Creative Class

Hi, Bert Sperling here.

My main area of work is measuring Quality of Life (QOL) in general, and using the QOL and other metrics to rank different places. By examining the differences between places and their residents, we can gain insight into what people are looking for, and how future events may impact where and how we will live.

Richard Florida’s Creative Class concept has evolved to encompass new theories regarding the importance of place and its effect on our lives. Richard and I are finding new areas of common interest as we both look at the unique attributes of different cities and metros, and theorize why some are thriving and others are in a slump.

I’m excited to lend my observations to the discussion here on the Creative Class Exchange, because I know that there will be some keen observations and challenging comments from you sharp people who regularly read it. Please consider this an invitation to share your perspective.

Where Are the Musicians?

It seems that that the most common way to measure the concentration of artists and other creatives is to analyze the United State census occupation data, which identifies Americans which list ‘artist’ as their primary occupation. This is the methodology of a recent report from the National Endowment for the Arts on “Artists in the Workforce.”

(Note – I call them “artistics”, since the category includes not only artists, but also writers, authors, musicians, photographers, architects, and others.)

Among their key findings is that nearly two million Americans identify themselves as artistics, but the total excludes “many people with secondary employment as artists – an estimated 300,000 Americans.”

Wait a minute.

Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Aren’t there many more casual or part-time artistics than full-time professionals? (And I have another concern. A person shouldn’t need to earn money to provide validation for their artistic expression.)

I divide my time between Portland and small town on the Oregon coast, named Depoe Bay. In little Depoe Bay, there are some great musicians that I regularly play with, and they’re patiently teaching me the theory and practice of jazz guitar which have added a new dimension to my playing. Robin, Steve, and I have a combo that plays around the area, and have developed a nice following.

Is this activity likely to surface using the usual criteria of primary occupation? Not likely; Steve is the town’s postmaster, and Robin is a local contractor.

But in the same way that young twenty-somethings work as a barista by day, and play in a punk band at night, this is part of what makes a place interesting and unique. And because it’s so much more pervasive, I feel that this underground creativity is even more important to a city’s quality of life than the concentration of artistic professionals.

So, how would YOU determine where these underground musicians live and play, so we can identify those places which are hotbeds of creative activity? I have some ideas, but I’d like to hear from you first.

Simon Jenkins, writing in the Times of London, absolutely nails it (h/t: Bill Bishop):

Futurology seminars have long been obsessed with one question: what next after the
internet? The answer is always the same, a new electronic gizmo. …

Since the invention of the telegraph and gramophone,
innovation is interested only in kit that yields profit. What is becoming plain,
even under the strains of recession, is that the futurologist’s answer should
lie in the realm not of electronics but of reality. It is in reality television,
reality politics, reality entertainment and sport, the immediate, the active,
the present, the live.

The phenomenon is near-universal. People do not want to spend their spare time in
front of the same screens at which they increasingly work. They want to “go
out”…

What is happening is a reversal of history. Artists can no longer sell the products
of their genius because the internet supplies it virtually for free. What can be
sold is that genius in the flesh.

The whole story is here.

Experiences matter. Authentic experiences, especially. Cities can provide them, and those that do so gain an edge. All part and parcel of the shift to the creative economy and society. We’re tracking the transformation of the popular music and entertainment industries in one of our big, focal projects at the MPI. More to come.

A new study by Harvard Business School’s Anita Elberse marshals substantial empirical evidence that “hits” still matter quite a bit, a seeming refutation of Chris Anderson’s popular long tail thesis.  According to Lee Gomes of the Wall Street Journal:

Anita Elberse, a marketing professor at Harvard’s business school
who takes the same statistically rigorous approach to entertainment and
cultural industries that sabermetricians do to baseball, … looked at data for online video rentals
and song purchases, and discovered that the patterns by which people
shop online are essentially the same as the ones from offline. Not only
do hits and blockbusters remain every bit as important online, but the
evidence suggests that the Web is actually causing their role to grow,
not shrink.

Anderson responds here. Here’s Elberse’s reaction, Tyler Cowen weighs in here.

