The Chicago Symphony Orchestra is considered the best in the United States, and 7th in the world, by a recent survey of music critics:

“Actually, this will be a surprise because a lot of people in America would, as a knee-jerk reaction, would rank the New York Philharmonic at the top,” Inverne says. “Or, indeed, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which has fantastic technical standards. But Chicago beat a further six orchestras, which were in our top 20, from America.

…

“Chicago famously has this incredible brass sound,” Inverne says. “And it just pins you to the back of your seat. And the way that that brass sound shoots out, exemplifies a lot about the orchestra, which is a sense of adventure in music-making.”

Categories: Chicago, Entertainment Media
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The signs are all there: The technological superiority. The ruthless march to galactic domination. The musical devices that from a fashion standpoint would be the perfect accessory for any Stormtrooper uniform. Once but the student (see their classic 1984 ad, their PC vs. Mac ads and oh, everything else that’s ever come out of their mouth), it seems that little ol’ Apple finally could be turning into the Master.

An article in Rolling Stone wonders if Apple is the new Microsoft. Good thing the guys over at Rolling Stone are reading David Dworin Online.

Categories: Business and Economics, Entertainment Media, Technology
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Turner Broadcasting and their ad agency are paying the city of Boston $2 million after law enforcement there confused a glowing Mooninite advertising the new AquaTeen Hunger Force movie with a terrorist threat.  Half will be “goodwill” funds given to the agencies for training and equipment.  Does this mean they just got a million dollars for their screw up?  Will they use this to prevent a similar embarrassment?  Doesn’t this provide an incentive for police departments to overreact, forcing a settlement with corporations who will then pay up to prevent a PR disaster?  After all, none of the departments in 9 other cities, who figured out that a glowing Moon Man isn’t a bomb, got any free money.
The companies can’t say what I’m going to: Boston law enforcement overreacted and behaved in a bumbling and incompetent manner.  The more we are willing to kowtow to our fears of terrorism, the more effective it becomes as a tactic.

Categories: America, Entertainment Media, Governance, Incentive Centered Design, Law, Marketing, Television
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In Slate:

But the more I thought about Cramer, the more I realized that pointing out that he gives terrible investment advice would be like pointing out that the sun rises. Worse, I would be dismissed as a wet blanket who didn’t get that the point of Mad Money was just to have a bit of ironic fun. I mean, of course Jim Cramer gives terrible investment advice—we all know that, right?—and we only watch the show because, well, because he does possess a certain bizarre type of market and entertainment genius—if there’s a pundit out there with more opinions about more stocks, I’ve never seen him—and he’s irreverent, madcap, and, yes, even brilliant, in an idiot-savant, freak-show sort of way. (Moreover, Cramer is mesmerizing reality TV. Admit it: You watch because you wonder if this is the night he finally has a heart attack, kills someone, or explodes in a tirade of expletive-laced slander.)

That is precisely why I watch Mad Money, and I love watching the show (though I can never stomach a full episode at a time). I think CNBC personalities are awesome, and although Jim Cramer is great in small doses, he’s nothing compared to personal finance guru Suze Orman, who will help you fix up your crappy finances and crappy relationships at the same time.

Categories: Business and Economics, Entertainment Media, Information Asymmetries, Information Markets, Television
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The character’s hair is generally mousy and flat, and the lettuce lends it no body. Her wardrobe is mannish, and she’s disdainful of the traditional female sexuality. You sense that Liz Lemon would push Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw under a bus, claim she did it on principle, and cackle about it for ages. In this sense, Jenna—whose heart is in her cleavage, whose deepest conviction is that her sexuality is a weapon—is something of a foil. As is Liz’s assistant, Cerie, a clueless little nymph who cannot comprehend her boss’s suggestion that she not wear short shorts to the office. On the occasions that Liz dolls herself up, Fey lays the snark on thicker yet: In the third episode, “Blind Date,” she put on a cocktail dress, and her producer, admiring, said, “You look like a fancy prostitute.” Liz made a flattered little bounce.

A Slate Review of 30 Rock.

30 Rock, The Office, and the under-rated How I Met Your Mother all compete for the title of Best Comedy on Television.

Categories: Entertainment Media, Television, Winter of Dave
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Chris Anderson’s Long Tail Blog asks do artists who give their music away for free want to make money?

Many do, but they’re just smarter than most music industry execs. They understand the difference between abundance and scarcity economics. Music as a digital product enjoys near-zero costs of production and distribution–classic abundance economics. When costs are near zero, you might as well make the price zero, too, something thousands of bands have figured out.

