Economics and the Music Industry

 Economics in the Music Industry

Jameson Janoska

There are many factors that can help an economy become stronger, and one of those things is the music industry. It can help boost the economy in many different ways, for example, it can help push forward artistic and cultural growth, and it can help create more jobs. It’s common knowledge that economics is the production and consumption of goods and services, so music is an important factor to our economy. It provides us with music, which is classified as a good, and a music-streaming app, which is a kind of service. 

One way the music industry affects the economy is pushing artistic and cultural growth forward. Music is a form of art, and with all of the new genres, subgenres, and sounds that have been created over the years the industry has been able to move forward because the sounds have been changing, so people haven’t gotten sick of listening to the same kinds of music for the last 20 years. The constant change in music over the years has kept people on their toes for new kinds of sounds and music, which helps the economy because different sounds can come from different cities all over the country that can help promote music when it releases to increase the sales.

When making music, there are a lot of parts to play in helping create the song, which creates a lot more jobs to help the economy grow. In the process of making a song, you obviously need the artist to make the song, and most of the time there will be a producer to make the instrumentals of the song. The artist then sends the song to a recording engineer, who edits the track to make it sound smooth and good by editing the artists voice to make it fit better with the instrumentals. A few other big parts in the music industry are the artist and tour managers, these positions help bring new opportunities to the musical artist, whether it’s a concert at a festival or it’s an opportunity for business, like an advertisement or collaboration. There are many more jobs that are involved in the music industry, and that is a great thing for helping our economy grow.

The music industry can help the economy grow in many different ways. It helps with pushing artistic and cultural growth forward and it can help with the creation of more jobs. 

Works Cited

“Uncommon Ways the Music Industry Affects the Economy.” Omari MC, 12 July 2018, https://www.omarimc.com/uncommon-ways-the-music-industry-affects-the-economy/. 

Terrill, Amy. “How Cities Benefit from Helping the Music Industry Grow.” World Intellectual Property Organization, Sept. 2015, https://www.wipo.int/wipo_magazine/en/2015/05/article_0009.html. 

“Top 10 Careers in the Music Business (and How Much Money You Can Make).” Berklee Online, 29 Jan. 2021, https://online.berklee.edu/takenote/top-10-careers-in-the-music-business-and-how-much-money-you-can-make/. 

Performing Arts and Low Income, Why are People Attracted to this Lifestyle

 Performing Arts and Low Income, Why are People Attracted to this Lifestyle?

By: Layla Tank

With Christmas coming up, people love to attend the popular seasonal show, The Nutcracker Ballet. At this show, you see a variety of talent and creativity in a story told entirely by dance. Although, rarely do people consider the hours of hard work and dedication that those dancers put into these shows… sometimes without pay or any benefits. In the article, The Untenable Economics of Dancing, they describe the varying pay range for dancers. They stated, “an early career choreographer can expect to make anywhere from $100 – $500 for a 3 months development process”. This article states that the highest pay would be “if you go on tour, maybe $500-$700/wk” which is a rare instance.

In addition, low pay is not the only factor impacting dancers. A huge outside factor is the demand to see shows. Without shows, there is no need to supply performers. DanceUSA in their report on the effect of COVID-19 stated that, “the dance industry is extremely vulnerable to the slightest change in the environmental, social, or economic landscape”. In the chart, you can view the changes and effects of consumer spending on performing arts events. Looking at the dates, there is a rapid decline at the Q2 2020 mark due to the impact of the start of COVID-19. This correlates directly to the wages of dancers. Like most around the world, dancers were left without a job and the scary thought that they may never find a gig again. Many were left to question how long they were to stay in unemployment. Would it always be cyclical or would it later turn into structural?

