Dan Lewis

Marc has a well thought-out takedown of a pair of Ethicist posts by New York Times columnist Randy Cohen on ticket scalping.    Cohen defense Miley Cyrus’ practice of instituting anti-scalpling measures by asserting , basically, that not everything should be auctioned off to the highest bidder, and performers should be allowed to license out the right to listen to their performances.

But why would they?  Artists can easily ride the demand curve, auctioning off tickets or otherwise maximizing revenue.  Even if they do not have the ability to do it themselves, they can partner easily.  Take Major League Baseball: They have an agreement with StubHub, allowing the latter to re-sell tickets, with the league and its member clubs taking a cut.  Why would Cyrus not do the same?  Is she really thinking of her fans?  If so, she’s spending a lot of money — in lost revenue — to be “fan-friendly.”

No so, Marc argues.  Rather, and correctly, I think, he proposes that artists are more interested in selling out venues than maximizing revenues.   Why?  Because failing to sell out a show signals a lack of popularity, and in their world, popularity matters.

Which is reinforced by another thing that can happen on the secondary ticket market: Ticket prices can actually fall below face.  I spoke to Mark — yes, another Mark — an experienced ticket arbitrager, and found that prices actually fall more often fall below face value more often than you think.   He says that Cyrus, who is popular everywhere, is an extreme outlier: even tickets to Britney Spears’ shows in sparsely populated areas during her recent tour could be obtained at face (or perhaps under) on the secondary market.  And if that were to happen, again, we’d have a signal of waning popularity.

Cyrus is participating in the latter market, which is a market for an even scarcer commodity: attention.  Popularity fuels attention.  Attention leads to listeners, viewers, and over time, more and more revenue.  Losing attention is too risky, and scalpers put it at risk.

[Update: June 5, 2010: In January, an armed robber held up a jewlery store on Madison Avenue between 75th an 76th, shooting and killing a 71-year old employee. This is the first shooting homicide in the Upper East Side in over seven years, and per the linked-to article, seemingly random.]

The New York Times came out with a neat interactive map of homicides in New York City — something which would be really cool if it were not about murder.  According to the map, ove the six and a half year period covered (2003 to present), NYC recorded just over 3,400 homicides, of which 15% — or about 500 — were in Manhattan.

The Upper East Side section of  Manhattan is incredibly safe, apparently.   11 homicides over the period, or about two per year.  For an area with a population of 200,000+, that gives roughly a 1 homicide per 100,000 per annum.  To put that in perspective, in 2003, Maine had the “best” homicide rate in the nation, at 1.2 per 100,000.

There are no formal barriers separating the Upper East Side from the rest of Manhattan — yes, it abutts Central Park on the west but one can easily walk though that, and the east is bound by the East River.  North and south, though, the lines are 96th and 59th streets respectively, which is to say, the borders are entirely fluid with the neighborhoods next to them.   (A guess as to why the lines are where they are?  On the south side, Central Park ends on 59th; on the north, the Metro North train tracks come above ground at 97th.)  The borders are known but hardly observed in any true fashion — we regularly consider a playground on 99th and 5th to be in the “Upper East Side”, for example.

If you live here, you probably will understand why the neighborhood is safer than most, but experience does not translate well to words.  I was not terribly surprised to see a low homicide rate, although admittedly it was much lower than I expected.  What did surprise me, however, was one simple fact: no firearms were used in the homicides.  Or, more accurately, guns abide by the borders.

The map above sums it up.  The green dots — firearm-related homicides — all fall outside the borders of the Upper East Side.  There are two which are close, of course: 57th and Madison, 97th and 3rd.  Two blocks south of the UES, one block north.   This makes the UES a massive outlier, as 69% of the 3,400+ homicides city-wide were firearm-related.

Why?

There is an episode of Sex and the City where Carrie, the narrator/protagonist — a sex columnist for a New York City tabloid — manages to be in a book pitch meeting.  It seems like a natural fit, until the audience (and Carrie) find out that the lady she is meeting publishes children’s books.  It’s a bad fit, to say the least, notes Carrie, and she shares a laugh with her friends.  A sex columnist write children’s books?  Crazy.  The rules do not allow for such things.

Just ask Britt Allcroft, creator of three children’s television series, most notably Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends, a derivative of a half-century-old book series.  Thomas has only two speaking parts: a chorus of children who sing sing-along songs; and a narrator, who tells the story and speaks on behalf of the trains and other characters.

