Journal of Cultural Economics最新文献

The trend towards digitalisation and technological innovation has reshaped the cultural and creative industries (CCIs) by changing the existing funding models and structures. The aim of this article is to explore the impact of cultural dimensions and policies on the adoption of reward-based crowdfunding as a new form of finance for firms in the CCIs in 12 different European countries during the 2015-2019 period. Our results show that national cultural dimensions and policies significantly affect the demand for cultural and creative crowdfunding. Specifically, the adoption of crowdfunding is broader in individualistic countries and in societies characterised by higher uncertainty avoidance, indulgence, short-term orientation, and lower levels of discrimination between genders. Furthermore, we find that the liberal welfare state model, characterised by limited government interference, market orientation, privatisation and a focus on self-responsibility, and the Southern European welfare model, based on a weak and inefficient state, increase the adoption of crowdfunding in the CCIs. The presence of a central ministry with cultural competence also increases the adoption of crowdfunding in the CCIs. Our findings show a U-shaped relationship between European grants and the demand for crowdfunding, mainly driven by a high or low European involvement within these sectors. We also identify a moderation effect of EU grants on the relationship between cultural dimensions and crowdfunding adoption, suggesting that the magnitude of this relationship depends on the amount of EU grants awarded in a specific country. As a robustness check, we run a set of Poisson regressions with correlated random effects (CREs), confirming our main results.

In this study ticket prices to Swedish opera houses and symphony orchestra concerts are compared to wages during the 1898-2019 period. Both wages and ticket prices have increased continuously. The same kind of policy objectives concerning social inclusion of disadvantaged groups that were established in the beginning of the twentieth century is still proclaimed. The most favourable ticket pricing policies for buyers were used in the decades around the first national Cultural Policy Act from 1974. The study shows that ticket price levels have risen thereafter to a level much less favourable for low-income workers. Managements do use some price discrimination tactics. However, they do it uniformly for all events. They now focus on the promotion of special, 'popular music'-based events as a response to social inclusion directives. The idea is that attending such performances will make visitors interested in the normal repertoire, as well. The choice of high-level ticket prices for the traditional content means that the standard audience remains monocultural.

This paper studies the influence of macroeconomic conditions on subjective well-being and music preferences. The macroeconomic cycle exerts an effect on happiness and well-being that consumers counterbalance by modifying music consumption. We use machine learning techniques to make a weekly classification of the top 100 songs of Billboard Hot 100 into positive and negative lyrics over the period 1958-2019. When unemployment is high, society generally prefers more positive songs. Other macroeconomic indicators such as high inflation, high interest rates or low stock market prices also affect musical preferences. These results provide initial evidence regarding the use of cultural consumption to offset business cycle oscillations.

Working conditions of musicians are marked by several specific characteristics that differ the occupation from most others in the labor market. For instance, non-pecuniary aspects of the profession may have a greater influence on the individuals who pursue musical activities than in most other occupations. Moreover, musicians are more susceptible to uncertainties in the short run and regarding the duration of their careers. Besides, informality and underemployment rates tend to be higher in the music industry when compared to the rest of the labor market. This paper aims to better understand musician's labor market participation using primary data. We conducted an online survey between February and December 2020, gathering data about working conditions, in particular job satisfaction and turnover, with all the musicians from Belo Horizonte who were registered and not were registered in musician's association. Belo Horizonte is known as a unique city and a highly heterogeneous environment for the development of the music industry. Thus, using work satisfaction indicators and Kaplan-Meier survival model, controlled by personal and work-position variables, this study highlights that most musicians were neither satisfied nor dissatisfied with their work. However, satisfaction was positively correlated with the following characteristics: being protected by social security, having a music career as main occupation, and holding a degree in music. These traits were also important for musicians to remain in the occupation throughout 2020, an atypical period due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The cluster of innovations brought about by information and communication technology (ICT) is dramatically changing the ways in which the visual arts can be produced and consumed. By using the USA 2012 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, we explore visual arts consumption through both onsite attendance at museums and electronic and digital media. To disentangle the complexity of the relationship of different forms of museums attendance, both a multinomial logit and a recursive bivariate probit model are estimated to obtain direct and indirect effects of the alternative forms of participation. Results demonstrate that there are no age consumer differences in the form they consume visual arts. Noticeable differences concern race, gender, families with children attending arts school, and type of occupation. In addition, results show that there is a trade-off between online and onsite visits. Visiting museums and art galleries have a positive correlation with the digital access to visual arts, both through handheld and mobile devices and via the internet, whilst the same correlation is not found for internet access on museum attendance. This means that for many consumers, online attendance is the only way to overcome time constraints and other costs involved in an onsite visit.

In this paper, we exploit a unique weekly longitudinal survey of adults in the UK purposefully collected to study consumption choices with respect to cultural content types during the first Covid-19 national lockdown (the "Great Lockdown"). We look for changes in the probability of consuming different cultural and creative types of content (Music, Movies, TV, Games, Books, Magazines and Audiobooks), as well as changes in the overall variety of consumption. We find that changes in consumption depend on the type of content. In particular, other things being equal, the likelihood of listening to Music and playing Games went up and the likelihood of reading Books went down. We find little statistically significant evidence of changes in the probability of consumption of the other types of content. We find that, while on average individuals increased the variety of their consumption, the statistical significance of this increase varied depending on the socio-demographic and economic characteristic of interest. In particular, we find evidence of an increase in the variety of consumption for those at the bottom of the distribution of socio-economic status, which speaks to the importance of access to culture and creativity during lockdown for this specific social class.

Self-employment is much more frequent among artists and creative workers than other occupations. This has led to the emergence of the notion of the ‘artist-entrepreneur,’ which associates these workers with autonomy and independence and the ability to choose their own career paths. This study explores motivations for self-employed artistic work by using data from five waves of the Contingent Worker Supplement to the Current Population Survey collected by the U.S. Census Bureau. Using Coarsened Exact Matching, we compare artists to non-artists in predicting motivations for self-employed work. We find that artists are different than non-artists in terms of their entrepreneurial motivations. Artists are less likely to seek self-employment for economic reasons as compared to other motivators. They are more likely to do so for reasons related to independence, time flexibility, and personal reasons. However, the preference for independence and time flexibility is not associated with self-employed artistic work more than it is associated with other types of self-employed work. The main difference between self-employed artists and non-artists is in the likelihood of choosing self-employment for lack of choice and for economic reasons. The findings make us question the notion of the ‘artist-entrepreneur’ by showing that both self-employed artists and non-artists have similar motivations related to seeking professional self-determination, but that self-employed artists are more likely to be motivated by their precariousness.