SPEAKER_02: Amazing, fascinating stories of inventions, ideas and innovations. Yes, this is the podcast about the things that have helped to shape our lives. Podcasts from the BBC World Service are supported by advertising.
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SPEAKER_04: 50 things that made the modern economy with Tim Harford.
SPEAKER_01: Who's the best paid solo singer in the world? In 2015, according to Forbes, it was probably Elton John. He reportedly made $100 million. You two made twice as much as that apparently,
SPEAKER_01: but there are four of them. There's only one Elton John.
SPEAKER_01: If we'd asked that question 215 years ago, the answer would have been Mrs. Billington. Elizabeth Billington was, some say, the greatest English soprano who ever lived. Sir Joshua Reynolds, the first president of the Royal Academy of Arts, once painted Mrs. Billington. He depicted her standing with a book of music in her hands and her curls partly pinned up and partly floating free, listening to a choir of angels singing. The composer, Joseph Haydn, thought the portrait was an injustice. The angels, said Haydn, should have been listening to Mrs. Billington singing. Elizabeth Billington was also something of a sensation off the stage. A scurrilous biography of her sold out in less than a day. The book contained what were purportedly copies of intimate letters about her famous lovers, including, they say, the Prince of Wales. In a more dignified celebration of her fame, when she recovered from a six-week-long illness on her Italian tour, the Venice Opera House was illuminated for three days. It was Elizabeth Billington's fame, some would say notoriety, that she was the subject of a bidding war for her performances. The managers of what were then London's two leading opera houses, Covent Garden and Drury Lane, scrambled so desperately to secure her that she ended up singing at both venues, alternating between the two and pulling in at least £10,000 in the 1801 season. It was, even for her, a remarkable sum, but in today's terms, it's a mere £687,000, less than a million dollars, just 1% of Elton John's earnings. What explains the difference? Why is Elton John worth more than 100 Elizabeth Billingtons? Almost 60 years after the Sopranos' death, the great economist Alfred Marshall analysed the impact of the electric telegraph. It then connected America, Britain, India, even Australia. Thanks to such modern communications, he wrote, men who have once attained a commanding position are enabled to apply their constructive or speculative genius to undertakings vaster and extending over a wider area than ever before. The world's top industrialists were getting richer faster. The gap between them and less outstanding entrepreneurs was growing. But not every profession's best and brightest could gain in the same way, Marshall said. Looking for a contrast, he chose the performing arts. The number of persons who can be reached by a human voice, he observed, is strictly limited. And so, in consequence, was the earning power of the vocalists. Two years after Alfred Marshall wrote those words, in 1877, on Christmas Eve, Thomas Edison applied for a patent for the phonograph. It was the first machine to be able to both record and reproduce the sound of a human voice. Nobody seemed to know quite what to do with the technology at first. A French publisher named Édouard Léon Scott de Martenville had already developed something called the phonoautograph, a device intended to provide a visual record of the sound of a human voice, a little like a seismograph records an earthquake. But it doesn't seem to have occurred to Monsieur Martenville that one might try to convert the recording back into sound again. Soon enough, the application of the new technology became clear. You could record the best singers in the world and sell the recordings. At first, making a recording was a bit like making carbon copies on a typewriter. A single performance could only be captured on three or four phonographs at once. In the 1890s, there was great demand to hear a song by the African-American singer George W. Johnson. To meet that demand, he reportedly spent day after day singing the same song till his voice gave out. Fifty times a day would churn out a mere 200 records. When Emil Berliner introduced recordings on a disc rather than Edison's cylinder, this opened the way to mass production. Then came radio and film. Performers like Charlie Chaplin could reach a global market just as easily as the men of industry whom Alfred Marshall had described. For the Charlie Chaplains and Elton Johns of the world, new technologies meant wider fame and more money. But for the Journeyman singers, it was a disaster. In Elizabeth Billington's day, many half-decent singers made a living performing live in music halls. Mrs. Billington, after all, couldn't be everywhere. But when you can listen at home to the best performers in the world, why pay to hear a merely competent tribute act in person? Thomas Edison's phonograph led the way towards a winner-take-all dynamic in the performing industry. The very best performers went from earning like Mrs. Billington to earning like Elton John. Meanwhile, the only slightly less good went from making a comfortable living to struggling to pay their bills. Small gaps in quality became vast gaps in income. In 1981, an economist called Sherwin Rosen called this phenomenon the superstar economy. Imagine, he said, the fortune that Mrs. Billington might have made if there'd been phonographs in 1801. Technological innovations have created superstar economics in other sectors, too. Satellite television, for example, has been to footballers what the gramophone was to musicians, or the telegraph to 19th-century industrialists. If you were the world's best footballer a few decades ago, no more than a stadium full of fans could have seen you play every week. Now your every move will be watched by hundreds of millions on every continent. Technological shifts can dramatically change who gets what, and they're wrenching because they can be so sudden, and because the people concerned have the same skills as ever, but suddenly very different earning power. Throughout the 20th century, new innovations, the cassette, the CD, the DVD, maintained the economic model created by the gramophone. But at the end of the century came the MP3 format and fast internet connections. Suddenly you didn't have to spend $20 on a plastic disc to listen to your favorite music. You could find it online, free. In 2002, David Bowie warned his fellow musicians that they were facing a very different future. Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity, he said. You'd better be prepared for doing a lot of touring, because that's really the only unique situation that's going to be left. Bowie seems to have been right. Artists have stopped using concert tickets as a way to sell albums, and started using albums as a way to sell concert tickets. But we haven't returned to the days of Mrs Billington. Amplification, stadium rock, global tours and endorsement deals mean that the most admired musicians can still profit from a vast audience. Inequality remains alive and well. The top 1% of artists take more than five times more money from concerts than the bottom 95% put together. The gramophone may be passe, but the ability of technological change to alter who wins and who loses is always with us.
