Author: Maarten Walraven-Freeling

Tarzan Economics aims to switch your understanding of the world from thinking about transactions to thinking about consumption. Will Page argues for around 300 pages that we should all be interested in data that explains how people consume instead of data on what transactions they make. This is a question of economics, of course, but also of many other possible subjects such as psychology, neuroscience, and sociology. Page writes well and seems to enjoy making economics something everyone can grasp. Half the time, as a reader, I didn’t even realise he discussed economic concepts until he is well and truly deep into them. One such example is when Page takes several pages to discuss the concept of ‘fair division.’ He talks about himself coming home late and drunk, watching a program on TV called The Mint – It’s a game show with simple background music. The show itself was evidently an awful rip-off for viewers, but so was the music for the wider community of composers. The simple background music earned its composers lots of money due to the broadcaster’s, ITV, blanket license deal with the PRS. Not only does Page explain ‘fair division’ in an easy to grasp example, he also immediately lays bare the crux of Tarzan Economics: something like ‘fair division’ is only fair if the pool of money received gets distributed in a fair way and there’s lots of ways to game the rules. When those rules refuse to bend while consumers have already changed course it’s time to adapt.

The good

There’s a lot to like about Tarzan Economics, and while Page goes through eight principles in the book I think there’s three that really allow us to hone in on the core of the book.

Unintended consequences

Page keeps asking his readers to think about ‘what might have been’ and ‘what are we not seeing’? Every business decision can have unintended consequences and what Tarzan Economics helps you to do is see them before the fact. I think part of this is accepting that at some point, whatever industry you operate in there will be disruption. But more than that, it’s about thinking about data differently. Page gives an example of Abraham Wald, a Hungarian statistician who worked at Columbia University during WWII and aided the war effort as a part of the Statistical Research Group.

[Wald] noticed that when planes returned from their missions, mechanics were putting extra protection on the fleet based on the location of bullet holes. His pivotal thinking was that this wasn’t the right solution, as these planes were successfully making it home despite being hit. The bullet holes that mattered were the one that stopped planes from returning home. The air force needed to focus not on the positive signals, but the negatives. The zeroes, not the ones. (p. 178)

The idea of counting the zeroes as opposed to the ones, or at least acknowledging their existence, is what can help drive us to accept disruption and benefit from it.

Music as the first-mover in digital disruption

Page could write his book because music was the first industry to face digital disruption on an unprecedented scale. In other words, other industries can learn from music what to do, how to make sure that you grab hold of the next vine and let go of the old, crumbling one. Music definitely took hold of the new vine of streaming revenues to pull itself back up again after the old vine of physical CD distribution crumbled. However, it took them close to ten years to do so. Setting the music industry as an example of Tarzan Economics, then, also shows how slow pivoting can be. The music industry’s saviour was the blanket license style solution for copyright that allows streaming services to pool all music together and then charge a set rate for it. The subsequent pool of money that comes out of that is divided up pro-rata, per stream. It sounds fair, but a lot of people think otherwise. What Page suggests is that this method gave an entire industry a way out. But it needed to count the zeroes to get there. Those zeroes were not the illegal downloaders who major labels sued and settled with. They weren’t even the Napsters and Pirate Bays of this world. Instead, the zeroes were the money left on the table by looking at music as a transactional good instead of a service.

Now, this idea isn’t Page’s. The phrase and thinking behind Tarzan Economics goes back to Jim Griffin, former head of digital at Geffen. In his book, Page refers very briefly to hearing Griffin speak in 2009. By then Griffin had talked about the idea of Tarzan Economics for music – i.e. grabbing hold of the streaming vine – for a couple of years. Nor was Griffin alone or the first. Gerd Leonhard and David Kusek were two others who kicked the music industry towards that streaming vine. In their 2005 book The Future of Music, they, together with Susan Gedutis Lindsay, argued for a world without CDs. Music would flow as free as water, paid for bundled up with other services. Going back further still, and predating Napster, Bennett Lincoff is one person who advocated the blanket license model. In the early days of the internet Lincoff wanted to make sure copyright owners would keep getting their dues while their works spread online. Music can certainly be held up as a successful use case for Tarzan Economics. Perhaps it’s because I’m a historian, but it would help the book to contextualise the specific history of its digital disruption a bit more elegantly.

