Why did Bach work for patrons, Beethoven organize his own concerts, and Brahms rely on publishers? We develop a framework showing when creators rely on patronage, self-organization, or market intermediation to bring works to audiences. Copyright, coordination costs, and contract enforcement influenced these choices in classical music history and still shape creative markets today.
In December 1808, Ludwig van Beethoven rented the Theater an der Wien for a concert featuring his Fifth and Sixth Symphonies. He hired the musicians, organized the rehearsals, sold the tickets, and managed the four-hour program in an unheated hall. Seventy years later, Johannes Brahms premiered his First Symphony with an established orchestra and relied on a professional publisher to print and circulate it. Both men composed symphonies, but they brought their music to audiences in completely different ways. Why?
A work of art generates little value unless it reaches audiences. A composer may write a string quartet, but the work must still be performed, published, and disseminated. A painter may finish a canvas, but it must be exhibited, promoted, and sold. Creative production does not end with creation. It also requires realization: the activities that bring a work to the public and allow its value to be captured. The Nobel prize-winning economist Ronald Coase famously asked why some activities are organized inside firms while others are left to markets. We pose a related question: once a creative work has been produced, who organizes the activities that bring it to audiences—an employer, the creator, or outside intermediaries?
Our paper examines this question through Western classical composers. It develops a framework for thinking about how creative production is organized after the work itself has been created. In some settings, realization occurred through hierarchical employment (patronage): a court, church, or patron paid the composer a salary and organized performances, copying, and rehearsals. In other settings, composers organized realization themselves, retaining control but bearing the coordination costs of renting halls, hiring musicians, arranging performances, and controlling publication. In still others, they delegated these tasks to specialized intermediaries such as publishers, impresarios, orchestras, and concert organizations.
These different organizational forms are visible in the lives of major classical composers. Bach worked largely within court and church hierarchies, where salaried employment and patronage structured the realization of his music. Beethoven relied heavily on self-organization, arranging major performances himself and carefully controlling when and where his works diffused. Brahms operated in a more mature world of publishers, orchestras, and concert organizations where many of these activities could be delegated to specialized intermediaries. Figure 1 traces these trends from 1400-2000 using composers’ career changes documented in Grove Music Online. It shows hierarchical employment declining (Patronage), market intermediation rising (Market), and self-organization (Integration) persisting throughout.
Figure 1: Long run trends in composers’ organizational forms
What explains these long-run patterns? Once specialized intermediaries emerged, one might expect them to dominate. Publishers, impresarios, and concert organizers often had better networks, better access to audiences, and more experience with dissemination than individual creators. But specialization alone was not enough. Delegation worked only when creators could be compensated sufficiently for surrendering control. When copyright protection was weak, future revenues were hard to appropriate, or intermediaries were financially constrained, creators often preferred other arrangements. This helps explain why market intermediation expanded over time without fully displacing patronage or self-organization.
Our framework highlights a simple tradeoff. Fixed-fee contracts provide intermediaries with strong incentives, because they keep the full payoff from additional realization effort. But such contracts may be hard to finance when future revenues are uncertain or difficult to capture. Revenue-sharing can make delegation more feasible by reducing the need for large up-front payments, but it also weakens incentives, because intermediaries capture only part of the gains from extra realization effort. Delegation, in short, involves a tradeoff between feasible compensation and efficient realization.
The value of the work also matters. Some works reach larger audiences, support repeated performances, or generate broader dissemination. When more is at stake, creators may find it worthwhile to bear the fixed cost of self-organization to capture more of the value and retain greater control. This helps explain why self-organization was attractive for some major works even when delegation was possible in principle.
Another important implication concerns the timing and scope of diffusion. Organizational choice influences not only who organizes realization, but also how quickly and how widely a work is performed, published, or otherwise disseminated. Creators and intermediaries may value these margins differently. Intermediaries may favor earlier or broader diffusion to monetize the work more quickly. Creators, by contrast, may prefer slower or more selective dissemination if early diffusion reduces future revenues, weakens control, or increases exposure to imitation, copying, or piracy.
A related implication is performance before publication: creators may prefer to realize value through performance while delaying wider dissemination that would make works easier to copy or harder to monetize. Mozart premiered many of his piano concertos in subscription concerts in Vienna before publishing the scores, capturing performance rents while the works were still novel. Beethoven similarly controlled manuscript circulation and delayed publication until key performances had occurred.
The same organizational questions shape contemporary creative markets. Taylor Swift’s decision to re-record her early albums illustrates this problem in action. Unable to reclaim ownership of her masters, she chose to bear the costs of re-recording to capture more of the work’s value—essentially choosing integration over delegation when contracts could not transfer sufficient surplus. Comparable tradeoffs appear across creative industries, as authors weigh self-publication against traditional publishers, musicians choose between artist-owned labels and major companies, and filmmakers decide whether to release independently or through studios. The details have changed, but the underlying organizational problem has not. The economic logic that guided composers from Buxtehude to Bruckner remains central to understanding how creative production is organized today.
About the article
Borowiecki, Karol J., and Marc T. Law. “Creators as Firms: The Organization of Creative Production.” Journal of Cultural Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10824-026-09588-y
About the authors
Karol J. Borowiecki is a Professor of Economics at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense, Denmark.
Marc T. Law is a Professor of Economics at the University of Vermont in Burlington, Vermont, USA.
About the image
Left image: A Beethoven piano sonata autograph score https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e7/Beethoven_Klaviersonate_Nr_30.jpg
Right image: A Beethoven piano sonata first edition https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Beethoven_Hammerklavier_sonata_first_edition.jpg
