This is a guest post by Julian Ensbey. Julian is a lawyer in London and one of the smartest people I have met. I am very grateful for his thoughts, which are in response to my past assertion that music has never been better. Julian puts forward a framework for measuring whether this is true.
The question of whether today’s music is better than that of any particular past era is one of those lazy lines of enquiry that can pad out twenty minutes of conversation between two fans without ever going anywhere. Just like most conversations about sport (Punter v Sachin? 2006 Storm v 1998 Broncos?), the point of the conversation is ultimately for the participants to show off how much they know, rather than any expectation that the debate will go anywhere.
Punter. Sachin. Who’ll it be?
At least in music though, the question matters. The entire intellectual property law regime that defines the music industry depends on it. Governments grant musicians a statute-enforced monopoly on the commercial distribution of their music only because the “State” accepts that it provides an “incentive” for the production of better music.
The logic seems simple. If talented musicians can cash in on their talents because they know they are entitled to sue anyone who distributes their music without permission, then in theory, those talented musicians have an incentive to work harder and turn down other careers. They can be confident their labour will be rewarded. The consumer pays a little more at the register, but if it wasn’t for the intellectual property protection, then high quality music would never be made and all of society would be worse off.
Pictured: modern man without music.
Is this hypothesis actually true? Much more than most other areas protected by intellectual property legislation - research into herbicides, design of microconductors - performing music has enormous intrinsic appeal. Many more garages are filled with talentless rock bands than talentless electrical engineers. Perhaps money is not the key motivation.
It is true that musicians who earn enough to be able to work on their music full time have a big advantage and will, on average, produce more or better music than those who have to keep a day job. But beyond a minimum level of financial security, does more cash for the musicians actually lead to better music? Would Kanye have thrown it all in to become a merchant banker if his only revenue was from gigs?
Kanye: letting Taylor finish.
The implications of this should be obvious. The debate over intellectual property rights and pirated music becomes redundant if no link can be shown. If there is no benefit to society, the government has no justification for keeping the laws on the books, let alone enforcing them.
Yet, there is no precise way to measure if music is getting better. It is inherently a subjective assessment. Even if a measure existed for a statistical assessment, the number of external variables to control for is vast.
Nonetheless, because the question matters, it is important to try. Even an imprecise measure could inform the debate.
This disclaimer in mind, here is one attempt at how to approach the issue. Arguably, one legitimate measure of the quality of music is how many people go to see live performances. Possibly it is the only one - radio is too often background noise and record sales numbers are undermined by piracy.
The crowd at your show. The only true measure?
Attendance at live music has risen in recent years. This in itself means little. It may reflect changes in income and lifestyle preferences rather than the quality of music. For example, it seems that the GFC has reversed the trend. A second measure is needed to control for these external variables.
One suitable control might be the live performances of old music - covers bands, opera and classical recitals. More or less, changes in attendance at these performances will be driven by income, lifestyle preferences and recessions, as the underlying performance is about the same. This change in attendance should be a rough measure of the impact of the changes in everything affecting the audience except the quality of the music.
If this holds true, then the percentage increase in attendance at new music, less the percentage increase in attendance at old music, is a rough proxy for the change in quality of music.
A graph of the change in the quality of music shown alongside a graph of changes in revenue would show a measure of the relationship between changes in revenue and changes in quality. If the lines on the graph don’t move together, then the case for copyright looks much weaker. If they track one another, then we should all care a lot more about what a post-piracy revenue model might look like.
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Huw Murdoch 11.09.09 at 10:31 pm
Interesting piece. I wrote about a similar thing a little while ago here. Royalties are nice and, as a musician, I’m all for them getting paid out as much as possible, especially given the relative poverty of a lot of musicians. However, just because they’re nice for the people, it doesn’t mean that they’re effective.