When Ms. Allcroft and her team sought a narrator, they assumedly did so with great care; after all, it is the only known voice for the entirity of an episode.   Allcroft and her successors attracted some great talent to narrate: Ringo Starr, Alec Baldwin, and Pierce Brosnan all narrated something from the Thomas franchise.

A few nights ago, while watching an episdoe with my son, I heard another voice  — familiar enough where I knew I had heard it before, but given the context, I could not place it.  It turns out that this narrator worked on 51 (!) episodes over most of the 1990s.  Per Wikipedia:

In 1991, he provided the narrative voice for the American version of the children’s show Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends, a role he continued until 1998. He played “Mr. Conductor” on the PBS children’s show Shining Time Station [another Alcroft show], which featured Thomas the Tank Engine from 1991 to 1993, as well as the Shining Time Station TV specials in 1995 and Mr. Conductor’s Thomas Tales in 1996.

But that’s not what he’s most famous for.   Not even close.  And no one who popularized the Seven Dirty Words could possibly be the voice of a beloved children’s show character.   Unless you’re George Carlin, I guess.

Here’s a great rule of thumb that any good writer will tell you, and has been told to me many times: Know your audience.  If you’re writing a term paper, your audience is your professor.  A legal brief, the supervising attorney/partner and ultimately, the judge.  A Facebook status update, your network of friends.

The problem with the rule is that it prevents you from writing when there is no obvious audience, or when you do not have a target one in mind.  If you cannot tailor your writing, how are you supposed to write?  That problem is, primarily, why I have not had my own blog in way too long.

But last week I realized that there is a target audience for this blog: Me.  My goal here is simply to get my thoughts into words, and then to have them stored somewhere (semi-)permanently so I can remember what I thought, and why.  In retrospect, it makes a lot of sense.  No one else out there is going to make me their target audience, at least not on a regular basis.   If no one else reads or comments, that is OK; but if someone else wants to follow along, all the better.  The writer side of me does not mind if more people show up to listen or comment, and the audience-side of me appreciates the company and the feedback.

Fred Wilson leads today with a simple point:

Nothing is standard. You either need it or you don’t. Explain why you need it and most of the time you’ll get it or something like it[.]

Mr. Wilson says this in the context of contract negotitations, but it applies elsewhere.   One can iterate on the scenarios all day.

But I’m more interested in one word: “it”.  Specifically, “Explain why you need it and you’ll get it.”  “It” is not “what you asked for” — but rather “what you you want.”  There’s a big difference.

When you ask for something — anything, really; this even applies to asking a clerk at the supermarket where the paper goods are — you assume that the listener has enough information to give you an answer.  Sometimes that’s true, but not always.   If you ask that supermarket clerk “Where are the paper plates?” and he replies “Aisle four,” chances are you will get what you are after.    In my neighborhood supermarket, though, that is not always true.  Yes, the Dixie and Solo and other every-day paper plates are there, as are the kid-oriented shaped like animal faces or with pictures of Elmo on them.   What you want isn’t there, and to make matters worse, there is no way to find out that high quality paper goods are, well, anywhere — in fact, if you did not know about them beforehand, you would have no reason to think they even existed.

Had you explained “My wife and I are having guests over for dinner and I need some paper goods.  Where are they?” you’d have, hopefully, gotten a different answer than “Aisle four.”   If you want to get what you want — and not just what you asked for — explain your thinking.   It is like turning the other person into a mind reader.

Ask yourself: When does the lone guy dancing turn into a mob? Seth’s Godin says it’s the third guy, but that’s not the whole story.

Take a look at the people sitting around. They’re looking at the solo dancer but their attention wanes. The second guy comes and captures their attention for long enough for the third guy to come in. But it’s another 20 seconds before anyone else shows up.

And when someone else does, it’s actually two someone elses. You can almost here the conversation.

“Look at that guy dancing.”

“Heh. Idiot.”

<silence>

“Another one.”

“Wow.”

<silence>

<third guy joins>

“Dude… wanna join in?”

“Let’s go.”

Seth is right — we need more guy #3s. But they’re rare and we can’t expect to make more. The fourth person wasn’t going alone. Neither was the fifth.

What we really need is more guy #5s for the guy #4s out there, and more #4s for the #5s. That we can make happen: If you’re afraid to go it alone, just find a friend who is similarly afraid.