Catching up - Media Apperances last two weeks

Bloomberg TV video#

The Street.com article

Happy Easter

On the Quality of Music

from todays globe (boston.com)

Maybe ‘free’ doesn’t hurt music In the music industry, much of the last decade has been spent fighting the scourge of illegal downloading. While it’s pretty clear that sales have slumped, what’s not clear is whether society as a whole has suffered. In other words, has good music not been produced due to weakened economic incentives? An economist who sits on a National Academies committee on copyright policy thinks the answer is no. To create a consistent benchmark for the supply of new music, he integrated numerous retrospective quality rankings (e.g., Rolling Stone’s 500 best albums) going back decades to see if there’s been a drop-off in the supply of quality music since the advent of illegal downloading. He found no statistically significant change, suggesting that lower production incentives have been balanced by lower production costs.

Waldfogel, J., “Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie? The Supply of New Recorded Music since Napster,” National Bureau of Economic Research (March 2011).

I found the last sentence key. Not the statistical cost but the cost of production part. To extend it, the distribution cost, or at least the barriers to entry, are much lower as well. These are two arguments I don't see the "industry" addressing, much less considering.