With the prospect of knowing that you could earn so little and be in phases of unemployment for unknown amounts of time, why would anyone put themselves in this economic situation? The compromise of looking over all the opportunity costs comes down to what economists are calling psychic income. Psychic income is defined as the “rewards (as in prestige, leisure, or pleasant surroundings) not measurable in terms of money or goods but serving as an incentive to work in certain occupations or situations” (Merriam-Webster). To professional dancers, not being able to pay the month’s rent or get stable roles in performances is okay, because the benefit to do something they love and have passion for is greater than economic values.

As a dancer myself, I understand the desire to pursue a career so fulfilling, but I would rather have enough income to support myself. In the end, becoming a professional dancer is very risky if you care about having a stable job and being able to afford the cost of living, but due to the high amount of psychic income, it may be worth it to some.

Works Cited

“Dance Comeback: The Impact of COVID-19 on the Dance Field and the Future of Dance.” Dance/USA, 21 Sept. 2021, www.danceusa.org/ejournal/2021/08/13/dance-comeback-the-impact-of-covid-19-on-the-dance-field-and-the-future-of-dance.

Horwitz, Andy. “The Untenable Economics of Dancing.” Culturebot, 12 Nov. 2014, www.culturebot.org/2014/03/21361/the-untenable-economics-of-dancing/.

“Psychic Income Definition & Meaning.” Merriam-Webster, Merriam-Webster, www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/psychic income.

Working Multiple Jobs

 Working Multiple Jobs

John Akins

Whether you’re trying to save up your money, pay off a debt, or increase your income, a second job could be highly beneficial for you. It may be the right move, but it will require a lot of work with time management and communication with employers.

“From the second quarter of 1996 to the first quarter of 2018, the multiple jobholding rate has averaged 7.2% of all employed individuals.” (census.gov) With a multiple jobholder being defined as “anyone who holds two or more jobs in a quarter and at least one of these jobs is a long-lasting, stable job.” Rates of multiple jobholders tend to follow a cyclical pattern. During an economic expansion, the multiple jobholder rate rises, while during a recession, the rates decline.

As you can see below, the number of workers in the United States with more than one job has been increasing with a few dips around 2001-2004 and 2008-2010

Additionally, the graph below shows the percentiles of total earnings for multiple jobholders with a stable job.

For those at or below the 18th percentile, a second job or jobs provided an average of more than 30% of their total earnings, and for everyone above that, multiple jobs provided over 25% of their total earnings. So whether you’re a high earner or a low earner, being a multiple jobholder could provide over a fourth of your total earnings.

Although money is the driving force behind getting a second job, there’s other considerations to be made. Another job can help with the development of skills in an area completely different from the first. It can also be used to test whether a career change might be the best course of action. This will also provide security just in case a fallback is needed after the first job doesn’t work out.

There is definitely something to be said about working a second job even with a full time job. An increase in pay can alleviate financial stress and overall income if it’s done right. Not everyone is willing to do it, but if you’ve ever thought about it and have the ability to do so, why not? The most important thing is to find a balance. If the idea of a second job does not sound appealing then choosing not to is completely fine. Just remember to do what’s best for you.

Works Cited

Buhl, Larry. “Moonlighting: Pros and Cons of a Second Job.” Monster Career Advice, www.monster.com/career-advice/article/moonlighting-pros-and-cons-of-a-second-job-hot-jobs.

Bureau, U.S. Census. “Using Administrative Data, Census Bureau Can Now Track the Rise in Multiple Jobholders.” Census.gov, 8 Oct. 2021, www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/02/new-way-to-measure-how-many-americans-work-more-than-one-job.html.

“Is a Second Job While Working Full Time a Good Idea?” IMDiversity, imdiversity.com/diversity-news/is-a-second-job-while-working-full-time-a-good-idea/.

Xbox Thoughts

Danny Lovas 

So I’ve been Having this debate with my friend Tyler, and he wants me to play the new Forza Horizon 5 with him but I no longer had Xbox Live or Xbox Game pass. I started to do the math of how much It would cost to either buy the game or buy Xbox Game Pass to play the game for free as long as I have the Subscription. I’m not always playing games so I didn’t want to get the 15$ a month subscription but I didn’t want to spend 60$ immediately on a game that I didn’t know if I was going to play it all the time. 

