An Economic Approach To The Plagiarism Of Music

This book is an economic analysis of plagiarism in music, focusing on social efficiency and questions of inequity in the revenue of authors/artists. The organisation into central chapters on the traditional literary aspect of composition and the technocratic problem of ‘sampling’ will help clarify disputes about social efficiency and equity. It will also be extremely helpful as an expository method where the text is used in courses on the music business. These issues have been explored to a great extent in other areas of musical content—notably piracy, copying and streaming. Therefore it is extremely helpful to exclude consumer use of musical content from the discussion to focus solely on the production side. This book also looks at the policy options in terms of the welfare economics of policy analysis.

This book is an economic analysis of plagiarism in music, focusing on social efficiency and questions of inequity in the revenue of authors/artists. The organisation into central chapters on the traditional literary aspect of composition and the technocratic problem of ‘sampling’ will help clarify disputes about social efficiency and equity. It will also be extremely helpful as an expository method where the text is used in courses on the music business. These issues have been explored to a great extent in other areas of musical content—notably piracy, copying and streaming. Therefore it is extremely helpful to exclude consumer use of musical content from the discussion to focus solely on the production side. This book also looks at the policy options in terms of the welfare economics of policy analysis.

Much recent economic work on the music industry has been focused on the impact of technology on demand, with predictions being made of digital copyright infringement leading to the demise of the industry. In fact, there have always been profound cyclical swings in music media sales owing to the fact that music always has been, and continues to be, a discretionary purchase. This entertaining and accessible book offers an analysis of the production and consumption of music from a social economics approach. Locating music within the economic analysis of social behaviour, this books guides the reader through issues relating to production, supply, consumption and trends, wider considerations such as the international trade in music, and in particular through divisions of age, race and gender. Providing an engaging overview of this fascinating topic, this book will be of interest and relevance to students and scholars of cultural economics, management, musicology, cultural studies and those with an interest in the music industry more generally.

Is it ever appropriate to “borrow” culturally inspired ideas? Who has ownership over intangible culture? What role does power inequality play? These questions are often at the center of heated public debates around cultural appropriation, with new controversies breaking seemingly every day. Cultural Appropriation in Fashion and Entertainment offers a sociological perspective on the debate, exploring appropriation of cultures embedded in race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and religion in entertainment as well as the clothing, textiles, jewelry, accessories, hairstyles, and tattoos we wear. Case studies are drawn from K-pop, Bollywood dance, J-pop, Bhangra music, Jamaican reggae, hip hop and EDM fashion to explore how, when, and why cultural borrowing or appreciation can become cultural appropriation. There's also discussion of subcultural territories that extend beyond geography, race and ethnicity, such as cosplay and LGBTQI+ communities. By providing a range of global perspectives on the adoption, adaptation, and application of both tangible and intangible cultural objects, Kawamura and de Jong help move the conversation beyond simply criticizing designers and creators to encourage nuanced discussion and raise awareness of diverse cultures in the creative industries.

Chris Anderson's initial `Long Tail' analysis was released in 2004 just as the wave of mergers and acquisitions was sweeping the music publishing and radio industries. Music industry executives began looking for Anderson’s ‘Long Tail’ effect and with it the implied redistribution of royalty income from popular songs to long dormant and forgotten works in their catalogs. These music publishers had hoped to further maximize the value of their copyright assets (lyrics and melody) in their existing music catalogs as the sale of compact disks diminished, and consumers switched their purchasing and listening habits to new digital formats in music technology such as the iPod. This book deals with the measurement of skewness, heavy tails and asymmetry in performance royalty income data in the music industry, an area that has received very little academic attention for various reasons. For example, the pay packages, including signing bonuses, of some `superstars' in the sports world are often announced when they join a team. In the art world, the value of an artist's work is sometimes revealed when the work is sold at auction. The main reason it is difficult to study art and culture from a royalty income perspective is that most of the income data at the individual level is often proprietary, and generally not made publicly available for economic analysis. As a Senior Economist for the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) using both internal and licensed external proprietary data, the author found that the so-called `superstar effects' are still present in performance royalty income. Success is still concentrated on a relatively few copyright holders or members who can be grouped into `heavy tails' of the empirical income distribution in a departure from Anderson's `long tail' analysis. This book is divided into two parts. The first part is a general introduction to the many supply and demand economic factors that are related to music performance royalty payments. The second part is an applied econometrics section that provides modeling and in-depth analysis of income data from a songwriter, music publisher and blanket licensing perspective. In an era of declining income from CD album sales, data collection, mining and analysis are becoming increasingly important in terms of understanding the listening, buying and music use habits of consumers. The economic impact on songwriters, publishers, music listeners, and Performance Rights Organizations (PROs) is discussed and future business models are evaluated. The book will appeal to researchers and students in cultural economics, media and statistics as well as general readers and professionals in the music publishing industry.

This book gives an overview of the key issues related to books and reading within the field of cultural economics and identifies additional lacunae in this area of research. The field of cultural economics is surprisingly short on research on the book market and on the activity of reading compared with other more recently invented media such as films and musical recordings. In addition, books and reading are strongly impacted by the disruptive innovations of digital technology and the use of online distribution platforms that fuel much of the research on the more recently invented cultural media. This book shows that the area of books and reading has had contributions in historically established areas of cultural economics and those currently exciting attention - chiefly with respect to digital disruption. Finally, it explains how books and reading are a fully developed rational addition model rather than something just based on the addition of past behaviour. Previously published in Journal of Cultural Economics Volume 43, issue 4, December 2019