Here’s Elberse’s site: Her research looks very interesting.

“[I]n the long run, we are all the Grateful
Dead.” – Paul Krugman.

I wish. More and more of us are like the t-shirts vendors at a Dead concert, actually. A lucky few are the backup band, and fewer and fewer are sound men or roadies. One thing that seems self-evident – artists, musicians, writers, scientists, and creative people generally continue to produce terrific creative material.  It’s the transmitters and publishers of that content that are the bottleneck and the problem. What will become of the book publishers, record companies and scientific journals in this new age of digitization. Seems to me like they are the dinosaurs of the digital age on their way for extinction. More of Krugman’s ruminations on digitization of everything, authors, musicians, and IP, here.

Yesterday I posted my two part interview with CIUT’s David Peterson.  Here’s a link to a fascinating discussion with David, Andy Frank, Kate Adach, and Lynn Harrison. Best of all it includes a wonderful new song by Lynn, “Just the Kind of City I Am,” inspired by these themes. Enjoy!

Eye Weekly’s ever witty Marc Weisblott really made me smile tonight. We’re in NYC to do a segment on the CBS Early Show tomorrow AM, and I came across his new piece (with requisite, though mainly recycled, “zingers”) titled “Sunshine Statesman.”

When my brother Rob and I formed our first band in the mid-1960s, trying our hand at Jimi Hendrix, Cream and other power rock staples, we practiced hard for our first gig – the annual Cub Scout shindig. We thought we’d found a great name – Flagg – with those so strategically place double gs.

But our Dad, who headed our local troupe, told the organizers to call us “The Sunshines.”

I hadn’t thought about that for nearly 40 years, but Weisblott and Eye brought it all back – the image of our youthfully mortified red faces on the stage of Queen of Peace Elementary School’s cafeteria cum Cub Scout meeting hall/ performance venue. And for that I am ever so grateful.

Doing lots and lots of media for Who’s Your City and here’s one folks might especially enjoy. I’m on for TWO whole hours today with Matt Galloway host of CBC’s Here and Now. Matt and I will talk about the book, but you’ll also get to hear four or five of my current favorite songs – including hopefully this NPR song of the day by recent CCG alum, Jesse Elliott of These United States.

Click here to stream. Enjoy!

Taste is always subjective and fame-fleeting, but I could not agree more with NPR’s Carrie Brownstein on this:

This afternoon I went to the Spin party to see X. The band played
all of the hits, from ‘Los Angeles’ to ‘We’re Desperate’. John Doe,
always the storyteller, told the audience that ‘Nausea’ was how we’d
feel after the amount of beer we’d all been drinking and that ‘Motel
Room In My Bed’ is where we’d be when we woke up feeling sick … Before X were Vampire Weekend, who I saw yesterday at The Parish. It’s a shame so many people left after Vampire Weekend and missed X’s show.

To my ears, X were one of the very best bands of their era.  Doe is a terrific lyricist and the male-female vocals as good as any this side of Jefferson Airplane.

The New York Times:

Over its four days, SXSW, as the festival is called, is like MySpace moved to the physical realm: more music than anyone could possibly hear, freely available and clamoring to be heard.

Hmmmmm …

The Financial Times, John Gapper:

The late 20th century was a very good time to run a studio or a
label in a media company. Apart from having a lot of freedom and being
paid a lot of money, executives and producers could hang out with
artists and feel creative themselves.

Things are now tougher for studio executives and A&R (artists and repertoire) people at music
labels. The digital revolution and the end of the DVD boom and the CD
era means that there is less money to throw around. They are being
thrown out of their jobs instead …

First, creativity flourishes in small groups rather than big organisations.
There are sound reasons why media companies maintain labels, studios
and, in the case of book publishers, imprints. It is why GlaxoSmithKline,
for example, groups its drug discovery work in specialist centres
rather than making its scientists work in big, amorphous laboratories.

Second, talent spotters and producers have skills that someone who works in
finance does not possess. Mr Hands and EMI’s suits would probably be
lousy A&R people. They would not be able to spot promising but
inexperienced bands, get them to sign and guide them through the maze.