Creator-to-distribution chain

Page’s insistence on taking the unintended consequences of decisions into account is the key idea I’ve taken from the book. The most prescient, however, is his thinking around the production chain. Digital disruption means that more and more creators look to retain control of their own creations’ rights. In many industries this complicates often quite simple creator-to-distribution chains. ‘Luckily’ for music, rights organisation throughout this chain has been complex since the early days of recorded music. Page goes back to the example of how the French performance rights collective SACEM found its start. That organisation was also the first to institute the blanket license. It’s importance cannot be overstated for Page:

Blankets hold collectives together, as without them gridlock would cause the market to fall apart. I would be impractical (if not impossible) to find and negotiate with those 4 million songwriters around the world independently, yet a failure to secure a license for all of their songs would create a risk of liability that would make trade unworkable. Having 99.9 percent of all the songs isn’t good enough – the value of the blanket is in the completeness of getting 100 percent coverage – removing risk and increasing convenience. (p. 162-3)

The idea of a collective, however, often finds resistance because so much of our (Western) world is based around independence and do-it-yourself. Again, this is especially prescient in music, but also in the creator economy as a whole. That said, people always tend to be capable of pulling together when they have a common goal. Witness the advent of DAOs or other networks.

Either way, going it alone or going it through a collective, what’s important for Page is that the whole creator-to-distribution chain is under strain. It breaks and mends and weaves new paths from start to finish. The main reason it does this is because of the seemingly endless number of competitors for consumers’ attention. Cutting out your label and distributing your own music works if you are capable of finding a large enough audience to make it pay. Radiohead did it with In Rainbows – and are Page’s key example of successfully going it alone – but they were already a world-famous band with a dedicated following. What’s important though, is how the band leveraged a new tool, distribution via the internet, to circumvent old distribution networks and reach their fans more directly. Technologies, platforms and tools, then, are not what draws a crowd or what gets people to pay attention. They can help to achieve that and it doesn’t matter how those crowds form. There can be a gatekeeper, or not. There can be money involved, or not. There can middlemen, or not. There’s a larger discussion to be had around this topic, but Page simply wants to start by instilling the mindset that creators can be distributors, but also vice versa. And in a digital world where anything goes, swinging with the vines will help keep momentum going, crowds growing and attention piqued.

The bad

There were a couple of instances in the book where I felt Page’s arguments fell a little flat. I’ll dig into a couple here, but before I do let me point out that due to the scope of the book it was difficult for Page to go in depth in all chapters. As he writes himself, each chapter could probably be turned into a book on its own. I’ll try to eschew criticizing the book on this, besides my previous point about the broader context of Tarzan Economics and its origins in music.

Builder-farmer dichotomy

The book gets a bit self-help in the end with the builder-farmer dichotomy, but the intent is good because it allows readers to think about the various stages a company can be in. That said, I don’t feel this dichotomy helps in teaching ourselves to think differently, which is one of the purposes of the book. Take the idea into the context of all musicians now having to basically be entrepreneurs, it could make sense to think of yourself and the potential team you want to build around you in this way. At the start, you – the musician, the creator – are the builder, then you move into the territory where you want to reap the benefits of your building and you have to turn into a farmer. But at that point you are, most likely, not alone. You may have a manager, a label, a booker, a distributor. All of them can be at various stages of their own entrepreneurial development. Some will be builders and some will be farmers, but it’s not like Spotify needing more farmers after its IPO. It’s a musician who will go back to building a new creative work which they will then look to farm. Importantly, most of those musicians won’t turn into a band the size of Radiohead who have the sort of fanbase they can, indeed, farm. Remember, there’s value in thinking small, and that requires a psychological framework that is much more intricate than a macro-scale builder-farmer model.

The company line

Page still tows the Spotify company line, especially the marketing spiel about its origins. Moreover, he seems to tow the big-company line in general. Going back to my previous example of the single artist not benefiting from a dichotomy like builder-farmer all that much, it’s generally hard to see how smaller entities, such as a band but also someone like a small beer brewer or a hat maker, would benefit directly from engaging with Tarzan Economics. Of course, Spotify, and other streaming services, extract a lot of value out of a large group of people. Getting hundreds of millions to pay around a $100 per year on music equates to more value than getting a smaller group, say hundreds of thousands, to pay $50 per month. But it grates that Page doesn’t question Spotify or its model. As a reader, then, you would do well to read something like Spotify Teardown alongside Tarzan Economics. At least then you’ll understand that Spotify isn’t really a music company. They are a platform that makes money by offering music listening in a convenient way. As a platform, it may have offered music labels the tools to swing to the next vine, but that’s about as good it gets. In that sense, it’s more like Page’s final example of Skyscanner, which he lauds for getting smaller airlines growth by appearing on top of their search. It reminds me of Spotify’s growing middle class of 43,000 musicians earning good revenue. If, indeed, musicians need to get listeners’ attention against a vast pool of other attention seekers, then for them it’s time to grab hold of the next vine and let go of the streaming vine. Find your own audience and link them together into your own network.