Morning Advantage: Stealing Music Isn't the Problem
HBR.org 2012-06-29
On June 16, Emily White, a 20-year old NPR intern, confessed that she rarely pays for music. Then David Lowery, a musician and professor, took to his Trichordist blog to lecture Snider about the consequences of her actions: “Congratulations, your generation is the first generation in history to rebel by unsticking it to the man and instead sticking it to the weirdo freak musicians!” In this erudite post at Billboard, music exec Jay Frank says Lowery has it all wrong. File-sharing isn’t the culprit here — it’s competition. Consumers, Frank says, have way too many choices. Last year, 77,000 albums hit the market, but only 4 percent sold over 1,000 copies. Using Google as his barometer, Frank shows that web searches for Lowery’s music are basically nonexistent. So the problem is simple: “there are too many artists competing for shrinking dollars.” Music “isn’t about royalty rates, thievery, or even quality of music. It's all about how I get people to know I exist.” The winners? The major labels.
Life After Moneyball (Grantland)
Fans of the Oakland Athletics may be wondering what happened to the team’s Moneyball ethos. Base stealing? Using early draft choices on high-school pitchers? Don’t those run counter to Billy Beane’s philosophy? Not really, says Evan Hughes. The cash-strapped A’s were successful in the past because they exploited the inefficiencies in the market. Whereas other teams were overpaying for power hitters, the A’s were using statistics to find the players with the skills that the rest of the league had undervalued. Unfortunately, everyone else caught on, so the A’s were forced to shift their focus.
FEAR AND LOATHING IN FREELANCE LAND
Modern Workers at Risk in a Gig Economy (Huffington Post)
In this call-to-action, Richard Greenwald warns us about the effects of the continuing rise in freelance workers. Nearly 30 percent of the workforce consists of free agents — consultants, contractors and so on — but many of these workers aren’t as privileged as we think. Many are day laborers. Many more are temps. If the trend continues, Greenwald argues, this could be the biggest shift in the workforce since the industrial revolution. We need to take notice. A growing number of workers are caught in low-wage, dead-end, vacation-less jobs that offer little economic security. We should be worried.
Sounds Delicious
Wine Drinkers Will Pay More for Bottles with Hard-To-Pronounce Names (Time) Start-up Lessons From Reality TV (Inc.) David Foster Wallace on Performance (Basketball Prospectus)