Results for “satellite radio” 31 found
Friday assorted links
1. Did Singapore’s National Service improve you?
2. Research position at GiveWell. And is Norway taking too much from its sovereign wealth fund?
3. Is materialism and interest in “stuff” in decline?
4. Should we regulate medicine like public utilities?
5. It is sad how much they play Steely Dan on satellite radio — could it be some strange form of payola?
Observations on seeing Paul McCartney
1. Many of the best songs were from his solo or Wings period, especially those designed to be played live, and designed to work without the backing voices of the other Beatles.
2. The first two-thirds of the concert pulled out an impressive number of obscure songs, most of which worked, including a bluesy “Letting Go” (can anyone other than Kelly Jane Torrance place that one without using Google?). Paul flat out told the crowd he doesn’t care if they like these other songs less.
3. Often the best Beatle song vocals were Paul doing either John or George parts, because you didn’t know exactly what to expect and thus you were let down less by his 74-year-old vocal cords.
4. His stamina was remarkable. The show was almost three hours long, with little in the way of breaks for him, and he is playing two nights in a row.
5. At the time of its release, “Hi Hi Hi” seemed like a commercial piece of crud, but it has become iconic and satellite radio treats it with respect as well.
6. Paul has been with his current touring band for fifteen years, far longer than he ever was with either Wings or the Beatles.
7. There is a fellow who collects “album covers that are parodies of Beatle album covers,” and he has over 2,000 of them. How is that for markets in everything?
Assorted links
1. Bob Dylan’s satellite radio theme hour to return.
2. New uses for old soda bottles. And looming peak dirt?
3. Really fast urban evolution of animals.
4. Nudging the poor to consume more medical services: is time more important than money?
Bob Dylan’s 70th birthday
It is today, here are a few underrated highlights of his career:
1. No Direction Home, the biopic directed by Martin Scorsese. It’s one of the best documentaries on American music more generally, and a superb albeit hagiographic portrait of Dylan and his music.
2. The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and Another Side of Bob Dylan and Blood on the Tracks and most of all Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits volume II are the albums I listen to most often. The last one sounds horrible from its name, but it was conceived conceptually, avoids the traditional problems of greatest hits albums (unlike Vol. I), and has some not otherwise available tracks; highly recommended. Then comes Time Out of Mind. I think of Bringing it All Back Home as the “best” Dylan album, but I enjoyed it so much at age fifteen that I don’t listen to it much today. Blonde on Blonde is overreaching and Highway 61 Revisited is half wonderful, half embarrassment in the lyrics.
3. Dylan as disc jockey is first-rate, and you can buy his XM Satellite Radio selections of early American music. He has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the period.
4. As a singer Dylan is influenced by Al Jolson and Bing Crosby, as an acoustic guitarist he remains underrated.
5. Dylan once said that Barry Goldwater was his favorite politician.
The Tyranny of the Market
This new book is by sometimes Slate.com columnist and U. Penn economist Joel Waldfogel, of "Deadweight Loss of Christmas" fame. The subtitle is "Why You Can’t Always Get What You Want."
This well-written monograph is the best extant non-technical treatment of fixed costs and how they limit product diversity. On a given night, you can’t see a live performance of Samuel Beckett in Topeka, Kansas but maybe you can in the larger New York City; fixed costs are why they won’t set up the stage and hire the cast for only five viewers.
But Waldfogel is more pessimistic about the market than I am. The book’s opening example is about how hard it is to find radio stations in underpopulated areas; satellite radio is mentioned on p.120 but I would have started with its reach and also its limitations (and here). There is internet radio as well. The first example in the empirical chapter is that it takes $900 million on average to develop a new drug, but regulations and the FDA are not mentioned.
I can recommend this book but I do not agree with its central conclusion: "Markets do not avoid the tyranny of the majority." There are very few areas of my life, if any, where markets force me to follow the wishes of the majority.
Oddly the biggest problem is not mentioned and that is style and marketing. Retail outlets do not carry many items, not because they couldn’t hang some of the stuff from the ceiling, but rather because they wish to project a focused image. In other words, the real problem, when there is one, is the very limited attention spans of the consumers and the ad watchers and the product line gossipers.
