Krugman (and Connolly and Krueger) on the Economics of Music
Posted: Tue Feb 24, 2015 6:00 pm
It doesn't seem as if anyone has beat me to the punch on this: Paul Krugman has a blog posting, "Jenny Lind, Taylor Swift, and Me", about the economics of popular music. He uses a paper I hadn't heard of (and I confess to not having read this 86-page paper yet) titled "Rockonomics: The Economics of Popular Music".The money shot from Krugman's blog entry:First of all, the big lesson I learned from Connolly and Krueger is that musicians, as opposed to the industry, never made much money from recordings. C&K tell us that in 2002 “ which was close to the peak of the golden age of CDs “ the biggest bands made more than 7 times as much from touring as they did from royalties. Basically, for musicians it has always been about live performance.The paper is from 2005, which will give people enough room to argue that the intervening decade has changed the economics of popular music significantly. But I thought people here might find these items interesting.