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Tyler Cowen

Expectations Feed The Disease

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Thai-Klingon cellist Jon (J’onn) Silpayamanant commented today on a post I did on economist Tyler Cowen’s discussion of Baumol’s cost disease as it relates to the arts. He quickly followed up with another comment apologizing because he assumed I was talking about piece Cowen did in 1996 rather than a more recent post on his blog where he makes much the same point.

I started to write a slightly snarky response wondering if Cowen had been more efficient writing the more recent piece because he had better technology and 16 years of thinking about it to back him up or if he was subject to cost disease because it took just as long to write four or five as it did back in 1996, inflation has made his time more expensive and he had to distill down 16 years more experience into a thoughtful entry.

At that point it occurred to me that every time people talk about cost disease related to the arts, they do it in connection with the actual performance. Other parts of creating art has actually benefited from greater efficiencies. Computers aid the design of performance elements as well the transmission and discussion of those designs allowing them to be received and acted upon much quicker than in the past. The marketing and advertising of the performances are likewise aided by technology in terms of design and dissemination. LED lights promise to cut electricity bills by an enormous amount once the ability to control and insure the quality of the light improves.

The quality of the performance itself also has much more potential of benefiting from technology in terms of the amount of research the performers, directors, choreographers, conductors, etc can do in preparation. Every aspect of the performance can be informed by concepts promulgated half the world away. In many respects, the audience is getting a much better product than they were years ago and it is made possible less expensively than in the past.

In fact, they are in a position of being far more informed about a performance they are about to see than a person with the same level of experience with the arts 10 years ago might have. Of course, the whole issue we have is whether the audience values that experience or not.

Had Cowen used this approach in support of his argument that the arts aren’t really impacted by cost disease, I might have been a little more receptive to it.

In some respects, I think that non-profit performing arts have done a great job of employing technology to keep their costs under control, (often to the detriment of the artists, orchestra musicians in particular these days), in comparison with the movie industry where technology has resulted in sky rocketing costs. They employ wide spread distribution options like movie theatres, DVDs and streaming as a substitute for economizing.

It is often said there is a lesson in that for the performing arts but just like the independent film maker, the small arts organization would have to depend on a relationship with a big company with the resources to replicate something on the scale of the Metropolitan Opera and National Theatre broadcasts.

Of course, many times audiences demand the spectacle that technology brings to the movies and some of that carries over to even the solo artists that Silpayamanant mentions. While touring solo might have been a cost cutting measure at one time, that often isn’t the case any more with the huge tours many major acts take on the road.

As an aside, I wonder at the economics of J-Pop groups like AKB48 which has 66 active members spread out across four performing teams. Even though they don’t tour, that is a lot of people to support.

But getting back to the discussion of Baumol’s cost disease, even though people cite the fact it still takes as long to perform a particular work as it did X hundred years ago, it probably really isn’t those two hours of performance that is the costliest part of the process, it is everything else that surrounds it. Because of audience expectations about their experience more preparation precedes the performance, much of which involves salaries and benefits.

As I noted above, technology has brought efficiencies and quality to many parts of the preparatory process. What is it coming down to now is balancing the expectations about the quality of the experience and the cost of delivering it with what people are willing to pay. Right now the focus seems to be on how much of the product can be trimmed back before people notice and become concerned with the drop in what they value.

While this is translating into seeing how many musicians an orchestra can cut before people figure the music is suffering, you see the same thing manifesting in other areas of your life as well. Just try to buy a half gallon of ice cream these days. You will find it is 1.75, maybe 1.5 quarts.

I don’t think that is really a sustainable practice. There should be an corresponding push to shift customer expectations too, and not toward accepting less ice cream and music for the same price, but rather expecting a slightly different sort of experience surrounding a quality performance. I am not sure exactly what it would look like. I know I would like it to be less structured and more educational than what we have now.

Yes Virgina, There Is A Cost Disease

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Over on the Marginal Revolution blog, Tyler Cowen opines that the arts are not impacted by Baumol’s cost disease.

2. I do not see the arts as subject to the cost disease very much at all. As for the “live performing arts,” the disease seems to afflict the older and less innovative sectors, such as opera and the symphony. There is plenty of live music these days, it is offered in innovative ways, and much of it is free.

I was a little confused by this point since all it really proves is that people aren’t charging for live music and doesn’t really address that there are costs involved with the performance.

