First Steps to Sizing Up the Market

This week I decided to do something a little different, resulting from my questions regarding the profitability of Asch's Folkways Records. I thought it might be beneficial to start doing a bit of market research to get a better picture of what's going on in market for music. I used a tool called SimplyMap to generate some tables and maps based on Census data from 2008 and 2011 which would hopefully start to give us a picture of American's music taste, and the potential size of the market for the lost music generation. As there wasn't a specific "Folk" music category, I decided the closest alternative option was Bluegrass, closely followed by traditional country. Defining the "folk" genre has been one of the problems I have continued to run into in articles and the book am I working through entitled  Rainbow Quest. Even folk artists themselves seem to have trouble identifying other folk artists, as each group seems to carry with them their own definition of what constitutes folk. For this reason, I decided to include both Bluegrass and Traditional Country in my initial data collection. All maps and tables created used numerical data rather than percentages to give a more accurate picture of where potential consumers are and how many of them exist.

The first map I generated was the number of people who listed Bluegrass as their favorite type of music in 2008. It is depicted below.

Then we have the map of Bluegrass top choice in 2011.

Though the differences in the maps isn't extremely noticeable, in the top 10 states there was an increase in people putting Bluegrass as their favorite choice of music, going from 6,857,697 in 2008 up to 6,928,561 in 2011. Also by looking at the maps, we can find folk genre hot spots. When we take out the high population states (California, Texas, Illinois, New York) we see that geographically, this genre of music is quite popular in middle America (belt states of Tennessee, North Carolina, Virginia and Kentucky) as well as seems to be gaining popularity out west in Arizona, Oregon and Washington.

Similarly for Traditional Country in 2008 we have the following map.

And for 2011 Traditional Country we have:

These maps appear very similar to Bluegrass, but when viewed closely, you can pick out some regional variance based on taste. In terms of which definition hits closer to Folk music in definition, I'd take Bluegrass as a better representative than Country but I feel that each are worth taking a look at.

I also have lots of other data to sift through so I'll probably dedicate another blog post to the numbers and my analysis as I sift through the information. The images above are just a starting point, and I do realize that the numerical data I can harvest from them will be more significant when talking about project scope.

Profit or preserve?

This question related to the project came to me after reading the recommended article on Moses Asch and Folkway Records.

In economics we are always in search of efficiency. According to the market, firms have the sole mission of profit maximization. This implies that resources be used efficiently, as they are scarce. The music industry should follow the same pattern. Scarce resources are recording space and time, limited promotion, production, and distribution funding, as well as up until recently limited inventory, holding, space. With the digital age, inventory costs for all media have gone way down, as discussed in this article, but the other costs have remained. Moses Asch was unique in the industry as he was much more concerned with breadth of the collection rather than the monetary value of each album he produced. Of the 2,200 albums he produced on Folkways Records, 2/3 sold fewer than 100 copies. In the business world that would indicate incentive to discontinue the products in the hopes of making room for potentially more successful output. But Folkways wasn't a traditional business, if it can be considered to be a business at all. Rather than being in the market for profit, the label was in the market for preservation of human expression, particularly in the forms of folk music and jazz. In that sense, the collection I am studying for this project is much more akin to a museum of music, which makes sense as it is currently in the possession of the Smithsonian Collection, than labels which remove unsuccessful records from production and inventory so as to not be subject to the costs retaining the records creates.

If not for profit, what was Asch's intention in establishing Folkways Records? The music in the collection is much like art, the value largely indeterminable and subject to the beholder, in this case more specifically the listener. Asch did society a great favor by maintaining accessibility to otherwise obsolete music. Music is tricky because of the fickleness of taste, a genre can be super hot one year, and much less popular in subsequent ones. Factors outside the market such as social transformation, political unrest, and demographics all play roles in popularity of music. Those factors are also often reflected in the music itself, which can be seen in the nonconformist, sometimes rebellious, undertones in many of the albums I have collected data on so far. Music it seems has as much to say as print from specific periods of time has something to say about the greater society, and therefore may be considered as important for the documentation of cultural history. Museums, focused on preservation, run on a very different business model than do your traditional record labels or publishing companies. They are not driven by profit stemming from product, but rather from patronage by consumers who appreciate whatever has been preserved. Streaming websites such as Spotify and Rdio, seem to be digital museums, allowing users to listen to their collection without providing ownership of the content. As it stands, from a business perspective, preservation akin to the collection amassed of Moses Asch is inefficient, as he used resources and money which could have been more optimally used somewhere else, but when looking at his actions from the perspective of a preservationist interested in retaining the character of American cultural, the costs and benefits fall more in line.