My podcast, #2
Tyler Cowen, professor of economics at George
Mason University, talks with Bloomberg’s Tom Keene from Fairfax, Virginia, the
impact of celebrities on politics and the economy, XM Satellite Radio Holdings
Inc.’s possible combination with Sirius Satellite Radio Inc., and the effect
of blogs on the news industry.
Scroll down from here, there are many other economist podcasts as well. I predict that both XM and Sirius will go under, the iPod is the real competitor.
Addendum: Here is the new podcast link.
Markets in everything
Welsh expatriates missing the sweet smell of home can now buy a bottle of air from the hills of Wales – for £24.
Businessman John Gronow will launch walesinabottle.com on Thursday to sell Welsh atmosphere around the world.
Here is the full story, and thanks to Chris Tracey for the pointer. And while we are on the "Markets in Everything" topic, did you know Sirius Satellite Radio is starting an all-Elvis channel?
Markets in everything
Price a Chilean cemetary charges for an alarm built into coffins to ensure against mistaken live burial: $462
That is from Harper’s Index, in the latest issue of Harper’s. Here is a related link.
Here is some evidence on the likelihood of being buried alive.
The Italians take things further, albeit at a higher price:
In 1995 a $5,000 Italian casket equipped with call-for-help ability and survival kit went on sale. Akin to bleeping devices which alert relatives to an elderly family member’s being in trouble, this casket is equipped with a beeper which will sound a similar emergency signal. The coffins are also fitted with a two-way microphone/speaker to enable communication between the occupant and someone outside, and a kit which includes a torch, a small oxygen tank, a sensor to detect a person’s heartbeat, and even a heart stimulator.
What I would want: Satellite radio, Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, and a cell phone with a good battery.
Does anyone listen to XTC anymore?
I’ve had satellite radio for over a year now, and even they don’t play XTC. Once seen as one of the UK most vital independent pop bands, XTC first rose to popularity and now seems to have fallen out of both indie and pop markets.
To be sure, the group had its problems. They don’t have a single album you can listen to straight through without wincing at least occasionally [Black Sea comes closest, though English Settlement has their highest peaks], the fey Britishisms can be offputting, and the vocals are sometimes monotonous [have I sold you on them yet?]. Plus they don’t have a truly convincing greatest hits collection. But their very best songs are among the most significant achievements of rock and roll. Andy Partridge’s songwriting, polyrhythms and studio sense have given me some of my most treasured musical moments. Let’s hope they stand the test of time.
I don’t do iPod (I can’t stand the poor sound quality), but buy the following if you can: 1) No Language in our Lungs [Partridge’s favorite song from the group], 2) Helicopter, 3) Ladybird, 4) Snowman [my favorite], 5) No Thugs in Our House, 6) Senses Working Overtime, 7) I’d Like That, 8) Crocodile, 9) Rocket from a Bottle, 10) Yacht Dance, 11) Brainiac’s Daughter [technically by the “Dukes of Stratosphere”], and 12) Holly up on Poppy, just to name a few. Those songs are my nomination for what belongs in the canon but isn’t yet there.
Addendum: Economist Dan Klein, who first turned me on to XTC, adds the following:
“I liked Tyler’s post on the British rock band XTC. But there is something about XTC he didn’t mention. Not sure how to describe it. Something like the soul wrenching sound of focus and determination. In Led Zeppelin and NWA you also get a pure sense of masculine being, but there’s something special about it in XTC. The self as a team of men in a boiler room making a machine serve an over-riding purpose. I think of songs like “Paper and Iron,” “Travels in Nihilon,” “Heaven is Paved with Broken Glass,” “Tissue Tigers,” and, above all, “Roads Girdle the Globe.” I’d say the peaks come on the albums Go 2, Drums and Wires, and Black Sea.”
“Hail mother motor!
Hail piston rotor!
Hail wheel!””