Admittedly, he does seem to imply that innovation in the way the artistic product is offered makes all the difference. Back in June, I noted that Jon Silpayamanant made the point that there are alternative ways to make money when offering an experience.

Cowen goes on to say, (my emphasis)

“4. In many sectors of the arts, especially music, consumers demand constant turnover of product. Old music becomes “obsolete” — for whatever sociological reasons — and in this sense the sector is creating lots of new value every year. From an “objectivist” point of view they are still strumming guitars with the same speed, but from a subjectivist point of view — the relevant one for the economist – they are remarkably innovative all the time in the battle against obsolescence. A lot of the cost disease argument is actually an aesthetic objection that the art forms which have already peaked — such as Mozart — sometimes have a hard time holding their ground in terms of cost and innovation.”

I will grant him that some of the cost disease problems can be attributed to an adherence to aesthetic ideals rooted in the past and a resistance to innovation.

But I am not sure if consumers are truly demanding a constant turnover in product. There is reluctance to sample anything new and unfamiliar among consumers. This isn’t necessarily confined to symphony and opera where you might argue the new material is being presented to the wrong audiences (i.e. older existing audiences whose tastes are already set).

There is as much a sense of risk aversion among audience as among content creators. Broadway shows are often revivals or derivative of works that have already proven their success. Playwrights bemoan the fact that regardless of their proximity to Broadway, few theatres are producing new works.

The same is true with movies. The most well attended movies this summer were based on comic books. Even the plots of those stories had been revamped numerous times in the comics format. The plan for the adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit went from two movies to three leaving fans to wonder, if the three books of the Lord of the Rings took three movies to tell, (albeit with much left out), how is the one book of The Hobbit going to be stretched to three?

A fair bit of emotion and nostalgia is responsible for perpetuating the conditions which contribute to Baumol’s cost disease. One of the points Cowen makes reinforces this:

“Live music” may seem like it doesn’t change much, but lifting the embargo on Cuba would boost the quantity and quality of my consumption of spectacular concert experiences, as would a non-stop flight to Haiti.

Opportunity rather than innovation is the only thing having any bearing on the quantity and quality of his consumption. It isn’t necessary for Cuban musicians to made any changes whatsoever since 1962 when the embargo began, they just need to be available.

There is an element of his aforementioned “aesthetic objection that the art forms…have already peaked” in this point as well. It is difficult to take an entirely objective view of a product or service possessing an artistic element.

If quality of product could be maintained by paring down performers and replacing them with technology, The White Stripes would have been a model everyone emulated. As interesting as the band’s work might have been, there wasn’t a rush to form duo performance groups.

It may be a difficult to define Platonic ideal, but there is a minimum one can offer before the perception of the experience suffers. Ultimately, because it is his area of expertise, I might find myself having to concede Cowen’s point in the face of a more detailed argument. But I think given that the resources necessary to provide the central experience remain generally constant, Baumol’s cost disease does indeed impact the arts significantly.

As for the solution, at this point I keep coming back to Jon Silpayamanant’s idea that ancillary elements surrounding the experience need to be developed in order to support it.

iPad Will Make Your Performance…Forgettable

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One option for preserving the performing arts is often mentioned is a greater use of multi-media either in a performance or as a medium to transmit the performance. However, reading an article on Time magazine’s website (h/t Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution) about how it is more difficult to remember things you read in electronic format versus paper format, I wondered if moving to electronic media might be a disservice to the arts.

Second, the book readers seemed to digest the material more fully. Garland explains that when you recall something, you either “know” it and it just “comes to you” — without necessarily consciously recalling the context in which you learned it — or you “remember” it by cuing yourself about that context and then arriving at the answer. “Knowing” is better because you can recall the important facts faster and seemingly effortlessly.

“What we found was that people on paper started to ‘know’ the material more quickly over the passage of time,” says Garland. “It took longer and [required] more repeated testing to get into that knowing state [with the computer reading, but] eventually the people who did it on the computer caught up with the people who [were reading] on paper.”

The thought is that spatial context is very valuable in helping us to remember things. We recall where places are physically located based on landmarks. Though it may seem hard to believe it can be that significant a factor, we are better able remember information because we have a sense of where it appeared on a page. E-books don’t have that sort of physical context.

In addition, apparently size matters as well.

