Katy Perry

On the top 40, Katy Perry has made a record for being number one five times off one album since Michale Jackson's record. Katy Perry now is the perfect experiment for an economist, if you cant make money off of her then you are in bad shape basically. A question that was asked to the record label was if they had made a profit and there response was, " I believe so, yes". the reason why the record label answered like this was because for 1. the record industry is very secretive, 2. because its complicated on how these records are making money off a superstar like that.

Katy Perry sold 2 million albums and 204 million individual songs. So on iTunes at 99 cents a song if you do the math that's 44 million dollars in songs made. But what i learned from this podcast was that not all the money goes to the record label. Apple takes about 30% of the 99 cents from the song, 15% goes to the royalty of Katy Perry, and 30 cents goes to the song writers. So the record label is left with 25 cents on the dollar from the 99 cent song. The EMI invested alot of money to make a good record if you think about it.

There are two expenses that people need to worry about in making a record. The first one is the album itself and how much did it cost to record teenage dream for instance. Well from the pod casts research they found out that it took 1.5 million up to 2 million dollars to make the song. The reason why this song was so expensive was because for one Snoop Dog was in the song and hes pricey and second the production. Another expense is the radio. A hit song is not a hit song until the radio. 92.3 said that they play Katy Perry's song up to 19 times a day. The labels spend a lot of money on independent promoters who are the people who sell the songs to the radios.

The problem with this is that Katy Perry is a huge hit and the record label only made 8 million off of her. The reason why they didn't make that much is because this whole summer Katy Perry toured all summer and the record label doesn't get any of that money, also when the song plays 19 times on the raido the record label doesn't get any of that money either. The profit of an Artist has record sales, publishing, and touring revenue, and merchandise revenue. But with today's internet its the opposite revenue structure.

The label record came up with a deal called the 360 deal which is how to get a piece of all these record deals basically a little piece of everything the artist does. Music sales is the least significant of what the record labels do.

This podcast made me look at Katy Perry differently from what i heard. In the podcast they said that she probably has a good lawyer and that's why she didn't agree to the 360 deal because she didn't want to split up her money. Another thing that i didn't like was when they said that she doesn't even really write her lyrics, she has a song writer.

The three major music labels that are left are 1. Universal music group 2. Warner and 3. Sony which should be known as promotional conglomerates around artists.

Planet $$

Planet $$

     When i was listening to this podcast the one thing that really stood out to me was how competitive Asia is with America, when this how time i thought that America was competing with Asia to develop things that quickly as they do. Taylor Swift is an American product right now. she is producing music that is spreading worldwide so quickly and as of now her song "Never ever getting back together" has been number one numerous times. Well not as a surprise, other countries want there song to be number one.

     The Korean video Gangnam style by PSY on youtube has over 4,267,799 views. Korea has been perparing for this moment for 20 years in hopes to have a great competition with America. 

Korea has a major economic growth. They export cars, cellphones, etc. In the podcast they said that it wouldn't be obvious it if you were driving a KIA car and talking on a Samsung phone. America used to lead the world in making cars but we don't anymore. China does.

The girl from the Podcast said that she went to 92Q #92 to visit the DJ and the DJ put on the top 40 songs and the most requested song was Gangnam Style. But it didn't surprise me when i heard that, but what did surprise me was the America took 100 years to create pop dominance while Korea took 20 years to create the same thing.

There were three lessons of American Cultural History and how Koreans did it.  The first is that music can me manufactured. they said that the first pop song ever came out 150 years ago which was "Oh Suzanna"which came out in 1847 by Steven Foster, which i thought was funny because i still remember that song. Music back then was more of an art that anything they wanted to make money off of it. But in Korea in 1992 its own version of Tin Pan Alley came out by Lee Son Mon, its income was spent on music specifically pop hits. In the mid 90s HOT (highfive of teenagers) the boy band was created.

Lesson two was about how America took off when they took control of the distribution system. Records, radios, and the jukebox saved the mucis industry. When i heard this i was shocked because they continued to talk about how the jukebox demanded records so people had to buy records of there favorite music to play on the jukebox. In korea though pop music always came with an image. The Big Bang Band was the most popular band with the greatest image. So while America was build on the radio, Korea was build on television. When people wanted to find out some new music they would watch television which was a competitive advantage for them.

Lesson three talked about how to combine industrial products, hits at hand in a little package. So how they did that was to make CD's. Having CD's you could ship them anywhere in the world because of how small and light they were. The American boy band NYSC sold 2 million copies in one week when they first came out. While in Korea YouTube was where everything went. Everyone was online, everyone had a phone and everyone was watching videos. Korea knew in order to get an audience we have to go on YouTube. Since Korea depended so much on YouTube they started to notice that other countries were watching there videos and soon realized that that's where they needed to tour were those countries that were viewing there videos the most.

