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.
First let me note that your characterization of economics and efficiency applies first and foremost to the corporate form, where there are shareholders who are otherwise not involved in the company business at all. On the opposite extreme, there can be small businesses, run by an owner-operator, who is motivated by a labor of love as much or more so than by making a big profit. Then, in the 1950s and earlier, large chain stores were less prevalent than they are today, so there might have been more of those labor-of-love types per capita than there are today. In other words, while Asch's music curation may have been rare in that industry, those sort of businesses did exist in other sectors.
ReplyDeleteGiven that, it would still be interesting to know what criteria Asch used to record an artist. He had a sense of taste about the music. Where did that come from? Did other people have similar taste, even if they weren't in the curation business? That book I loaned you might help here, to provide a different cut on this issue.
If you think of it as they teach statistics - there are both type 1 and type 2 errors. Are there some artists who made it to Asch's collection but really shouldn't be there? And are there other artists who should be there but never made it in?
Now let me get at the last stuff you say here. Asch's collection may have much greater value now then when he ran Folkways. There is a difference between being profit maximizing, on the one hand, a simply wanting to have big profits in the short term. The latter can be myopic. So Asch might have shown prescience and actually taken the efficient actions at the time. Do you think there is any way to value that collection now, given how it is distributed?