“He says that studies show that smaller screens also make material less memorable. “The bigger the screen, the more people can remember and the smaller, the less they can remember,” he says. “The most dramatic example is reading from mobile phones. [You] lose almost all context.”

Based on these findings I wondered if the arts might actually seem less relevant if digital media was the only way to access it. While a performance obviously loses its impact when it is not seen live, it may quite literally be less memorable when viewed on a smaller screen as well.

I would be interested to learn if there are studies comparing the experiences of people who watched a movie in a theatre vs. on a television vs. a small screen. (I am sure movies watched on airplane seatback screens will be memorable or forgettable due to myriad factors other than screen size 😉 )

Will movies seen on a very small screen be less memorable because the distances between people and things are so compacted? Desperate lunges to save someone may make less of an impression when reduced to fractions of an inch. Panoramic shots of gorgeous landscapes may pass by unnoticed in small scale.

Digital media may increase your reach by giving you access to a larger distribution channel, but if the scale makes it difficult to distinguish your product from thousands of others, you may have to question its worth.

You may basically be in the position you are now with YouTube where everyone posts something in the hopes it goes viral. I am sure YouTube won’t always be the standard, but if you can use it to test things now. Watch a video on the largest computer screen you can find and then watch the same one on a cell phone screen and judge the effectiveness. Better yet, watch the smaller version first and then watch the larger and see how much you may have missed just in terms of emotional expression.

Will Perform For Snacks

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On the Marginal Revolution blog, Tyler Cowen has a short post about a psychology professor who requires his students take turns bringing a homemade snack in to each class. If they don’t bring in a snack, he doesn’t teach. I was initially pretty cynical about this approach as a valid teaching technique and was surprised to learn he had actually been doing it for over 30 years before it became an issue.

While I was still a little cynical after reading about his rationale for the requirement, I could understand how it fits into a psychology class that runs 3 hours at a stretch.

Parrott said that he’s teaching students to work together to set a schedule, to work in teams to get something done, and to check up on one another, since everyone depends on whoever has the duty of bringing snacks on a given week. Typically, no individual should be involved in preparing the snack more than twice a semester, he said.

Parrott said that considerable research shows that students learn more if they develop the skills to work in teams, to assume responsibility for projects, and get to know their fellow students. Team members need to count on one another, he said, and his students learned Thursday that if someone fails at a task for the team, there are consequences. “They need to learn to check on one another and clearly they didn’t get that done,” he said. “This was an important lesson.”

It struck me that this might be a good approach for building/engaging community around an arts organization (with the punitive elements de-emphasized, of course.) An arts organization might have a performance/gallery series where attendees were required to bring food as payment. Some times it might be the orange ticket holders, other times the blue ticket holders, so that an attendee isn’t bringing food for the whole audience every time they attend.

Allowing for a snack period like this will change the dynamics of the relationship with the audience. It isn’t going to pay the light bill, but it can get people involved and invested enough in the organization in other programs that do earn revenue and donations. I suspect the staff will do a much more effective job of convincing people their organization is worthy of support while chatting over chocolate chip cookies than pitching them during a curtain speech.

I can envision scenarios where groups bond over their shared responsibility to provide snacks to try to outdo the other groups. If that turns into its own type of headache and introduces stress to an event intended to be informal, that impulse could be channeled to support a more formal series of events to increase the investment in its success.

News You Can Use: Musicians Are Delicious

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If you're ready for a zombie apocalypse, then you're ready for any emergency. emergency.cdc.gov

As you can see in the above, the Centers for Disease Control have finally acknowledged the threat of a zombie apocalypse. Hat tip to Tyler Cowen for bringing this important government service to my attention.

From the CDC website:

“If zombies did start roaming the streets, CDC would conduct an investigation much like any other disease outbreak. CDC would provide technical assistance to cities, states, or international partners dealing with a zombie infestation. This assistance might include consultation, lab testing and analysis, patient management and care, tracking of contacts, and infection control (including isolation and quarantine)…Not only would scientists be working to identify the cause and cure of the zombie outbreak, but CDC and other federal agencies would send medical teams and first responders to help those in affected areas.”

Actually, while this is really on the CDC site, they use the subject of a zombie attack to reinforce the need to have good emergency plans and supplies prepared for any disaster. Some examples:

“First Aid supplies (although you’re a goner if a zombie bites you, you can use these supplies to treat basic cuts and lacerations that you might get during a tornado or hurricane)”

“Pick a meeting place for your family to regroup in case zombies invade your home…or your town evacuates because of a hurricane.”

