Creative Class

“The bicycle is the means of transport used most often in Amsterdam,” reports Bike Europe. “Between 2005 and 2007 people in the city used their bikes on average 0.87 times a day, compared to 0.84 for their cars. This is the first time that bicycle use exceeds car use.”

When I started cycling in the Boston area a decade or so, I recall there was a competition between bike, car, and train commuters on designated routes. The bike commuters cleaned up.

It’s getting better in cities from New York to Portland, but American and Canadian cities have a long way to go to catch up - in car too many, commuting by bike remains fraught with risk.

Check out this video of Amsterdam bike commuters:

There’s no shortage of debate on this one. But a new report (pointer via Tyler Cowen) by the intriguing combination of Harvard professor of Technology and Operations Management Robert D. Austin and Lee Devinand, a theatre dramaturg, shows there’s really no conflict:

[W]e examine the apparent conflict between artistic and commercial objectives within creative companies … We surface some assumptions that underlie such debates, compare them with findings from our research on creative industries, and identify three “fallacies” that sometimes enter into discussions of art in relation to money. This, in turn, leads us to propose a framework that can support more productive discussion and to describe a direction for management research that might help integrate art and business practices. We conclude that despite an inclination to take offense that often attends the close juxtaposition of art and commerce … the interests of art, artists, and business can be best served if more commerce enters into the world of art, not less.

Check out the other fascinating work on art, music, and management this team is doing.

Dutch start-up SellaBand has built a platform that allows artists to crowd-source funding from music-lovers around the world. Established in 2006 by two Sony-BMG music executives, it provides a Bowie-bond like process for up-and-coming bands to raise $50,000 to record their album by selling ten-dollar “parts” to online “believers.”

Economist Ajay Agrawal has been studying SellaBand’s business model as part of a new MPI program on Innovation and Creativity. He recently hosted an evening featuring a performance from the first Canadian to record with SellaBand, Angie Arsenault.

Hypebot ran this three-part post recently.

Part I: Music & The Creative Class: A Fruit Fly Industry

My colleague Dan Silver crunches the numbers and finds that while Nashville may be at the top of the commercial music pyramid, it lags on genre diversity.

Nashville takes fifth place in terms of popularity of its acts, according to Silver’s analysis of MySpace fans, behind L.A., Manhattan, Chicago, and Atlanta, and just ahead of Brooklyn. It falls to 25th in terms of total (MySpace) acts behind Portland, Austin, and Miami, not to mention leaders like L.A., Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Chicago.

Nashville also lags in the diversity of its music mix, according to Silver. Not surprisingly, it’s way out in front on country with 1,800 (MySpace) bands with five times as many as second-place San Antonio. Nashville also makes the top 20 for Christian music, acoustic, pop, rock, folk, jazz, and indie.

Silver provides further evidence of what he dubs Nashville’s “intensive rather than extensive” music profile by ranking Nashville alongside L.A., NY, Chicago, Atlanta, and comparably sized Portland on MySpace’s “bands with fans” metric (see table below).

Nashville is the national leader in Country and Christian music, and has bands with the top 10 most fans in folk, acoustic, acapella, pop, rock, punk, jazz, and alternative. This is very impressive indeed; Nashville is for sure a hit maker. But, once again, note the steep drop off. The other top 5 “bands with fans” cities - NY, L.A., Chicago, ATL — have high fan rankings across all the genres, with averages of 3, 7, 6, and 18. Nashville plunges to 40. Portland, by contrast, which ranks #19 overall on this metric (14 lower than Nashville), has an average fan rank across genres that is 14 higher than Nashville’s.

So yes, Nashville is more than country music. But, ranked in terms of the sheer cosmopolitan multiplicity of the genres its bands produce and circulate, Nashville is not quite New York City. Or, for that matter, Portland.

Still, Nashville’s music scene remains highly focused on the best-selling and most commercial of genres - pop (fourth), rock (sixth), and punk (sixth) as well as country (first), Christian (first) and folk (second) - compare to its 33rd place finish in Afrobeat and 151st place in death metal - as Silver’s data show.

Boy, Ta-Nehisi’s commenters surely do rock.

Paul Krugman reflects on the demonization of cities and the people who live in them.

Basically, the accusation is that anyone with a good word for urbanism must just hate the American lifestyle.

[T]he same thing is true about pro-sprawl commentary … Conservatives really, really hate on Portland; examples here and here. Aside from the tendency to engage in factual errors, the hate seems disproportionate to the cause. But it’s an aesthetic thing: conservatives seem deeply offended by anything that challenges the image of Americans as big men driving big cars.

Me, I like dense urban areas. But I’m a pointy-headed intellectual. And bearded, too.

This trend is not new.

A disdain for cities and the diverse, open-mined people (like Krugman) who gravitate to them has long been a rallying point on parts of the right. Long before their forays into foreign policy, neoconservatives were railing against cities. Edward Banfield’s tellingly titled The Unheavenly City offered an incredulous chapter on “Rioting for Fun and Profit.” Early essays in the Public Interest sported snappy titles like “The City as  Reservation” and “The City as Sandbox.” Not to mention so-called “benign neglect” which argued that cities should be left to rot and run down so that land could become cheap enough to entice large-scale suburban-style retrofitting.

The anti-urban strain continues today, as Krugman notes. Ironically, its persistence is what’s really anti-American - anti-American economy that is - making it ever more difficult to leverage the powerful role played by cities and urban areas in innovation and economic growth for long-run economic prosperity.

Brian Frank writes:

Well, almost. Norman Mailer’s infamous “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster” was originally published in 1957 in Dissent.

Nearly a decade earlier, in 1948, Anatole Broyard published “A Portrait of the Hipster” in Partisan Review. I can’t find an online version, but here’s how one writer describes it:

Broyard attempted an analysis and a definition of a new type then appearing around Greenwich Village who had, in his view, been welcomed by intellectuals who “ransacking everything for meaning, admiring insurgence… attributed every heroism to the hipster.,,.”

But Broyard was less enthusiastic about these supposed new rebels … In Broyard’s words: “The hipster promptly became in his own eyes, a poet, a seer, a hero.” And he added that the hipster life-style “grew more rigid than the Institutions it had set out to defy. It became a boring routine. The hipster - once an unregenerate Individualist, an underground poet, a guerrilla - had become a pretentious poet laureate.”

Of course, what Broyard was doing, as well as attacking the hipsters, was criticising his fellow-intellectuals for failing to accept that the hipster rebellion was a sham.

Hmmmmmm…

A new British study finds that the most pirated pop songs on the internet are those that already top the charts. Instead of giving rise to a “long tail” where small indie acts broaden their appeal online, the study found that digital technology - and music pirating - simply work to reinforce the fat head of mass appeal. From the BBC’s summary:

There was little evidence that file-sharing sites helped unsigned and new bands find an audience … It suggests file-sharing sites are becoming an alternative broadcast network comparable to radio stations as a way of hearing music.

Music critic, Carl Wilson, provides perspective:

This shouldn’t be a surprise ever since the 2006 Columbia University study that showed pretty convincingly that popularity tends to breed popularity whether on the Internet or not: When facing a big list of music, even if you have sampled each song, most people are apt to decide that the best ones are the ones other people also like …

It’s also notable that the Big Champagne study found that most people followed this pattern because otherwise they were overwhelmed by choice (you’ve probably run across Barry Schwartz on that paradox).

What’s more the ensuing exchange of information and opinion is the primary way that these choices become meaningful. A s one of the researchers, Andrew Bud, told The Register: “… it’s through people chatting to each other and seeing the music talked about in the media. That’s what culture is.”