The Economics of Local Music (part 4): Making a Living in Your Local Music Market

I just bought a copy of the third edition of Dick Weissman's "Making a Living in Your Local Music Market" published by Hal Leonard Books.  The description says: This newly updated book is an invaluable resource for the musician or aspiring musician who lives outside the major music business markets. The author has lived in …

It still takes the same number of musicians to play “Hey Jude” now as it did for the Beatles

Found a blog referencing this piece I read last year when it came out.  This quote, in particular, summarizes Baumol's Cost Disease: Dr. Baumol and a colleague, William G. Bowen, described the cost disease in a 1966 book on the economics of the performing arts. Their point was that some sectors of the economy are …

Classical Music: declining or rising…or neither…

Greg Sandow poses a question (or rather, series of questions) at his latest blog post "Why don't we know?"  This one is probably the pin that ties them all together and is obviously something I've been blogging about and research for myself for years now: behind all of this — at least in my view …

The Economics of Local Music (part 3): Folk vs Pop vs Art Music

A few days ago I read a fascinating analysis of music from a functional standpoint by Gregory Booth and Terry Kuhn.  The piece, titled "Economic and Transmission Factors as Essential Elements in the Definition of Folk, Art, and Pop Music" (The Music Quarterly, Vol. 74. No. 3, 1990, pp. 411-438), compares and contrasts very general …

The Economics of Local Music (part 2) Audiences: a lesson from blogs

One of my biggest criticisms of using the pop music field as a way to instruct the classical music field in ways of increasing audiences is that, for the most part, there seems to be an overinflated sense of how big an audience a pop musician is actually able to draw.  I've been doing some …