Category: Music

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?

Glen Whitman has got Coase in the brain.  In Against the New
Paternalism: Internalities and the Economics of Self-Control he puts Coasian insights to good use arguing against the new paternalism of internalities.

Writing the paper must have been hard, hard work because Glen has now got the Coasian Blues.  (More at the link!).

You can hire an agent to work in your basement
But you know there’s a
possible cost:
That dude could be shirkin’ yet oughta be workin’
If you
don’t hire monitors, boss!

You can bring on a man to run your food
stand,
But your firm could be courtin’ a loss.
‘Cause that helpful young
man might come up with a plan
To abscond with your so-special sauce!

Yeah you pick and you choose… the markets you use;
And if you
pick wrong… you’ll be singing the blues.

I know that one day if my
tears go away
Then my cheeks’ll be rosy in hue
But until that day comes to
pass I must say,
I’ll be singin’ the Coasean Blues.

I had thought classical music was flailing on-line, but perhaps I was wrong:

…classical music comprises twelve percent of sales on that site [iTunes]. Back in October I linked to a piece by Marc Shulgold in which Mark Berry of Naxos asserted that classical music accounted for six percent of all Internet downloads. We’ve been told for some years that classical music makes up only three or four percent of record sales overall. Something’s happening here, and Time, Newsweek, and Entertainment Weekly (to name three magazines that have dropped all classical-music coverage) don’t know what it is. For more, read Anastasia Tsioulcas in Billboard and Scott Timberg in the LA Times.

Read more here.  I suspect many people don’t want classical music to succeed on the Internet.  That would mean change.  Shorter pieces?  More celebrity-driven?  More pieces that can withstand poor sound quality?  More fusion and crossover?  Listeners who reassemble symphony movements to form their own medleys?  What is classical music anyway?  By the way, here are the classical grammy winners.  Nelson Freire playing Chopin deserved to win Best Instrumentalist.

While sales are down, more music is being produced and heard than ever before in history.

Here is the full story, which focuses on retailer bankruptcy.  Maybe I shouldn’t be sad that Aron’s in Los Angeles is shutting down.  Keep in mind that when consumers do not much like most of what they buy, standard metrics for measuring output do not track welfare very well.

To
my mind, no one has done a better job of concisely explaining what makes Mozart
Mozart than Donald Tovey,
whose essay on the G Minor Symphony, K. 550, the greatest of the minor-key
works, is a convenient starting point. Tovey offers a
seeming paradox that will startle many readers: “We can only belittle and
vulgarize our ideas of Mozart by trying to construe him as a tragic artist.”
What could he possibly mean, especially with reference to the G Minor Symphony,
still widely regarded as the locus classicus
of tragedy in music? The answer, Tovey replies, is that
Mozart was up to something altogether different: “Mozart’s whole musical
language is, and remains throughout, the language of comic opera.”

This
bald-faced assertion, so surprising at first glance, turns out on closer
inspection to be all but self-evident. From the rush and bustle of the outer
movements of the G Minor Symphony (whose compositional language Tovey likens to Rossini’s Overture to The
Barber of Seville) to the wittily “theatrical” exchanges between
soloist and orchestra in the later piano concertos, one finds in Mozart’s
mature instrumental works an abundance of proof that he thought of all his
music in dramatic terms–and that the kind of “drama” he had in mind was
18th-century opera buffa,
abstracted at times to the point of sublimity but still essentially comic.

Here is the Commentary article which cites Tovey.  The article also offers a useful discography of Mozart in minor keys; it was Alfred Brendel who said:

The pieces in the minor
do more than just present a dark backdrop to Mozart’s brilliance. . . . I know
of no other composer fundamentally transformed while writing in minor keys.

Happy Birthday Mozart!

The Operas: The peaks of his achievement.  For Figaro I recommend Carlos Guilini or Rene Jacob, for Cosi Fan Tutte, Karl Boehm, here is my post on Don Giovanni, and Klemperer is a sure thing for The Magic Flute.  For The Abduction from the Sergalio, how about Beecham with a nod to Krips?

The String Quintets: Grumiaux’s group, with Takacs as a good runner-up.  Most of the string quartets are boring.

Symphonies: I am courting hate mail, but 38-41 will suffice, toss in the first movement of 29 if need be.  I like von Karajan for the last two symphonies (not everyone does), and there are many good versions of the others.

Piano Concerti: Focus on 20-27; I grew up with Casadesus and Szell but you have many good choices.  Few areas of the repertoire have been better covered.

Piano sonatas: Uchida all the way.  They start getting good around K311.  Here are bloggers on the sonatas.  As a general rule, Mozart before K300 is not so special.

K563: Mozart’s least-known masterpiece, go for Grumiaux.  Even better is the currently unavailable L’Archibudelli version.

If you own these you have a decent chunk of the essential Mozart.

Most overrated Mozart: The Violin concerti and then the Requiem.  Contrary to cliche, Suessmayr ruined the ending.  The Clarinet Concerto was once wonderful, but it has been overexposed in muzak, Nordstrom, and overpriced faux Italian restaurants.  By the way, it won a listeners’ poll as "best Mozart," the Requiem came in second.

Most underrated Mozart: The violin and piano sonatas, and the short, comic vocal pieces.  Try also the Piano and Wind Quintet, K. 452, the Clarinet Trio, K. 498, the Piano Quartets (with George Szell as pianist), and the Clarinet Quintet, K. 581.

Comments are open, do offer your opinions…