First I started to look at the ups and downs of both options. First I’ll start with the 15 a month, Xbox Live costs 15 a month by itself so the first month would be 30$ and would take only 3 months or less to match the cost of buying the game. The total cost at the end of the year would be 360$, that’s a major down. The Up part of buying Game Pass is the ability to play hundreds of games, this would include Ea Play Games and about 100-200 Games on Xbox all for the 15 a month. 

The second option was to buy the game and have the 15 a month Xbox live. That’s 75$ in just the first month but goes back down to 15$ for the rest of the year or however long I have Xbox Live. The benefit of this too is that I don’t need Xbox Live to play Forza, all I need is to have Forza Downloaded in order to play.

Home Prices and the Covid Affect

Lily Bierce

 When you think of the pandemic and everything that was influenced by it, what do you think of first? 

The demand for masks? Hand sanitizer? Toilet paper? While these are all right, there was also another huge product that was in higher demand. The housing market saw a huge increase of prices at the end of 2021. 

Between September 2019 and September 2020, homeowners accumulated a collective $1 trillion in additional home equity. The exploding demand of the past year, in conjunction with a historically low supply of housing, has led buyers to desperately bid up the prices of available properties, sending home prices soaring. This surge affected pretty much anyone in the real estate market. 

The S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller National Home Price NSA Index, which keeps track of single-family home purchases, shows that in November 2020 the housing prices had gone up 9.5% from the previous year. There are some factors to this, of course. When the supply of houses is lower, potential buyers tend to bid more money to greater their chance of getting the house. When the supply of houses is higher, potential buyers will tend to bid less money because they have more options. But recently, Covid has affected both the supply and demand of houses. 

Daryl Fairweather, Redfin’s chief economist, stated that she believes the increase in home values is mostly affected by demand. She said, “People are scrambling to take advantage of plummeting mortgage rates that make the cost of buying a home much cheaper. Due to falling mortgage rates, the cost of borrowing money to buy a house is dropping.” In the past couple years, mortgage rates have dropped but last year, they really fell off. In 2020, they reached a record low of 2.65%. 

In the midst of the pandemic, people were forced to stay home (as we all know), which caused most people to go a little crazy. Most people got sick of their homes and went looking to buy a new one. But since the pandemic was going on, most businesses weren’t able to produce at the rate they once did, or at all. This drove the prices up because there was so little of most things. This is what caused the demand to go up. 

All in all, the pandemic affected pretty much everything in our daily lives, including the housing market. By the demand going up, the prices for houses were driven up as well. 

Sources: 

https://www.vox.com/22264268/covid-19-housing-insecurity-housing-prices-mortgage-rates-pandemic-zoning-supply-demand 

https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/housing-market-tightness-during-covid-19-increased-demand-or-reduced-supply-20210708.htm 

How Black Friday and Holiday Shopping Affects Economy

 How Black Friday and Holiday Shopping Affects Economy

Cadence Sjoberg

With the holidays quickly approaching, many retailers around the nation will reach their peak selling season. This peak begins with one of the most important retail events in the US, Black Friday. The day after Thanksgiving has been proclaimed the busiest shopping day during the holiday season and throughout the year as a whole. According to Micheal J. Boyle, about 186.4 people shopped sometime throughout the Black Friday weekend. Spending by consumers has been known to drive economic growth and activity, making Black Friday a crucial time for businesses and the economy in general. Not only do retailers benefit from the holidays, but the food industry has also seen a spike from a combination of food purchases for Thanksgiving and Christmas. The increased shopping seen during the holidays provides multiple benefits to the economy. 

