Music Business Commons^™

Improving Arts Management/Marketing Efficiency: Optimizing Utilization Of Scarce Resources To Produce Artistic Outputs, Theresa A. Kirchner, Linda L. Golden, Patrick L. Brockett

Marketing Faculty Publications

Purpose

This longitudinal research examines US symphony orchestra sector organizations to determine individual efficiencies in allocating resources (donations, governmental/private funding, etc.) for desirable outputs (concerts, educational programs, community outreach). It provides researchers and managers with a tool for identifying, assessing and mitigating organizational inefficiencies.

Design/methodology/approach

This study assesses relative efficiencies in performing arts organizations using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), a widely-used nonparametric data-intensive benchmarking technique that determines an optimal “production frontier” of best-practice organizations among their peers and assesses their abilities to turn multivariate inputs into multivariate desired outputs.

Findings

This analysis highlights efficiency differences in a wide range of …

On Kathleen E. R. Smith's God Bless America: Tin Pan Alley Goes To War, Matthew Hein

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

When America's Top 40 starts counting down, are those best-sellers of popular music the results of clever top-down marketing ploys and mass-psyche machinations, or do those lists reflect vox populi, making itself heard with its purchasing dollars above the din of preplanned propaganda? Kathleen E.R. Smith doesn't seem to care. Perhaps it isn't her place to consider such possibly unsolvable questions. Smith's place, apparently, is to research the records in disarray that detail an interesting phenomenon: that of the top-down attempt to create and popularize a great American fight song (assuming the role Over There filled during WWI) …