Economics and the architecture of popular music

Abstract A simple supply and demand framework is developed to study the time-series pattern of music. Changes in the internal structure of successful songs, it will be argued, are tied to market forces. An extensive data set has been developed to enable the investigation of a large number of issues in this spirit. The analysis proceeds by first asking a basic question: Has the structure of music changed in these 50 years? We discover major regime changes in the mid 1950s and again in the mid 1960s that generally conform to intuition. The analysis then turns to specify a system of demand and supply equations to explain the patterns in popular music over the sample period.