CDs as loss leaders
An increasing percentage of compact discs are sold in mega-chains, such as Best Buy or Wal-Mart, as loss leaders. Offer the CD at a very cheap price, and hope that the buyers also take home a television set. This practice is the central reason why Tower Records recently went bankrupt.
Loss leader CDs push music in a more mainstream direction. The impulse buy is for the TV, the musical purchase is planned, which favors established stars with new releases. Sudden impulse buys of unknown musical products, by definition, do not bring people into the store. In essence consumers have decided they would rather bundle hit musical releases with TV sets and computers (the Best Buy model), than with more obscure musical releases (the Tower model).
Consumers with mainstream musical tastes are better off, but how about consumers who prefer the niche products? On the downside, hit CDs are cross-subsidizing obscure CDs to a lesser degree than before.
Nonetheless not all hope is lost for buyers with indie tastes. Amazon.com and other Internet services offer a wide variety of releases and lessen the need for such a cross-subsidy. And keep in mind that the cross-subsidy went two ways. The customers who prefer music from Madagascar no longer have to cross-subsidize the Eminem displays in Tower. The CDs are held in Amazon-linked warehouses, which is cheaper, even once you take shipping into account. Furthermore the desire to build up the Amazon brand name cross-subsidizes obscure products of all kinds, many of which Amazon makes little or no money from.
The other key musical trend of our time is illegal downloading, which hurts the top artists most of all. Indie releases use the Internet for publicity, and world music artists learned to live without copyright protection a long time ago. Legal downloading, through iPod, subsidizes music of all kinds. None of the iTunes songs make money for Apple, rather music of your choice (if they can get the rights) is a loss leader for hardware. Most people buy iTunes, not for the latest hits, but to hold a diverse mix of their past and yet-to-be-known future favorites. And most satellite radio channels do not play hits but rather serve niche tastes. XM offers a wide variety of channels, in part to make its brand name well-known and focal.
The bottom line: Don’t worry about music as a loss leader. Cross-subsidies all over the place, and point in many differing directions. But at the end of the day, both the demand and supply for musical diversity are alive and well.
Media concentration
It is commonly alleged that media concentration is on the rise. Ben Compaine, in the January issue of Reason magazine (not yet on-line), debunks this myth. In the mid 1980s, the top ten media companies accounted for 38 percent of total revenue. In the late 1990s the figure was higher, but only barely, up to 41 percent. More importantly, different companies shape our media experiences. Where was Comcast, now the largest cable company, twenty years ago? Bertelsmann, now a giant, was barely visible in American markets. Amazon.com and other Internet-related enterprises are new on the scene as well. If media companies are monopolies, their market power is extremely fragile.
Nor are smaller media outlets necessarily better than the larger conglomerates. The larger outlets are much more likely to win awards for their quality, nor are they obviously more biased. Clear Channel radio is now a poster boy for media critics, but its 1200 stations comprise only slightly more than ten percent of a total of 10,500 American stations. Note also that there were only 8000 radio stations in 1980. We now have satellite radio and Internet radio as well.
Compaine makes a nice point in closing:
It may indeed be that at any given moment 80 percent of the audience is viewing or reading or listening to something from the 10 largest media players. But that does not mean it is the same 80 percent all the time, or that it is cause for concern.
The bottom line: When it comes to media, we have more choice and more competition than ever before.
The economics of classical music
A search on Amazon.com yielded 276 distinct performances of Beethoven’s 5th symphony, many at bargain prices. Attendance at classical concerts is steady or slightly up. The classical share of the CD market is roughly constant at 3 to 5 percent. On the other hand, many orchestras are experiencing financial difficulties, and some are closing.
Complaints about the economic fate of classical music have been common for many decades. In fact parts of the 1980s and 1990s — not long ago — were a financial golden age for the classics, driven by The Three Tenors, Gorecki, and replacing albums with CDs. The entire story comes from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, click here.
In my view, the biggest single dilemma is whether the next generation of philanthropists will have any loyalty to classical music institutions.
How about classical music on the radio?
