What if the music industry could be used as a guide to important principles in business and the economy? It would sure make introductory economics courses more fun. The idea is not as fanciful as it might sound: As Alan Krueger shows in "Rockonomics," music is a microcosm of the wider business world and provides all sorts of insights into today's economy.
Most fundamentally, music embodies the “paradox of value.” We spend a lot of time listening to music — an average of three to four hours a day — and doing so makes us significantly happier. Krueger and Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel-winning behavioral economist, have found, for example, that adding music to an otherwise miserable commute lifts the experience to the average non-commute happiness level.