Creative Industries

Preface Introduction: Economic Properties of Creative Activities Part I: Supplying Simple Creative Goods 1. Artists as Apprentices 2. Artists, Dealers, and Deals 3. Artist and Gatekeeper: Trade Books, Popular Records, and Classical Music 4. Artists, Starving and Well-Fed Part II: Supplying Complex Creative Goods 5. The Hollywood Studios Disintegrate 6. Contracts for Creative Products: Films and Plays 7. Guilds, Unions, and Faulty Contracts 8. The Nurture of Ten-Ton Turkeys 9. Creative Products Go to Market: Books and Records 10. Creative Products Go to Market: Films Part III: Demand for Creative Goods 11. Buffs, Buzz, and Educated Tastes 12. Consumers, Critics, and Certifiers 13. Innovation, Fads, and Fashions Part IV: Cost Conundrums 14. Covering High Fixed Costs 15. Donor-Supported Nonprofit Organizations in the Performing Arts 16. Cost Disease and Its Analgesics Part V: The Test of Time 17. Durable Creative Goods: Rents Pursued through Time and Space 18. Payola 19. Organizing to Collect Rents: Music Copyrights 20. Entertainment Conglomerates and the Quest for Rents 21. Filtering and Storing Durable Creative Goods: Visual Arts 22. New versus Old Art: Boulez Meets Beethoven Epilogue Notes Index

Richard E. Caves is Nathaniel Ropes Research Professor of Political Economy at Harvard University.

By documenting a wide range of commercial interactions across the creative industries, this comprehensive and immensely readable book shows persuasively that economic theory can help us understand the sheer business of making art happen. -- David Throsby Times Literary Supplement [Caves] uses contract and industrial-organization theory to throw light on how and why the industries producing cultural goods and services--from literature to film, from rock music to opera--work as they do...Caves does not engage issues of ideology, nor of the political or economic importance of the arts, but simply sees the creative industries as fascinating areas of economic activity which have been largely neglected by economists...By documenting a wide range of commercial interactions across the creative industries, this comprehensive and immensely readable book shows persuasively that economic theory can help us understand the sheer business of making art happen. -- David Throsby Times Literary Supplement 20001215 Creative Industries explores the economics of the arts in exacting detail. With great skill and originality, Caves has analysed the economic forces operating in music, book publishing, painting, the theatre and movies. -- Winston Fletcher Times Higher Education Supplement 20010504 Caves presents an excellent and readable discussion of the economics and organization of the creative arts industry...Using an enormous amount of qualitative information, Caves combines the theory of contracts (a new development) with the economics of industrial organization to explain institutional arrangements (the contractual strategies of the market mediators) between artists (authors, actors, performers) and consumers. -- R. A. Miller CHOICE