In what may be a new trend in corporate cross-promotional synergy, large companies like Best Buy and Ameriquest are offering customers who subscribe to special promotional e-mails first crack at tickets to some of the hottest arena rock concerts of the season. “Typically, bands give their fan-club members a chance to buy tickets a few days before the general public.” But rewarding those who buy a new DVD player with early access to unrelated concert tickets has some fans steaming.
Author: sbergman
Music Industry Coming After Online Sheet Music
The next round of the ongoing war over free (and illegal) music online may not have anything to do with MP3s. The distribution of sheet music and guitar tablatures over the internet has become a widespread practice, and “a concerted legal effort in the United States, which is about to gather pace, could spell the beginning of the end for free music on the Web.”
Husband Admits Being Behind Hatto CD Fakes
After initially denying involvement, the widower of pianist Joyce Hatto has admitted to passing off recordings of other pianists as hers in the years leading up to her death. “He said he wanted to give her the illusion of a great end to an ‘unfairly overlooked career.'”
Piano, Plagiarism, & Personality
Denis Dutton says that the scandal over Joyce Hatto’s years of plagiarized piano recordings reveals much about the problems of objective music criticism. “Music isn’t just about sound; it is about achievement in a larger human sense. If you think an interpretation is by a 74-year-old pianist at the end of her life, it won’t sound quite the same to you as if you think it’s by a 24-year-old piano-competition winner who is just starting out. Beyond all the pretty notes, we want creative engagement and communication from music, we want music to be a bridge to another personality.”
Roth Picks Up Faulkner Award
“Philip Roth has won yet another literary prize, this time the PEN/Faulkner award for Everyman, his short, bleak novel about illness and mortality.”
Oh, So It’s Henry Miller’s Fault That You Don’t Like Him
Literary critics, particularly those with blogs, have seemingly been shaken loose from the traditional need to bow and scrape at the altar of the classics. Some find this to be a positive development – after all, why should everyone have to love Chaucer? But Stephen Moss says that it amounts to the dumbing down of what should be a serious examination of literature, and shows a distinct lack of intellectual curiosity.
Using Theatre To Attack The UK’s Societal Gaps
“The working class no longer has any strategic presence in British politics – it was defeated in the 1980s and no parliamentary party is its champion. Nothing on the political horizon will make a significant difference to its relative conditions of existence.” So say two British playwrights, who decided to make the growing class gap, and those who have created and perpetuated it, the subject of their latest work. “Today, theatre, rather than parliament, is one of the places where politics is being rediscovered.”
Murdoch’s Empire May Have To Keep Its Hand Off ITV
British authorities have launched an investigation into the purchase of a significant stake in the ITV network by media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s satellite TV company, BSkyB. The cabinet minister in charge of the investigation says that the purchase “”raises public interest concerns about the number of different owners of media enterprises,” but BSkyB officials are said to be furious at the apparent effort to block their expansion.
African Film Fest Opens Amid Industry “Crisis”
Fespaco, Africa’s largest and most successful film festival, has opened its 19th season in Ouagadougou, the capital city of Burkina Faso. “Cinemas have been closing in many African countries, leading the monthly magazine Continental to describe the African film industry as ‘in crisis’. For many involved in the film industry, Fespaco has become a hugely important event.”
As If A Dutch Grease Wasn’t Bizarre Enough
A Dutch production of the musical Grease went horribly awry in Amsterdam this weekend, when a car carrying the two leads in a key scene went out of control and slammed into the orchestra pit. Both actors were injured, although not critically. None of the orchestra musicians were hurt. The whole sorry episode will presumably be up on YouTube in the next day or so…