Rockonomics

The way in which people make money from music is changing.

One symptom of this is that it’s getting much more expensive to see a big-name live music act, and the reason turns out to be a knock-on effect from the advent of downloadable music. Live shows used to be a way to promote CD sales, but now that fewer people get their music from CD it is tours that have to make a profit.

The pricing of live shows and the balance of power in recording contracts are topics in what Princeton University economists Marie Connolly and Alan Krueger call “Rockonomics”: the economics of the pop music industry.

Read more: “Winners take all in rockonomics”, BBC News web site, 20 April 2006.
Reference: Connolly, Marie and Alan B. Krueger. “Rockonomics: The Economics of Popular Music,” Working Paper, April 2005

Comments are closed.