From Tyler Cowen, economist and genius visitor from planet Vulcan, we get the following musing over in Volokhland:

It is like the puzzle of why most teenagers (the bulk of the market) buy only new music. It is not that music is somehow “getting better” each year, but rather that only new music brings the desired affiliations, hipness, etc. And again, the effect seems to be a strong one. Most of the value of music is social, not the private listening experience.

True insofar as it goes, but that explanatory fact here, the association of novelty with hipness and social “lubrication,” itself seems to stand in need of elaboration. Why are we neophiles? Why is new cool?

Obviously, part of that just has to do with the way we’re wired: we get accustomed to what’s familiar. Call this the “variety explanation.” Psychological experiments show that even young infants pay attention for longer when their background expectations about what’s coming next are violated. But that would only explain why we seek what’s new-to-us, not what’s actually new. There are, after all, plenty of N’Sync or Puffy fans who’ve probably never listened to Nirvana, let alone the Velvet Underground or Thelonious Monk. So the variety explanation alone won’t account for why muscal fashion isn’t more cyclical.

Next there’s what we can call the “zeitgeist explanation.” The idea here is that each era’s music resonates with the generation that produced it in a special way, and if you think about the Sex Pistols or Bob Dylan or (again) Nirvana, there seems to be something to that. But it’s not altogether clear which way the causation runs here: sometimes the early innovators in a new kind of music have as much to do with shaping the zeitgeist as the reverse, and in other cases the connection seems harder to defend. Is N’Sync really doing anything that New Kids on the Block didn’t? Probably not, but we all know that NKOTB are passe. That’s a caricaturish example, but it’s often hard to see what new popular band are bringing to the table that wasn’t present in older (better) bands. The appeal of this explanation for me is largely based on personal evidence: a lot of my favorite music isn’t stuff I spend much time talking about or even listening to with other people. Sure, if folks are over, they’re apt to hear my music, and I may even suggest the occasional album to someone, but mostly when I’m out with other people, I settle (within limits) for what’s playing, and put on what I really like when at home alone. And yet I still end up buying a disproportionate number of albums recorded in the last five or ten years.

The explanation I’d imagine Cowen favors, given what he wrote, and one I find pretty plausible as well, is the “Red Queen explanation” (after Matt Ridley’s book of the same name). You see this more directly and more quickly with hip places. Some joint is discovered by early adopters, word gets out that it’s the place to be, and before long, the early adopters have moved on to someplace less crowded with riff-raff. (You see the same thing happen with neighborhoods: Williamsburg became cool when rents in the Village started rising, pushed up by moneyed hip-seekers, and the center of gravity is probably shifting again now. On face, this explanation really works better with indie music, where a band’s relative obscurity is a sort of badge of honor, at least for the fans, than with mainstream pop. Nobody who’s digging on the top-ten videos on MTV can imagine they’re part of some sort of exclusive club. But then, exclusivity is relative. Maybe the object is to include as many of your peer-group as possible while

Finally there’s the “planned obsolesence” explanation, wherein hegemonic record companies (or MTV, or whomever) manipulate our tastes to keep us buying new albums. There’s some precedent for this one: according to Grant McCracken, the whole idea of annual “fashion” first arose centuries ago as a means of keeping French and British aristocrats dependent upon the Crown. Nobles had to keep in close contact with the court to see what was au courant for the purposes of peer competition, and perhaps more importantly, often had to put themselves in debt to the king or queen to sustain lavish expenditures on new wardrobes each year. But this one doesn’t work quite as well for music. Sure, it’s obvious that labels manufacture stars, but it’d surely be more cost effective to play a cyclical strategy here, creating new demand periodically for the existing recordings of old artists, or at least new albums from established artists already signed. But given the constraints imposed by the other theories, that may not be an option. If we assume those constraints, then something like this may play at least a partial explanatory role.

So that’s four partial explanations, but I’ve probably missed a few. Comments welcome.