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CD Sales Down Again In First Half Of 2006

CD sales are down in the first half of 2006 by 3.4 percent. Yes downloads are up, but they don’t make up the gap. And “cassettes, are on their way to join vinyl and 8-tracks on Boot Hill. Cassette music sales fell a whopping 54 percent in the first half of 2006, peddling only 632,00 units, compared to the 1.3 million tapes sold in the first two quarters of ’05.”

Kimmelman: New Paris Museum “Brow-snappingly Wrongheaded”

Paris’ new Musee du Quai Branly “simply makes no sense” writes Michael Kimmelman. “Old, new, good, bad are all jumbled together without much reason or explanation, save for visual theatrics. If the Marx Brothers designed a museum for dark people, they might have come up with the permanent-collection galleries: devised as a spooky jungle, red and black and murky, the objects in it chosen and arranged with hardly any discernible logic, the place is briefly thrilling, as spectacle, but brow-slappingly wrongheaded. Colonialism of a bygone era is replaced by a whole new French brand of condescension.”

Is Montreal Really Getting A New Concert Hall?

“This is the seventh time in the past two decades that a Quebec government has promised a new home for the [Montreal Symphony]. One could put together a modest bus tour of all the sites around Montreal that have been touted as the orchestra’s future address. This one will be different… because the plan is clear and the process foolproof. A private developer will design and build a hall to the orchestra’s specifications (1,900 seats, shoebox shape), assume all the risks of construction and pocket $105-million during the course of a 40-year lease by the province. At the end of the lease, the province would own the building.”

Publishing On Your iPod

“Fader magazine has made its entire summer music issue available for download on iTunes, in what it says is a publishing first. The full issue is free to download as a PDF file, which offers a digital copy of every page — article and ads — in the magazine. It’s accompanied by a 47-minute podcast featuring music covered by the magazine. The leap off the page and into an area of the Web typically reserved for audio files is one considered natural by Fader, which has covered emerging music since 1998.”

Turning Porgy Into A Musical

Director Trevor Nunn is turning Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” (the opera) into “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess” (a musical). So why does such a great opera need to be reimagined (or at least repackaged)? “It’s the most sensational, wonderful, wonderful score, and so many of the people in the world know it but they don’t know they know it,” Mr. Nunn said in a telephone interview yesterday from London, where he was attending auditions. The problem, he said, was that the operagoing audience is small.

If All Of America Could See Just 365 Plays…

“From Nov. 13, 2002, to Nov. 12, 2003, Suzan-Lori Parks wrote a short play each day. Now comes ‘365 days/365 plays,’ conceived and produced by Parks and Bonnie Metzgar. Billed as the largest theatrical collaboration in U.S. history, hundreds of theater companies around the nation will team to make sure that each play is staged on its fourth birthday — or at least during its birthday week — starting Nov. 13, 2006.”