Why A Guy Should Always Pay On The First Date(and what the music biz can learn from it)
Most of us are rarely aware of the fact that we live in two worlds. One is characterized by social exchanges and the other by market exchanges. The quality of any one person’s life depends to a great extent on how adept they are at balancing the two. What do I mean by that? [...]
Continue reading...Inside The Mind Of A Music Pirate
Sunday, May 30, 2010
Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger gave an interesting response to a question about music profits recently. He said: But I have a take on that – people only made money out of records for a very, very small time. When The Rolling Stones started out, we didn’t make any money out of records because record companies [...]
Continue reading...The Price Of Music Is Based Mostly On Ideology
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
The New York Times wants to start charging for content. It’s a strategy that’s worked reasonably well for publications like the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. But those publications provide a higher degree of actionable information that appeals to people in the financial industries. My prediction is that the New York Times’ new [...]
Continue reading...Record Labels Waged War On Human Psychology…And Lost
Monday, May 10, 2010
The major record labels and the RIAA could have averted a PR nightmare and saved themselves millions of dollars by hiring a few behavioral economists instead of lawyers to advise them. The basis of all human economic transactions are psychological. Our animal spirits animate markets. The lawsuits the RIAA waged against consumers several years ago [...]
Continue reading...The Internet’s Bringing Idealism Back To Music…And Why Microsoft’s Still Evil
Monday, May 3, 2010
Most of us assume that people are motivated primarily by self-interest. It’s a logical assumption to make because, after all, most people do care about their job more than they do about yours. They do care about their own kids more than they do yours. None of this is surprising in the least because it’s [...]
Continue reading...The Psychology Of Free…(Or, Why I Won’t Pay For A Song)
Monday, April 26, 2010
One of the biggest misconceptions about pricing is the notion that people base most buying decisions on rational economic calculations. The truth is that they’re based far more on psychology most of the time. There’s several ways to look at this. One is from a value standpoint. Most people would probably rather pay $4.50 for a [...]
Continue reading...Why The Cost Of Music Trends To Zero
Monday, April 19, 2010
Economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources with alternative uses. It sounds like esoteric mumbo jumbo. But all it means is that the world has stuff we want and that we can’t all have that stuff and the market decides how it all gets divvied out. It’s one of the more important [...]
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Tuesday, July 13, 2010
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