“Plan your evacuation route. When zombies are hungry they won’t stop until they get food (i.e., brains), which means you need to get out of town fast! Plan where you would go and multiple routes you would take ahead of time so that the flesh eaters don’t have a chance! This is also helpful when natural disasters strike and you have to take shelter fast.”

While the whole zombie attack craze may have peaked and is already on its way out. (Yeah right, zombies are not that easy to kill!) The tongue in cheek approach mixing “fiction” (the government will never really seriously admit the zombie problem we face) with the real message they are trying to communicate–and offering social media options to spread the word–could easily be used by arts organizations to communicate their core message.

On a related topic, a study was recently released providing information that will be of great importance to arts people when the zombie attack comes. According to the Freakanomics website,

“A new study argues that musicians have more highly developed brains than the rest of us….New research shows that musicians’ brains are highly developed in a way that makes the musicians alert, interested in learning, disposed to see the whole picture, calm, and playful. The same traits have previously been found among world-class athletes, top-level managers, and individuals who practice transcendental meditation.”

So when the zombies come, all you really need to do is be faster than the musicians or point out the location of their delicious, highly developed brains to the zombies. Of course, given that musicians have a heightened alertness and calmness, they will likely possess the composure needed to effectively flee themselves, so you will have to be especially canny.

(Thank god for the CDC. I was wondering how I was going to address the Freakanomics piece without feeding the egos of my Inside the Arts brethren who are mostly musicians.)

The Scandal!

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Tyler Cowen of Mariginal Revolution is reporting that the iTunes version of John Cage’s 4’33” is actually only 4’31”. Just another example of how the fidelity of classic works of art are being abridged and destroyed by technology.

The comments on the entry are pretty amusing and bear a look. My favorite –

“I saw the sheet music recently, cleverly priced at $4.33.

I memorized it on the spot rather than buying it.”

Free Markets And The Artists Unappreciated In Their Own Country

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I was reading a piece by economist Tyler Cowen on how Milton Friedman’s views apply to the arts. According to Cowen, Friedman essentially felt that free market commerce creates diversity in the arts, in types, method of expression, funding and innovation. “Our most effective arts policy has been tax incentives for donations, which has kept choice and quality control in private hands,” writes Cowen.

Cowen acknowledges that we don’t always like the way this manifests itself.

“In other cases, many people, most of all intellectuals, object when apparently nonmeritorious individuals earn huge salaries. The same objections surface in the cultural realm. Madonna earns hundreds of millions, whereas a first rate opera singer might pull in only $50,000 a year or perhaps cannot earn a living from singing at all. The best response, well understood by Friedman, is the same. A system that permits such “inequities” will in fact generate the greatest number of opportunities for performers of virtually all kinds.”

I am sure I was being stubborn when I decided I wasn’t completely convinced by this assertion, though there were enough examples to support Cowen that kept creeping into my mind. It wasn’t until later in the piece when Cowen cited the example of Monet that I had to reluctantly fall more in agreement with him.

This story of free trade and creativity runs throughout the history of culture. Claude Monet had little success marketing his paintings to the government run Salon in Paris in the late nineteenth century. His style and colors were considered to be too radical and too unpleasant. Monet had greater success selling to wealthy North Americans, who were not bound by prevailing French artistic conventions. His haystack paintings proved particularly popular in this country, which is one reason why they appear so frequently in American art museums.

The Monet example illustrates a broader (but sometimes neglected) benefit of international trade. The common arguments for trade cite the benefits of drawing on producers from other countries. But trade also mobilizes the benefits of the consumers from other countries. Consumers hold embedded knowledge. Their purchases can induce suppliers to elevate quality, help suppliers pursue careers of greater pleasure (for example, art), and help generate the artistic heritage of mankind. The greater the diversity of consumers to draw on, the better markets will perform these tasks.

This past week we premiered an original work about the Hawaiian snow goddess, Poli‘ahu which pretty much illustrates his point. It employed hula, ballet and contemporary dance. The artistic director brought in dancers from Japan, a Yupik Eskimo from Alaska and an exchange student from Mongolia to work alongside local dancers to tell this story. While we hope to tour this throughout the rest of the state and take it to the continental United States, there were already plans forming to take it to Alaska and Japan as the show closed opening night. Colleagues at another performing arts center took a show about Kahekili, the chief who nearly united all the islands under one king to Germany a few years ago.

