Journal of Cultural Economics最新文献

Cultural consumption has increasingly acquired a fundamental role in urban policy frameworks, thanks to its empirically proven positive effects on individuals and on societies. Although several theoretical and empirical contributions have examined the main socio-economic determinants that explain cultural consumption; its spatial dimensions remain significantly under-considered and require further analysis. The aim of this paper is to analyse the factors influencing cultural consumption with a focus on spatial distance and spatial dependence. Specifically, it seeks to inquire into the extent to which spatial distance between consumers and cultural institutions plays a role in neighbourhood’s levels of cultural consumption. To do this, human mobility data towards cultural institutions are used as a proxy for individual cultural consumption levels in six French cities. Results show that spatial proximity with the cultural offer matters in explaining consumption patterns, but that traditional socioeconomic determinants have a higher explanatory value.

Abstract

Music streaming changed the recorded music industry’s business model from individual product sales to unlimited on-demand access subscriptions. The streaming platforms experienced strong growth during the 2010s and now drive most of the industry’s revenue, up to 90% in the most mature markets. Until recently, the payment system for rights holders had remained unchanged. Many industry stakeholders criticise the system’s alleged unfairness, and artist organisations, independent labels and major labels all propose different ideas to ‘fix’ the music streaming payment system. The current ‘pro-rata’ payment system pools all subscription fees, with each rights holder receiving a payment proportional to their share of the accumulated number of streams. The system does not look to align the individual users’ payments with their actual musical preferences and consumption. Therefore, this paper defines the problem of the current music streaming payment system as its allocation of equal value on all streams. The paper proposes a framework to systematically evaluate alternative payment systems inspired by policy analysis and planning. It additionally contributes with a structured evaluation of six alternative payment systems that rethinks how streams are calculated and remunerated to restore the price discrimination between different listening behaviours. The paper finds that developing a mixture of the alternative systems can likely solve many of the current system’s challenges. Furthermore, the paper analyses and discusses the new payment system changes to be implemented on Deezer and Spotify.

Cultural economics has largely looked toward environmental economics and used non-market valuation techniques such as contingent valuation to estimate the total economic value of cultural goods. These methods are well suited to the valuation of cultural heritage goods, where the benefits are mostly related to the level of supply and mainly take the form of existence and bequest values. This stands in contrast to cultural institutions such as theatres, libraries, exhibitions, and concerts, where the value is produced, when the goods are consumed. For this type of cultural goods, I suggest that cultural economics rather turn to find inspiration in the economics of education. The value of schooling can be divided into private returns and social returns (human capital externalities). Likewise, the value of cultural consumption can have a private and a public component, where I suggest labeling the public component cultural capital externalities. The idea is that when private consumption of arts and culture is taking place, the individual will accumulate cultural capital. This accumulated cultural capital can impact other people (e.g., through changed behavior, future decisions or interactions) and create externalities, i.e., the cultural capital externalities. The size of the externalities is expected to increase (or decrease) with the level of consumption. Without the consumption by the users, no externalities are produced. While this is one of the most fundamental arguments for cultural policy, it has not yet been extensively studied within cultural economics.

This study investigates potential disruption from advertising-based video-on-demand (AVOD) streaming for new-release in-home films. Using stated-preference discrete choice experiments on representative samples from four major countries, we model demand and examine substitution patterns between AVOD and the incumbent transactional video-on-demand (TVOD) model. In addition, we consider illegal streaming alternatives, including the possibility of using a VPN to provide anonymity of the unlawful activity. We find strong preferences for AVOD across each country sample, with large cross-price substitution patterns away from TVOD. An entry simulation exercise provides back-of-the-envelope estimates for ad pricing required to offset reduced revenues if AVOD were offered alongside TVOD for new-release in-home films.

Despite being a globally significant form of art and culture, the performance of comedy has seemingly maintained a very low profile in cultural economics. The case for greater research scrutiny of this art form is advanced alongside some possible reasons for the relatively low academic attention devoted to comedy. The scope for considering comedy in economic terms is also considered, and a range of research questions are raised to stimulate debate and further enquiry on the topic.