Music 4 Econ: https://music4econ.com/

economics educators at all levels


Introduction
Using music to teach economics has a long history, and for good reason (see Tinari andKhandke, 2000, Lawson, Hall and and Hall, et al. 1 (2008), Raeshler (2010) and McClough and Heinfeldt (2012). The lyrics of many songs contain economic references waiting to be appropriated by teachers. To this end, a number of web pages that catalog music related to economics have been developed, including Broadway Economics, Dirk Mateer.com, Econ Gone Country, and Economics Media Library. In this note, we present a new contribution to the available webpages housing economics related music: Music4Econ (M4E) www.music4econ.com. What differentiates the M4E site is that no other website provides a "How to Teach" section. In this section of the website, we provide short descriptions for nine of the songs in the M4E catalog along with specific review questions for each selection. Furthermore, while most of the songs on the M4E site (and all the songs on the previously mentioned sites) are English-language, we have also included songs performed in Bahasa-Indonesian, French, German, Hindi, Korean, Mandarin, and Vietnamese. Economic educators have been teaching with pop culture for decades, but the idea of using foreign-language resources to create a more inclusive and diverse classroom has only recently been adopted (Wooten, Geerling, and Calma, 2021;Geerling, Nagy, Rhee and Wooten, 2021).
The M4E site offers a curation of dozens of economics-related musical presentations created by students and faculty from around the world. After clicking on a song's title, users are redirected to the videoclip integrating the song with an economic interpretation of the lyrics. The site can be searched by topic for quick access, or users can click on the "Clips" button to sort through songs by general category: microeconomics, macroeconomics, AP econ/foundations, labor/trade, and personal finance.
The M4E approach is twofold. First, providing an economic analysis of the content of popular music helps instructors show students that economics is not constrained to what they read in a textbook. Second, it provides examples of what students themselves can do. M4E includes a number of studentcreated projects resulting from an assignment used in our classrooms since 2005 (see Geerling, Mateer and O'Roark, 2019). By applying the concepts learned during a course, students are actively engaged in putting their knowledge into practice.
What makes music a particularly effective teaching tool is that song lyrics can address a multitude of different economic topics across a myriad of genres. This is demonstrated by the publication of multiple papers explaining how music can be used to teach economics. Papers have been written targeting particular songs (Krasnozhon, 2013), Broadway shows (Rousu and Conrad, 2017) various genres (Melichar, 2018;O'Roark, Holder and Mateer, 2018;Roussu, 2016;Wooten, Geerling, and Calma, 2021), and even student-created music based projects (Al-Bahrani, et al., 2017;Holder, et al., 2015;Geerling, et al., 2019). Other work focuses on using music to teach particular courses (Van Horn and Van Horn, 2013; Ben Abdesslem, 2022) and specific topics (Geerling, et al., 2021;Rousu, 2018, Rousu, et al. 2021. As most students have at least a passing familiarity with, if not a love for, music, this medium can work to highlight economic concepts in a context that is familiar for most students. Moreover, because music is universal, it stretches across cultural divides. Add to this that most songs can be played in two to four minutes, so they don't require a lot of class time, and we have a compact yet powerful teaching device.
Based on our conversations with teachers who have used music from the site, some play a clip before class as students are filtering into the room to extend teaching time, while some play a clip at the beginning of class as a warmup. Others use the clips to break up a lesson, playing the song and asking questions about how specific lyrics apply to economics. Others assign the video building project to students as either an extra credit opportunity or as a graded assignment. A link to a how-to guide for this project is provided on the home page of M4E.
As economics teachers, we all agree that econ is everywhere. We hope Music for Econ will reinforce this for you and your students. Enjoy!