The first benefit is stock growth. Companies and businesses who see high numbers during the Black Friday weekend, typically see a growth in stocks. With the stock market closed on Thanksgiving, not everyone sees a growth of stocks, but throughout the month of December, most companies tend to see a spike. Even in December of 2020, coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, America saw it’s largest growth in retails sales of over 8.2%.

Another benefit that holiday shopping can provide is increased employment. With the abundance of shoppers, many job opportunities open up at retail stores and manufacturers. Many businesses tend to have available job openings during the months of November and December which can help decrease the unemployment rate of the economy. It has been found that nearly 1 million jobs open up each year with the anticipation of increased shopping. 

Although a weak economy can also have a negative effect on consumer spending, even during the holiday season, the economy always seems to show a rise (minus during the 2008 season) at the end of the year. Not only does spending increase for retail, but people tend to spend more money on gas and travel as well. 

Works Cited

Larry, Larry. “Why Holiday Shopping Is so Important for the U.S. Economy.” CBS News, CBS Interactive, 28 Nov. 2016, www.cbsnews.com/news/why-holiday-shopping-is-so-important-for-the-economy/.

Team, The Investopedia. “How Thanksgiving and Black Friday Affect Stocks.” Investopedia, Investopedia, 29 Oct. 2021, www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/102714/how-stock-market-affected-thanksgiving-and-black-friday.asp.

Unemployment

 Problems with the Government and their Stimulus Checks

Sam Riek

In April of 2020, we had an unemployment rate at 14.7% which was 23,109,000 people that did not have a job, the reason is that the Covid Pandemic just started and companies weren’t making enough money to keep people hired. Right now the unemployment rate is 4.6% which is really good from April, but that is still 7,149,000 people that are unemployed. Right now, companies need people to hire but some people are not going out and getting jobs because the government is giving the money away. 

On CBS58, they say “The federal government has pumped about $4 trillion into the US economy since the pandemic began in March 2020, sending cash directly to households, boosting unemployment benefits”.  When money is given out to people who need the money and are unstable they should get the money, but if there are families that are stable enough to get food and water, they shouldn’t be needing the check from them. 

TBut, guess where the money is coming from, the money is coming from the middle class and high class. They had them  pay the government for the money through taxes, and it isn’t right for people from the middle class and high class to be giving their money to people who get money for free. But some may argue that some people can’t work, if they can’t work, they can’t work. 

 

Work Cited

https://www.bls.gov/cps/

https://www.cbs58.com/news/6-trillion-stimulus-heres-who-got-relief-money-so-far

Fast Fasion

 Fast Fashion

Heather Sunderlage

Fast fashion has always been something you hear about but don’t fully grasp what it is or even understand how large of an impact it has in today's culture and society. Essentially, fast fast fashion is the designing, manufacturing and marketing of rapid and large amounts of clothing. Due to trend and designer garment replication, demand has skyrocketed in the fashion industry and to keep up, the supply has been met with cheap, low quality materials and mass production rates. Earlier in the year, there was a post on the blog titled “How Microtends in Fashion are Destroying the Environment” by Emily Eklund and she does a great job explaining how the high demand of trendy clothing  and heavy amount of consumption ultimately ends up quickly piling up in landfills and toxic chemical dyes in the ocean. However, I plan to inform people about the most known companies for fast fashion and how to spot them, their low moral and ethical standards, and how to stop contributing to them.

People make clothes whether it's hand sewing or sewing on a machine, and that is labor work that gets paid for their services. But it is different where fashion companies typically outsource that labor to lower class countries with very loose labor laws to undersell their workers and pay them significantly less. Sweatshops and industrial factories work long, restless hours avoiding health and safety concerns. In 2013, the Rana Plaza building collapsed which was home to a couple garment construction sites; workers had noticed serious cracks in the wall but were dismissed and even managers got an evacuation notice that got ignored--resulting in the death of 1,129 workers, and many more injured. Many of the work areas provide poor lighting which is harmful to the laborers’ eyes, as well as the possible toxic chemicals used on fabrics that they are exposed to. The University of Alabama at Birmingham’s Institute of Humans Rights blog discusses that, “As of 2016, the minimum wage in $67 dollars each month...More often than not, these workers cannot simply quit and find work with better circumstances.  They must be able to provide for themselves and their families and lack the education and qualifications for more favorable employment.” Fast fashion disregards human rights and abuses them, a sufficient standard of living can only be acquired by an adequate income and they already fall short.

