Category: Music

Here is a list from Pitchfork; the Beach Boys’ "God Only Knows" takes first place.  The selections are excellent (head to iTunes), but I would have opted for the Beatles’ "Rain" and the Byrds’ "Eight Miles High."  You’ll find links to their top 200 picks as well.

Daniel Levitin’s This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession — is a new book on how music affects our brains.  Here is an introduction to the book.

Addendum: Here is an interview with Levitin.

Don’t they say "demography is destiny," or something like that?  Basically I like the rap CDs that all the other overeducated middle-aged white guys like.  That means rap which is musically complex, often ironic, and innovates with rhythmic patter and postmodern pop culture references.  Here are a few favorites:

1. Outkast, their entire ouevre.  They have mastered soul and funk as well.  Their new album is due August 22, but this time around the advance reviews are quite critical.

2. Eric B and Rakim, Paid in Full.

3. De La Soul, especially their clever early material.  They ran out of steam quickly, however, as have most rap groups.  But their "Jenifa Taught Me" cut might be the most fun rap song ever.

4. NWA, the Compton album.  A mini-opera, visceral like Verdi.

5. Control Machete, Mexican rap is generally worthwhile.

6. Nas, Illmatic.  A classic.

7. Dr. Dre, The Chronic.  The best parts are when SDD cuts in singing.

8. P.M. Dawn, most of all Jesus Wept, if you consider that rap.  Hits the sweet spot between gospel and Prince.

9. Kanye West, his last CD.  He has the talent to rival Outkast as the most important rapper(s).

10. My dark horse pick would be Schooly D, The Adventures of Schooly D, especially the stripped-down cassette version with only the album’s highlights.  The next step after Varese.

If we can count Robert Ashley, Perfect Lives is the best rap of them all.  He is in any case a pioneer for integrating voice into music.

The most overrated bad rap group is the snotty and execrable Beastie Boys.  The most overrated good rap group is Wu Tang Clan, who had gobs of talent but doesn’t stick in my memory.  Run D-M-Z and Public Enemy are both overrated, but I am not yet sure which category they belong in, good or bad underrated.

For more on the history of rap music, see my In Praise of Commercial Culture, chapter four.  Here is an article on rap music in the Middle East.

Here is one article.  For me the essential Ligeti is the Horn Trio (most of all), the piano music, the two string quartets, and the cello and violin concerti.  He is best known for his "Lux Aeterna," which played a critical role in the soundtrack of 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Here are some reports.  Here is Wikipedia.

"Early on in the entertainment industry, it’s in the interest of the business to think of themselves as throwing a party, not selling a product. I think they attract more of a following that way," he said.

"But over time, the industry takes more the form of a market and is driven by market forces. The Superbowl initially felt like it was rewarding its fans. But then it becomes established and the League finds it in its interest to push up prices."

That is Alan Krueger, from this BBC article on his work on the economics of rock music.   Hat tip to EconBall blog.

Yes that is the name of the album, released today.  The first surprise is that Borders didn’t have it out on display.  The second surprise is that Brian Eno produces and imposes his sound on it.  The third surprise is no world music.  The fourth surprise is its high quality, at least after the dull You’re the One, six years ago.  Here is a good New York Times article on Simon and the album.  Here are (mostly positive) blog reviews.

Austan Goolsbee is now writing monthly economics columns for The New York Times.  Here is his first piece on French competition policy and iTunes.  Here is commentary from Henry Farrell.

This list is from a talk by Alex Ross, music critic at The New Yorker.

This stuff is hard to come by, buy it here, pointer from Bryan Caplan.  A few warnings:

1. The old joke about murdered cats is not groundless.  It takes a long time to pick up the patterns.

2. Much of the beauty is in the timbre; even an electrified live performance can mangle this, but these CDs manage OK.

3. You have no business not knowing the high culture music of history’s most dominant culture.

4. Most of all, they are fun.

99 cents, but the deals expire in two months.  Apple insists on keeping a single price across the board.  Why might this be?  Why might the retailer care more about price predictability than the wholesalers?

1. The confusion and resentment costs of different prices might be blamed on Apple.  But surely we see different prices in many other retail arenas.

2. Perhaps Apple is solving a status game problem.  If everyone else is selling for 99 cents and your song sells for $1.20, yours looks special.  Music companies might set prices too high, not taking into account the lower demand for iTunes, and music, more generally.