Meanwhile, the one thing that you can’t digitize and distribute with full fidelity is a live show. That’s scarcity economics. No wonder the average price for a ticket was $61 last year, up 8%–in an era when digital products are commodities, there’s a premium on experience. No surprise that bands are increasingly giving away their recorded music as marketing for their concerts, which offer something no MP3 can match.

Categories: Business and Economics, Distribution, Entertainment Media, Incentive Centered Design, Information Economics, Marketing, Strategy
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Good science fiction provides a vision of the future that gives us a window into the present.  Unfortunately, for each Orwell there’s a dozen others who create a vivid future, but populate it with shallow characters, an empty plot, and either lack social commentary, or even worse, don’t even bother to make it subtle.  In an era when the V for Vendetta movie is lauded for not butchering the brilliant comic too badly.  Children of Men (read better reviews than mine here), which I saw earlier tonight, executed perfectly the way SciFi should, rather than how it usually does.

I was going to write a longer post, but it’s getting late, so here’s the gist of it:

• The sets are so detailed that during nearly every seen, you dart around trying to pick up on minor things by reading signs, newspapers, pictures, and anything you can.  For a lot of scenes, I wished I could pause the theater.  In the same vein, the future technology is in the realm of possibility.  The movie feels like it’s one step in the future, not a giant leap, so that you feel like their world is ours, just with slight differences.
• It had one of the best portrayals of violence I’ve seen in a movie.  Not because it was necessarily real (I wouldn’t know to judge), but because it didn’t feel cartoonish or excessive, and it was placed perfectly.  The violence made you hate violence – this was a fight you didn’t want to be a part of.   At the end (I’m trying to avoid spoilers), the combat made you hate war – and wish there wasn’t a similar one going on.
• Because it was tangential to the plot, and the world felt slightly different enough that you knew it wasn’t our own, Children of Men could criticize things like military occupation, attitudes towards immigration, political activism, police state, art, class differences, and so much more.  It made you think about them, it didn’t preach about them, and it was so subtle that you could enjoy the movie without noticing any of it.

There are other things that I know I’m missing, but I can’t stress enough how awesome this movie was.  So far, it’s the best movie I’ve seen in 2007, and probably better than any movie I saw in 2006.

Categories: Entertainment Media, Movies, Winter of Dave
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And I want to see Indians on the big screen portraying stories that aren’t centered around “being Indian” or being “Indian plus something else” you know? There’s Harold and Kumar which is like “hey we’re Asian and also we get high and eat burgers.” Then there’s Bend it like Bekham, which is like “I’m Indian and I want to fall in love, help!” Then there’s Monsoon Wedding, the Namesake is coming out soon, American Desi, and one more that I can’t remember the title to right now, about a college-aged Indian musician whose parents don’t understand him.

Sonia wants Indian movies to come to America.

Take the above paragraph, and replace “Indian” with “Jewish” and change the examples around, and you see another example of why I think second generation Indian Americans and Jewish Americans are dealing with nearly identical identity issues.

While I’m on the subject, Sonia’s blog is awesome.  Hidden in almost every post is a gem, in one or two sentences, about cultural identity that she doesn’t even realize she wrote.  The rest of it is fun stories about her goofy family that are entertaining even if you’ve never met them.

Categories: America, Entertainment Media, Immigration, Movies
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In contrast to The Simpsons, Futurama permitted the writers to let their mathematical fancies run wild and to cram in math references for their personal delectation, Keeler says. “That’s why it’s not on the air any more,” he jokes.

The Simpsons writers are math nerds!

Futurama, which had even more math nerds as writers, along with Al Gore’s daughter Kristen Gore, remains one of my favorite TV shows, even in reruns.  That’s why I’m psyched it’s coming back.

Categories: Entertainment Media, Metrics, Science, Television
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Today, O’Reilly has not lost the independent streak that sets him apart from GOP apparatchiks like Sean Hannity. But shrill, intolerant rhetoric has almost entirely eclipsed intelligent discussion on his show, and his pugnacious but likable populism has given way to a paranoid and venomous self-aggrandizement.

That’s in Reason, the libertarian journal, not a left wing magazine.

Categories: America, Entertainment Media, Politics
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Watch Dogville or Fahrenheit 9/11 or even The Passion of the Christ and you get the distinct sense that you’re being congratulated for believing the right things. Rare is the movie that challenges your beliefs. Rarer still is the movie that tells you you’re a fat moron, and that you should be ashamed of yourself.