Fast fashion companies can often end up very popular due to up and coming trends because of their quick turnaround times from the internet and the catwalk to stores. One of the biggest and well known companies is Shein; their products are sold through their own website but also other online stores like Romwe that are just second distributors. Yet there are also well-known, in person stores that are also guilty of fast fashion: H&M, Forever 21, Nike, Urban Outfitters, and many others. You can generally tell by the quality of the clothing, if the fabric is really thin, a lot of loose threads on hems, missing buttons, plastic zippers, or even bad, processed, chemical smells. Just a good rule of thumb is that if clothes don’t seem durable or made to last, they are most likely fast fashion. The same goes for suspiciously cheap clothing, you could look at the Shein website and most items will be under $20, like cami dress could be listed from somewhere around $8-15 when at a typical store it would be at least $30 to even $60. Nevertheless, there are also some fast fashion companies that can have good products but utilize sweatshops that undermine and abuse their workers or use toxic chemicals and don’t dispose of them correctly. Those take a little more research to find. It also just helps to look at reviews of other customers on the quality and reliability of the store and its products.

Though the low prices and hot, new styles are tempting, it's often not worth the contribution to the companies profits and poor working conditions of its employees, as well as the quality of goods you are consuming. Though, I must admit something, I have bought from Romwe once before, before I fully knew of fast fashion. I really loved the design on a pair of earrings that were $3 (first red flag for being so cheap), so I bought them along with another pair of earrings and a set of enamel pins. They took a long time to ship, which also happens sometimes with scammy fast fashion websites because packages get lost and they offer no type of assistance or refund (second red flag). And then the products themselves (final flag): the first pair of earrings were really nice yet after wearing for a while, they begin to feel a little irritated, the other pair look good too however felt a bit cheapy, and lastly in the set of pins, the enamel paint was a bit messy and went outside of the lines. Overall, I do like the earrings but the fact that all the goods were a little messed up made it still feel not worth the money. In addition, now knowing that its production endangers the environment and violates people’s human rights, I, to the best of my knowledge, am trying my hardest to not shop fast fashion again. It is easy to think spending maybe only $10 won’t make a difference in the grand scheme of fast fashion, but if everyone adopts that idea, numbers pile up and we make a larger contribution that makes profit for owners and persuade them to continue production. Currently the 90s and 2000s style is popular and is late enough where trendy clothing can be found second hand; preventing clothing from being thrown in wastes or landfills.

With the production and consumption rates of clothing continuing at this speedy rate, people will spend more money, time and time again, on low quality clothing that will constantly have to be replaced over fine clothes that can be worn more than 30 times over. Fast fashion over the last couple of decades has become more of the normal construct for clothing but slowly, it’s possible to get rid of it and return to a more stable supply and demand industry for the good of the laborers behind it and the environment. 

Works Cited

Eric. “A List of Fast Fashion Brands to Avoid Now.” The Sustainable Living Guide, 4 Nov. 2021, https://thesustainablelivingguide.com/fast-fashion-brands/.

Reid, Author Lindsey. “Fast-Fashion: Unethical and Unsustainable.” UAB Institute for Human Rights Blog, 22 Jan. 2020, https://sites.uab.edu/humanrights/2018/04/26/fast-fashion-unethical-and-unsustainable/.

Stanton, Audrey. “What Does Fast Fashion Mean, Anyway?” The Good Trade, The Good Trade, 14 Oct. 2021, https://www.thegoodtrade.com/features/what-is-fast-fashion.