Past, present and future: music economics at the crossroads

Abstract

This paper contextualises research on the economics of music. The papers considered represent a crossroad in economics music research. One branch is the most heavily explored area of the impact of digital technology on consumption of music. The others comprise one entirely new topic which is crowd-sourced funding of new music recordings. The other topics are extremely old in terms of relevance but very new in terms of there being little prior economic analysis. These are environmental damages from musical activity and the efficiency of belonging to a pop–rock musical ensemble versus being a solo artist.