If people listen to our pop stars they are more likely to buy the clothes they wear, the drinks they drink, the jewelry they wear, etc. So the country with quality bleeds electronics. Gangnam Style in the end is an indication of aspiration.

Legalize it!

 I found this podcast to be very interesting in the fact that marijuana is such a huge issue in mostly California and other states. Fourteen states have adopted marijuana laws. But in California marijuana is its largest cash crop. Marijuana is a significant industry believe it or not. In LA there are 1000 stores that have marijuana that you can buy but there are people who want to shut down the stores because they dont think marijuana should be legal. Right around the corner from Connecticut, New Jersey is fourteenth state where medical marijuana is legal. 

The two men who were doing this podcast asked an libertarian to come in and talk about the illegal and legal crack that is going on. His name is Jeffery Miron who is an Harvard journalist and is talking about weed, which kind of shocked me, but ill take it. One question that the guys had for Miron was how much would marijuana cost if you were to legalize it? Miron said that if we legal drugs they will get really cheap. When he said that it really shocked me because i thought that if it was legalized then more people would want to buy it so the dealers would raise the prices, but that was just the opposite. Miron said why would the price go up... all your doing is planting a tree, a weed plant.

There are two sides to this argument. Both sides make the argument that drugs will become cheaper if people legalize it. If you make drugs yours self then the cost of the drug will decrease a lot. thousands. The people who want to legalize marijuana say if pot is cheaper more people will end up using it. Exactly so make it cheaper!

Miron said that if you bring the prices for marijuana down then it will not go down 1000 times. 

Miron also made a good point that compare marijuana to actual legal things like coffee for insistence. So retail coffee compared to farm priced coffee will be more expensive than the farm coffee, which kind of made me think why? Well Miron said that retail coffee costs more because of transportation, insurance cost, distribution, advertisement, ect. 

The mark up between illegal drugs and legal retail things is that illegal drugs have a higher mark up for example, cocaine is 2-5 times more expensive than in an legal mark. Heroin is 15-20 times more expensive. whereas coffee is only a benchmark. Miron says that the price would decrease but not as much as people say. 

            1. Drug enforcements aren't as good as you think they are in making the drugs cost. Tons of people out there are wanting to make a profit just like in anything you sell. 

           2. If people are bringing in heroin for example illegally people wont have to pay taxes so they will be saving money in the end.

Another ecnomic argument is that we should legalize marijuana because it will make government money. Or save money on law enforcement and put a tax on it. The government could raise up to 1.3 billion dollars if marjiana was legal but Miron says that thats false. he did the math and he said that it would be 1/10 of that. we would only make 100 million. 

In end i believe that people should be able to do what they want if their not hurting other people. So after listening to this i believe marijuana should be legal.

Sir Ken Robinson

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Sir Ken Robinson

Sir Ken Robinson is an internationally recognized leader in the development of education, creativity and innovation. This clip of Robinson speaking really made me think about how schools are really preparing us for the future and if they are actually letting us be creative in a way that WE want to be. One thing that really stuck out from the clip was when Robinson said, “ If you’re not prepared to be wrong you will never come up with anything original.” And when I thought about that, he’s actually right. If you know your going to be wrong then you will have a back up answer that you have thought of, but if you don’t know that your wrong what you say could be funny and not original. All out life we grow up trying hard not to make mistakes in life, following other peoples footsteps and not making the same mistakes more than once, but being wrong could be part of creativity right? Robinson said we are educating people out of their creative capacity. What he means by this is that we are constantly being educated to do the right thing and to try and not make mistakes so we have no time to be creative. We grow out of creativity not into. We already have a creative mind as a child and we are experiencing with things as kids but as we age and grow older we tend to grow out of the creativity part and grow into the real world part. 

Robinson said that every country has the same hierarchy of subjects, which I agree with him on. He said that at the top is math and languages in the middle is humanity and at the bottom are arts. 

I agree with him because you also have to take your core classes before you can take your electives like music, art, and drama. As children we teach them from the waist up and as they grow older we focus on their heads Robinson said. Which is true because if you think about it, as children we learn to color in between the lines, and write, and cut out shapes, but as we grow older we focus on what we want to be when we graduate college and learn all the tools that we need to succeed in life. With what we have been taught during the years of learning the core curriculum is that higher talented brilliant people think their not because the thing they were good at in school wasn’t valued.

 In the next 30 years more people will be graduating than the beginning of history and technology has definitely made that happen as well. Robinson also said that now days a degree isn’t good enough you need an MBA, Phd, BA, and so on. 

There are three types of education, 1. Diverse-which is when we think visually about the world. When we think abstractly. 

2. Dynamic-which is interaction of the brain. Intelligence is interactive. We need to be creative because having original ideas that are valued more comes with the interaction of seeing different things. 

And 3. Distinct. How people discover their talent and how they got to be there. Which is future human ecology. Gillan Lynn was a perfect example of this third tear.  This clip “Ted” celebrates the gift of human imagination making something of their imagination.