As Cowen’s talked about how international trade brings benefits to the arts, it struck me that without it, the performance we just had would not have developed as it did and the opportunities that may open up and indeed have opened up for colleagues doing similar works, would not be possible. Some of these developments are owed to technology and the internet which enables people to become aware of these shows and evaluate performance videos. But international trade and interactions make people more comfortable and curious about each other and willing to consume other artistic experiences.

The inspiration for our production of Poli‘ahu originated during a bush flight over the Anaktuvuk Pass when the artistic director we partnered with was invited to bring hula to the Arctic Circle a few years ago. Granted, trips to Alaska from Hawaii are not international and there are some areas where they share a certain kinship, but in many respects they are diametrical opposites.

The dancers from Japan didn’t bring anything overtly Japanese to the performance. The role they played could have been performed by any well trained dancers. But their presence was a product of the international commerce to which Cowen refers. The artistic director of the production had been visiting their dance school in Japan for over 10 years and had worked with these women since they were children. He arranged accommodations for them during the rehearsal period so that they could participate in his production as part of his company.

It has been awhile since I invoked the concept of the Creative Economy so let me do so here. This production probably won’t constitute a large enough segment of the emerging economy to pull us out of the recession, but the dynamics which made the production possible and the activity yet to result from it may play a tiny part in moving things toward such an economy.

Do Androids Make Good Critics

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Science fiction often has a motif of technology seeking to become human. Its a story as old as Pinocchio or even Pygmalion and Galatea. Star Trek: The Next Generation series had an android named Data who painted and played music as part of his quest to achieve humanity. His work was often praised for its technical proficiency but lacking that intangible quality of self that artists imbue in their work. There is often a sense of pity that for all the sophistication possessed by the entity, the gap can’t be bridged. Perhaps it is out of ego that we create these stories which suggest there are some things in which technology can’t surpass us.

But what happens when we abdicate our aesthetic judgment to technology? Via Tyler Cohen’s Marginal Revolution blog, is a link to a prototype camera that rates the aesthetics of the picture you are about to take. Move the camera around to different angles to improve the percentage to achieve a better picture. According to the Today and Tomorrow web page, right now the camera, Nadia, communicates via Bluetooth with a Mac that does all the evaluating. The camera was created as something of a statement about the artistic experience, but you know it won’t be long before someone develops this as a feature for digital cameras. I’ll bet they get it linked up with Google Maps to automatically create notes about the best place for tourists to stand in relation to monuments.

Also on the Today and Tomorrow page is a camera that actually inserts smiles on people’s faces regardless of their expression. So if you are standing in the ideal spot to take pictures in front of the Grand Canyon, but your moody teenage offspring are scowling, the picture and memories need not be ruined. Say the camera creators:

“To achieve this camera takes a picture but overlays it with a smiling mouth drawn from a pre-existing pool of pictures with smiling faces. To generate to maximum level of exaggeration the replaced smiling mouth impression is matched as realistically as possible to that of the initial portrait taken.”

Again, the camera was created by German art students and is not a commercial development for cameras. But as the creators point out, digital cameras can already automatically retouch pictures in real time.

I know a couple photographers who figure they are the only ones keeping the makers of camera film in business since everyone else is going to digital. I am not going to debate characteristics of film photographs which are lost in digital. I am sure they have been beaten to death in books, blogs and magazines ad infinitum.

The question I want to ask is the I asked earlier–what are the repercussions of abdicating judgments to a piece of technology? In our science fiction, we always assume we retain the characteristics we value into the future and some are envied by those who do not possess them. But what if we, as a whole, don’t really care about some thing enough to work at developing and retaining them?

For those of us in the arts and our long time patrons, we know that developing discernment takes time and experience. One of the primary instructions to formal students and interested others has always been–go see stuff and then see some more. But it is conceivable that an artificial intelligence fed the judgments of thousands could synthesize an authoritative one of its own. It may not be perfect, but it would be enough to get by, right? Oh wait, Pandora already does this for music and Amazon does it with…everything.