From a 2005 Slate Review of Mike Judge’s Idiocracy, which goes on sale as a DVD this week.

Categories: America, Entertainment Media, Movies
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The reason I get so annoyed when people misread The Long Tail to think that I’m arguing that hits are dead is that the canonical powerlaw that defines the Long Tail requires hits. That curve is the shape of radical inequality, where a few things sell a lot and a lot of things sell a little. The right side of the curve–the long tail–can’t exist without the left side of the curve–the short head–which is made up of hits.

Chris Anderson talking about the difference between hits and blockbusters.  He’s right – most people do interpret The Long Tail, which I can imagine must be extremely frustrating.

Categories: Business and Economics, Distribution, Entertainment Media, Information Economics, Technology
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I think that one of the most important changes we’re going to see in lots of professions over the next few years is the emergence of tools that close the gap between the middle and the top–that allow the decision-making who is merely competent to avoid his errors to be reach the level of good.

Malcolm Gladwell writing on his blog.  His musing lately have dealt with finding good basketball metrics, but this post was in response to his article about an algorithm that predicts movie box office receipts from scripts.

Gladwell is right that metrics and decision tools raise the quality of the average decision, but he seems to think it affects most the people right below the top or near the middle.  What it actually does is take the implicit knowledge of the best decision makers and make it explicit for everybody else.  I’m not sure the precise numbers, but if you asked a group of people if they were in the top 10% of their profession, something like 70% will say that they are, even though by definition, only 10% can be.  Everybody thinks that they can make better decisions without structure, advice, or metrics, but reality tells a different story.  This was one of the key findings I took away from Gladwell’s book Blink.  In practice, the biggest issue is that nobody wants to admit that their complex “art,” like picking hit movies or music, making business decisions, or medical services, can be reduced to a simple algorithm or decision tree.  But on average, that algorithm does better than the specialists.

There are two areas where I think you need to watch out with the movie algorithm.  First, movie revenues are heavily influenced by a number of factors that are decided by people today – opening size, marketing budget, timing.  The biases of the studio execs are all inside these factors, which means that they are biasing the results of the neural network.  IT could be argued that in fact, these things don’t matter, but I’m not sure if the current network controls for them.

The second issue is profitability.  Just because a movie will generate revenue, doesn’t mean it’s the most profitable investment.  A studio gets a better return with a $5 million film that generates $50 million in revenue than a $50 million film that generates $200 million in revenue, and if they can make ten of the cheaper films, then they’re able to make more profits with lower risk.  I see Hollywood moving, begrudgingly, in this direction, and entrenched organizational structures, distribution partners, and false preconceptions as the biggest osbstacles.

As an aside, the actual Gladwell article is worth reading for the description of Kamesian thinking and Dick Copaken alone.

Categories: Entertainment Media, Information Asymmetries, Information Economics
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The business landscape of the past couple of decades is replete with companies that have flourished as third wheels, and with companies that have struggled to make money despite being No. 1 in their industries. (Today, would you rather be Honda or G.M.?) And while it’s true that in many industries there is a correlation between market share and profitability, one doesn’t necessarily lead to the other. A recent survey of the evidence on market share by J. Scott Armstrong and Kesten C. Green found that companies that adopt what they call “competitor-oriented objectives” actually end up hurting their own profitability. In other words, the more a company focusses on beating its competitors, rather than on the bottom line, the worse it is likely to do.

From “In Praise of Third Place” in the New Yorker. Believe it or not, the article starts out about video games, which is why I read it.

This actually ties in with the most recent case in my B-School class, on Capital One’s use of an information based strategy to target profitable customers, rather than going after market share.

Categories: Entertainment Media, Strategy, Video Games
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I don’t want to be so strident. At first, I thought that content holders weren’t taking the tectonic potential of these services seriously. I now believe it’s just the opposite. Looking at their model, it’s almost engineered to make digital delivery the least appealing option.

That’s Tycho at PennyArcade railing against the high price of digital delivery. The more I read up on the economics here, the more I realize that it isn’t so much that the media companies don’t get it; they do. The problem is that right now, so much of their revenues come from DVDs, and DVDs are sold at Wal-Mart and other brick and mortar retailers (but especially Wal-Mart), who see direct-to-the-home as a competitor. The reason studios and networks can’t deliver reasonably priced downloads to the home isn’t because they don’t want to, it’s because their “distribution partners,” who make a fortune off of DVDs, won’t let them.

Categories: Distribution, Entertainment Media, Information Economics
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