Classical music stations have disappeared in many cities; one-third of the nation’s top 100 radio markets do not have a classical station. After 63 years, ChevronTexaco’s radio broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera House will be off the air next year.
I suspect that the future of classical music on the radio lies in satellite radio, read this article from today’s Washington Post. XM satellite radio has about one million subscribers and its classical stations are excellent, long pieces with high sound quality, not just another rendition of a Telemann shortie or a Boccherini guitar quintet.
Thanks to William Sjostrom for the pointer to the article.
Addendum: Kevin Brancato tells us that fewer than one percent of American symphony orchestras have gone bankrupt in recent years.
What I’ve been reading
1. Jon Elster, France Before 1789: The Unraveling of an Absolutist Regime. A useful historical introduction to the period, but most notable for taking canons of good social science explanation seriously throughout each step of the analysis. For one thing, it helps you realize how few people do that, but at the same time you wonder how much restating events in terms of social science mechanisms actually helps historical explanation. A smart book and very well-informed book in any case.
2. Paul Preston, A People Betrayed: A History of Corruption, Political Incompetence and Social Division in Modern Spain. A highly detailed but also analytical account of how Spanish political economy became so screwed up. Runs from the 1830s up through the financial crisis, and focuses why Spain was backward in nation-building. Maybe too detailed for some but I believe there is no other book like it.
3. Henry M. Cowles, The Scientific Method: An Evolution of Thinking from Darwin to Dewey. Argue that the true scientific method did not develop until the mid-to late 19th century. A good book, although perhaps more for historians of ideas than students of science per se.
John Anthony McGuckin, The Eastern Orthodox Church: A New History is both a good introduction and deep enough for those well-read in this area.
There is also Paul Matzko, The Radio Right: How a Band of Broadcasters Took on the Federal Government and Built and Modern Conservative Movement. I don’t listen to (non-satellite) radio, but some of you should find this interesting.
The High Cost of Free TV
Despite the fact that 91 percent of American households get their television via cable or satellite huge chunks of radio-spectrum are locked up in the dead technology of over-the-air television. In his Economic View column today Richard Thaler features the work of our GMU colleague Tom Hazlett who argues that auctioning off the spectrum to the high value users would generate at least $100 billion for the government and generate a trillion dollars of value to consumers. Thaler writes:
I KNOW that this proposal sounds too good to be true, but I think the opportunity is real. And unlike some gimmicks from state and local governments, like selling off proceeds from the state lottery to a private company, this doesn’t solve current problems simply by borrowing from future generations. Instead, by allowing scarce resources to be devoted to more productive uses, we can create real value for the economy.
Why isn’t your cell phone service better?
Matt Yglesias offers part of the answer:
One major impediment to better wireless service — be it for cell phones or broadband internet — is that right now we have television broadcasters squatting on two different swathes of the radio spectrum. One is used for digital television broadcasts and one for analog broadcasts. This came about as part of an ill-advised congressional giveaway in the mid-1990s. The good news is that half of that spectrum is scheduled to revert back to the federal government which will then auction some of it off and let the rest operate as "unlicensed" spectrum, like the spectrum block that current WiFi application sit on.
The bad news is that if you do that, the approximately 13 percent of households that currently rely on over-the-air (OTA) analog television suddenly can’t get any channels. That’s not going to sit well with the voters. So there’s an impulse in congress to push the transition date backwards and hope more people switch to cable, satellite, or HDTV by then. The problem here is that the spectrum in question would be really, really useful to wireless providers and would let them build various cool and awesome things for people to buy. Even better, the spectrum is so useful that the government will be able to get a lot of money auctioning it off. Way more than enough money, in fact, to give OTA households free conversion boxes to ensure that their TVs still work and still have money left over for something else. For reasons that aren’t clear to me, however, congressional Republicans don’t seem to like this idea and are therefore delaying the advent of better wireless.
As long as we are complaining, most other countries are on a compatible (GSM) system for international cell phones but the U.S. is not (addendum: Many of you have written to note that Cingular is one exception to this claim). I can buy a cell phone and sim card in Dubai and use it in Australia or New Zealand but not in Peoria.