But you know you can’t trust those Amazon reviews. People can manipulate them! A computer algorithm is an objective source! For those who are intimidated by the arts it may provide a sense of confidence that gets them to attend events more often. There are no critics to agree or disagree with. You take your device (and I am imagining more widely than just photographs) to a performance or gallery, let it absorb what you are seeing and hearing and rate it.

Except what if you point it at the stuff you already know you like and it says it sucks? What does the device know? It was programmed by elitist arts lovers. It has no credibility with you! What if it is like Pandora and has a feature that suggests you might like x because you like y based on a computer program? That might be bad for the arts people because it just reinforces people’s consumption of experiences they pretty much already like. It can’t sneak in suggestions to encourage people to take chances too much because it will lose credibility.

Also in my experience with Pandora, technology can’t yet measure that intangible quality based on beats per minute. Some people are great because of so many other factors. I stopped using it very quickly when I hated nearly everything it suggested alongside my favorite groups.

Do people care about learning about quality or about what already appeals to them? Is there too much work and risk involved in experiencing the unknown even at a highly accurate computer’s recommendation?

The use of such technology doesn’t have to necessarily have such a stark dichotomy, of course. Devices that evaluate aesthetics can help Pro-Ams sharpen their skills at creating things. They may only enable people to advance to a certain level, but can bring great enjoyment in the process.

It is a complicated subject all around. About as complicated as the idea that being able to create high quality original works is exclusively a trait of humanity.

Where Are All The Good Theatre DVDs?

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Last week economist Tyler Cowen pondered aloud about why there aren’t more stage plays on DVD. He had three basic theories.

1. It wouldn’t be very good. (This doesn’t stop most of what is put out on DVD. Furthermore the highly complex genre of opera on DVD works just fine and has become the industry standard.)

2. There wouldn’t be much of an audience. Yet you could sell memento copies to people who saw the plays, a few plays on DVD might hit it big, and in any case they wouldn’t cost much to produce. There are plenty of niche products on Netflix.

3. It would squash the demand for live performance. Really? Most people don’t go to the theater anyway. Those who do, in this age of 3-D cinema and TiVo, presumably enjoy live performance in a manner which is robust. It is more likely that DVD viewing would stimulate demand for the live product. Besides, they put these plays out in book form and no one thinks that is a big problem.

In my mind, it is actually the comments that really bear reading. For two pages, people debate the reasons. Some blame all the unions, producers and other entities that seek to preserve their intellectual property and financial interests. One person suggested there are play people and film people and never the twain shall meet. Others blame the cost. When you turn a movie into a DVD the primary material has been edited and is ready to go. With a play, you have the cost of the production and then the cost of filming and editing on top of it. As one commenter implied, there is also an entirely different marketing approach when promoting a DVD than a live performance. Films can effectively adapt the television ad for the theatrical release for the DVD release because people are already familiar with the material from the first advertising campaign.

The biggest general consensus though was that stage productions don’t translate well to film in terms of setting, acting technique, costuming. People have an expectation of video that staged productions can’t deliver and vice versa. An apparent theatre person using the handle, “Meisner-trained,” noted that “Much of the world’s great literature is in the form of a play — I am embarrassed at having to say this, so I won’t even provide examples. (In contrast, even “great” screenplays, like “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”, aren’t great literature!)”

The real reason I say the comments bear reading is due to the passion with which people argue for the validity of both live performance and film. These are the people you want on your board and advocating to government and civic groups on your behalf. My assumption is, “Meisner-trained” aside, there are more than just arts people reading and commenting on an economist’s blog. The Epicurean Dealmaker, for example runs a blog on mergers and acquisitions and notes, “A great many forms of art derive much of their power from the way they satisfy, push up against, and transgress their own limitations. (Think sonnets, or haiku, for example.)”

Something I was interested to note. Most of the comments dealt with Cowen’s first two hypotheses-quality and lack of demand due to poor quality/different expectations of the DVD medium. Almost no one addressed the idea that DVDs would undermine interest in live performance. Only the person who noted that recordings of Broadway shows aren’t available until after the show closes really addressed that idea. (Though there are a couple of less direct implications). While the comments on a blog entry are hardly scientific, the dearth is enough to make me question the validity of a objections to recordings on the grounds that it will undermine interest in live performance. I wouldn’t roll out a DVD of Les Miz during a local run, but I suspect that the existence of a DVD released a few years prior won’t significantly dampen interest in a live performance.

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