3. Could Apple be enforcing music company price collusion, while receiving implicit kickbacks in the rights agreements?  This would require the complainers to be in the minority.

4. Apple makes much of its money on hardware, especially iPods.  Low song prices  cross-subsidize the hardware, to some extent at the expense of music companies.  That said, some music companies wish to charge lower not higher prices.

5. Hit songs are kept at artifically low prices to discourage people from moving into the world of illegal downloads.

6. Price is a signal of quality and Apple doesn’t want to admit it carries "lemon" songs.  But won’t demand for the hits go up?

7. Uniform pricing is a precommitment strategy for a durable goods monopoly game.

We must distinguish two aspects of the problem.  First, Apple wishes to control retail prices.  Second, Apple wishes to make all retail prices the same.  Which of these features is more important for understanding the problem?

Here is a proposal for determining prices by auction; no way will we see it.  Here are rumors that the uniform pricing will end.  Note that the Japanese store already has two tiers of prices.  How about keeping the price the same, but bundling hot songs with less desirable ones?  Way back when, we used to call these "record albums"…

Wow, Glenn Hubbard can dance!  Well, for an economist.  Check out this awesome music video (click on the link and go to Every Breath You Take).  Dean, Dean Baby (econ rap!) is also great.  Glenn Hubbard, coolest Dean ever.

Thanks to Eric Helland for the pointer.

On my first listen I didn’t believe the ‘ype.  By the twentieth listen I was believing, Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I Am Not is a great CD.  Reminscent of The Who but popped up a notch with reggae and ska beats, Arctic Monkeys are a garage band from Sheffield, England.  Original guitar licks and the lead singer’s Yorkshire accent give the album real flavor.  I also like that it’s thematically whole, revolving around bars, bouncers, and the desperation and self-loathing that comes from trying to pick up women.  I like this: 

Last night these two bouncers 
one of em’s alright

The other one’s a scary
His way or no way
totalitarian

And this:

Everybody’s trying to crack the jokes and that to make you smile

Those that claim that they’re not showing off are drowning in denial

But they’re not half as bad as me, say anything and I’ll agree

Cause when it comes to acting up, I’m sure I could write the book

Yeah, I’ve been there.

I am in trouble:

Security staff at a British airport stopped a businessman from catching a flight because the songs he had asked a taxi driver to play on the car stereo made the driver suspicious, police said.

The songs: "London Calling" by The Clash, and "Immigrant Song" by Led Zeppelin, here are the offending lyrics and the story.

Addendum: Daniel Strauss Vasques points my attention to a slightly different version of the story, where the guy was just singing along.

…under a rule to curb hazardous substances in electrical products, Europe is about to restrict the centuries-old business of building pipe organs for churches, concert halls and other institutions.

The reason? Organ pipes contain large amounts of lead, and the wind that blows through them is generated by electricity (rather than the older method of people pumping bellows behind the organ). The new directive, to come into force in July, limits the proportion of hazardous substances like lead, mercury or cadmium to 0.1 percent of a finished product that works on electricity.

Here is the full story.  And how is this for a bureaucratic runaround?

The Department of Trade and Industry, the government office responsible for the issue, insists it is the organ builders themselves who "must apply for an exemption directly" to the European Union, said a spokeswoman for the department, who insisted on anonymity in accordance with government rules for departmental spokespeople.

French parliamentarians finished drafting a law on Friday that would open up Apple’s market-leading iTunes online music store to portable music players other than its popular iPods.

The new law, now set for a vote on Tuesday, would allow consumers to
circumvent software that protects copyrighted material — known as
digital rights management (DRM) — if it is done to convert digital
content from one format to another. Using such software is currently
illegal in much of the world.

This is expected to pass, here is the article.

My take: The French are probably still at the point where the songs aren’t making money but rather serve as loss leaders for the hardware.  A legally forced unbundling could induce Apple to leave the market, if only to send other governments a message.

More generally, song prices are relatively low early on to induce people to lock into the technology.  If you forbid lock-in, early period song prices and indeed hardware prices will be higher than otherwise (think of market exit as the limiting case).  But will forced unbundling make prices lower in the long run, due to the growing competitiveness of the market?  My guess is no.  Something better than iPod will come along within five or ten years, so the relevant form of future lower prices is "higher quality."  Allowing monopoly profits, rather than confiscating them, is the way to get there more quickly and more decisively.  By enforcing interchangeability at such an early stage in the process, the French will more likely get a lame rather than a cool version of a universal access platform.  How’s that for lock-in?