Consequences of Copyright

This very interesting article was recommended for me to read by my adviser for this project: "The Hole in Our Collective Memory: How Copyright Made Mid-Century Books Vanish" published in The Atlantic this past July. Professor Paul J. Heald at the University of Illinois has done an extensive research project looking at the effects copyright legislation has had on the availability of various media items, primarily in this case, books and music. The Atlantic article focused exclusively on books, but in Heald's full report you can read about his research on music and YouTube as well.

Heald conducted his research using a software program to grab a random selection of book titles off Amazon. It is similar to what I am trying to do with the Folkways Folk Music Collection, but of course is much more thorough and efficient. From the data he collected he had some very telling, quantifiable results. Some of the striking statistics include there being as many books in print from 1910 as from 2000, as well as the number of books in print from the 1850s being twice as big as the number of books in prints from the 1950s. As these results are contrary to the standard assumption that the number of books in print should steadily decline moving back from present time (due to less market demand as material ages), there is a red flag that something might be wrong with the copyright system.

                                                                                                                     Paul J. Heald
As we can see in the graph above, the hardest hit time period appears to be between 1940 and 1980, approximately the same period I am  using as my window for Folk music. Since copyright was introduced in 1923, mid-century media (books, music) has become virtually obsolete. Digitization seems like it will be able to protect media released in the time since the technological revolution, as almost all music and many books are now released and stored online. But that doesn't bode well for the mid-century material which has yet to come of age and fall into public domain with the expiration of its copyrights.

There are also differences in books and music which should be noted. It seems that as time goes on the market for books (printed or e-format) is in decline. People aren't reading nearly as much any more, a trend which can be seen in the decline of print newspapers, the end of Border's, and the current struggle of Barnes & Noble to stay afloat. The music industry, though not as profitable in song by song or album by album sales, is still as popular if not more so than ever before. This can be seen in the number of new start-ups related to music sharing, filing, and listening. There is still a music market, and still a broad range of taste. Therefore when thinking about the effects of copyright, the losses resulting from inaccessible music may be even greater than those of the inaccessible books. The size of the present day music market, with the addition of laptops, tablets, smart phones and other devices, if much larger than it was at the time of release of many of the songs I am looking at.

It seems as though in the print industry and the music industry, publishers and labels play parallel roles. I found it interesting that in the article, publishers were said to be the ones keeping the mid-century books off the market because they weren't profitable with the copyright attached. From the data I've collected so far, it seems to be much the same story in the music industry with labels not digitizing music and releasing it on streaming sites possibly because with copyright the costs outweigh the benefits, potential revenues.

I plan on looking more in depth at copyright as the semester progresses and will be using Heald's work as a point of reference for my continued research.

Reflections on the First Week

In the last week I have determined my initial research approach and have been getting acquainted with the different sources I will be using to gather information. My blog now has four different pages: home, relevant literature, notes & data, and data gathering process. The home page is where all my weekly summary and other posts will be located. The relevant literature page is where articles and books related to the research question can be found. Notes & data is probably the most important page as it is where links for my Google spreadsheet with data and notes on the process can be found. The last page has my step by step research gathering process, which will inevitably be amended as I continue working on collecting data. I have currently made the choice to ignore albums released after 1980, so as to keep the focus on Folk Music up through the 1970s but not later. This year will probably change as I do more research on the subject.

I have gone through about 3 pages of albums on the Folkways website and have started to uncover some patterns. Pete Seeger was very prominent on all three, but his albums were primarily re-releases and his name is so big in the Folk music world, that documenting his countless albums would add little to the project. I am also figuring out what to make of various collaboration performances and albums as it seems in the Folk genre, solo artists sometimes came together to record an album as a group, going their separate ways afterwards. I am curious whether that sort of album is more or less likely to be preserved. Something that is starting to become clear is that almost all Folkways music has been digitized and is available for streaming on Spotify. There was one record under the Folkway label that was on the Folkways website but not on Spotify, which I have yet to come to a clear answer as to why. It seems that "Bergerfolk Vol. 2: Happy Landings Family Folk" has mysteriously not made it into the Spotify collection. So far that is the only example I have of missing Folkways songs. The other pattern that seems to be emerging is that folk albums not available on Spotify tend to be under different labels, labels which probably haven't released content for streaming. The most frequent among these that I have found so far has been Columbia. Whether or not these albums are available digitized through a source other than Spotify is a question I'll have to look into.

Finding consistent discography sources has been a challenge, though I do find myself coming back to the same few for many of the artists. Something that I have run into is discrepancies in reporting of some artists' complete discography so it seems that there is quite a bit of uncertainty and question in music sellers, archivists, and enthusiasts themselves. Having a standardized and verified database of released songs and albums for labels and song artists could definitely be of use in the search I have been doing. Overall the my approach seems to be working, and getting data that we hypothesized we'd find so it looks like I've got more data to collect to start piecing together the story of what's been digitized and why, as well as answer the questions of why some records seem to have chosen not to.