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...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...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...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...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 [...]
Continue reading...Monday, March 22, 2010
I spent part of last weekend cleaning out my CD collection. By that I mean I threw it in the trash. Some of the albums were somewhat obscure and stuff I’d probably never find in a store. But I threw them all out for the simple reason that I don’t need them anymore. I can [...]
Continue reading...Thursday, January 21, 2010
There’s a cool paper about file sharing that was written by economists Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf this past summer. The conclusion of the paper is that file sharing benefits society. One of the pieces of evidence for that is that less restrictive copyright laws have encouraged greater numbers of creative people to create. [...]
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Sunday, May 30, 2010
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