comments:

I remember someone at Warner coming to me in about 1969 to say they were working on a music book for 'some guitar player named Hendrix.' I said he must mean Jimi, and the guy said, 'Yeah, whatever, I don't know much about his stuff.'

"I was astounded. The people managing the publishing industry were disconnected from what was happening right in front of them."

A somewhat similar form of ignorance is happening today. Weiss appears willing and able to profit from the changes.

 

Handel's Messiah at the Food Court - Hallelujah Chorus

 

How Much Should You Pay for That Neil Young Concert Ticket?

I always use farecast.com (now part of Microsoft's Bing) to purchase (or delay purchasing) airline tickets. The site provides information about the expected future price and whether it will increase or decrease. There is now a site that provides similar information for entertainment venues. SeatGeek provides information on expected future prices for concerts, sporting events, theater, and other venues, though there seems to be a very limited number of events currently in its system.

Solving A Principal-Agent Problem Through Signaling

Monitoring employees or other agents is costly. Signaling can therefore often serve to appease a principal at relatively low cost that his or her interests are being served. For example, to ensure that a maid hired to clean your home is doing his or her job thoroughly, place some dirt in an out-of-the-way place and after they leave check to see if they found it. If they did, they are probably doing a thorough job cleaning your house. If not, they may just be cleaning the visible dirt and shirking their duty to you.

It seems that Van Halen had an interesting means of monitoring how thoroughly concert venues and promoters read their contract, which was necessary to carry out the pre-concert duties that were required for a successful show. The band would include an odd clause in their performance contract  and then prior to the concert verify that that the provisions of that odd clause were actually carried out.

The contract rider read like a version of the Chinese Yellow Pages because there was so much equipment, and so many human beings to make it function. So just as a little test, in the technical aspect of the rider, it would say "Article 148: There will be fifteen amperage voltage sockets at twenty-food spaces, even, providing nineteen amperes . . ." This kine of thing. And article number 126, in the middle of nowhere, was: "There will be no brown M&Ms in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation."

So, when I would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl . . . well, line-check the entire production. Guaranteed you're going to arrive at a technical error. They didn't read the contract. Guaranteed you'd run into a problem. Sometimes it would threaten to just destroy the whole show. Something like, literally, life-threatening.

A Creative Tribute to John Williams

HT: Greg

Those Who Share Music Spend More On Music

I've always argued that the RIAA is misguided in their pursuit of those who share music. Why sue your best customers and potential customers?

It seems that those who download music illegally also spend more on music and movies than those who are indifferent to music and movies.

Creative Destruction In the Music Industry

Earning economic profits in the long run requires constant innovation to ward off competitors for your profit. There is a new entrant in the online music business that just may make Apple's iTunes obsolete.

The app allows users to buy the right to stream songs from a digital locker forever for just 10 cents each. The song quality is lower than what Apple Inc.'s iTunes offers, but "intelligent caching" lets the tracks load and play in seconds, with playback possible even outside of cell phone coverage.

An existing iTunes library can be synchronized with one's Lala account, meaning a person doesn't have to repurchase songs to listen to them within the app.

Quality will indeed have to improve to have a large impact, but at about one-tenth the cost of an MP3 from iTunes, Lala is likely to be a formidable competitor to Apple's dominance in this market.