Glynn Lunney

Lunney marshals a lot of evidence to show that the quality of music, based on its sales and long-lastingness in critical and popular terms, increases when the music industry makes less money. He argues that this is most likely the result of a backwards-bending supply curve, since top-earning artists feel less need to go out and work when their earnings are higher. “Now you have $20 million in the bank, a sizeable and continuing stream of royalty income coming in for the foreseeable future, and a seemingly unlimited supply of prospective sexual partners from fans who love and adore you. If you can imagine yourself in this situation, here is the question: Are you going to work tomorrow?” If we want to incentivize marginal artists to enter the field by using copyright (which is uniform in coverage and doesn’t target new/marginal artists), we’d have to give tens of thousands of dollars to each top artist for every dollar that a marginal artist earned, given that by definition their audiences are smaller. “[B]ecause most new artists prove to be one-hit wonders, the loss in output from our top artists, during periods of high sales revenue, outweighs the increased output from the additional new artists.”… (altro)