“There are an estimated 45 billion free music downloads happening annually, compared to around 360 million annual paid downloads. How to convert more of the free downloads to paid? Lower the price. How about five cents a song? “It’s certainly better than the system we have right now. If you charge five cents for 45 billion annual downloads, it’s a lot better than nothing.”
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Broadway Tix Get Yet More Expensive
Forget about family-friendly pricing. The price of the top Broadway theatre tickets, which shot past the $100 threshold four years ago when Producers mania was in full swing, has risen again, to a top price of $110 for popular shows like Spamalot and Wicked. The average ticket price on Broadway now sits somewhere north of $60.
Paris’s Gehry Gets A New Life
To read many of the stories written about Frank Gehry these days, you’d think that one of his buildings was all that was required for a destitute city to leap into the forefront of global metropolises. But in Paris (which gets along just fine on its own merits,) the one Gehry-designed structure has sat abandoned for a decade, “a sad monument to a failed American dream. It was planned as a new headquarters for the American Center of Paris, which was founded in 1931 and had long drawn crowds to its rambling Left Bank home as a place to discover American culture and to learn English. But the dream of a dazzling image went sour. The new center opened in June 1994 – and closed just 19 months later… Now, thanks to the French government, the building has begun a new life, this time as the headquarters of the Cinémathèque Française.”
iPod Porn? Not Bloody Likely
Admit it, men. When Apple rolled out the video iPod last week, your first thought (possibly your second, after “who would possibly need such a thing?”) was, “I wonder if that baby is porn-capable?” After all, every other new technology eventually seems to become fodder for the frighteningly large adult-entertainment industry, so why not the little jukebox that could? Well, don’t hold your breath. “With a couple of exceptions, porno producers are in no hurry to provide stag movies for the iPod, thanks to fears of a public outcry and a government crackdown.”
Ravel & The Deaf Man
Michael Chorost would like to listen to Ravel’s Boléro. But since 2001, when the last of his already feeble hearing left him lost in a soundless world, he hasn’t been able to. Chorost has been a guinea pig at the forefront of the cochlear implant industry, which uses surgical implants and computer technology to allow deaf people to “hear” by stimulating certain parts of their nervous system. But while such technology can allow the deaf to decode human speech, music is a wholly different (and far more complex) matter. Still, Chorost is a determined music lover, and years of trial and error eventually lead him to a breakthrough. “It’s like going from being able to tell the difference between red and blue to being able to distinguish between aquamarine and cobalt.”
Florida Orch Flush With Cash
The Tampa-based Florida Orchestra this week reported a $323,789 surplus on a budget of just over $9 million for the fiscal year that ended June 30. The orchestra’s ticket sales amounted to 38% of its overall revenue, which is low in comparison to the rest of the industry, but contributed income was robust, to say the least. Also significant is that “the orchestra finished in the black in a year when the board and musicians agreed on a new labor contract that boosted musicians’ pay by about 5 percent over the previous year.”
See Edinburgh Wirelessly
The city of Edinburgh is planning to put a wireless system in place so tourists could get “wireless tours” of the city on their mobile phones and hand-held computers. “The service, which could be in place as early as next summer, would help tourists pre-plan their visits and also provide regular messages updating them about events taking place in the capital.”
Broadway – Where Are The Latinos?
Few Latinos attend Broadway shows. “Despite many mainstream companies’ frantic attempts to cater to the booming Latino market, Broadway remains overwhelmingly non-Hispanic. Though the number of Broadway-going Hispanics during the 2004-5 season was the highest since the League of American Theaters and Producers began such surveys, they still made up just 5.7 percent of the total. They account for 12.5 percent of the United States population, according to the latest report of the United States Bureau of the Census.” Now some producers are trying some unorthodox marketing to build that audience.
Canadian Artists: More Money Please
Canadian artists are lobbying the federal government to increase arts funding to a rate of $5 per capita per year. The group has asked that any new arts money be directed to the Canada Council for the Arts, which supports 2,200 arts organizations and more than 2,000 individual artists. The council invests $156 million in the arts each year; but the coalition wants to double that amount. An increasing number of arts organizations and individual artists are requesting money from the council as Canada’s artistic community gets more diverse.”
Calatrava Towers
Santiago Calatrava is “the most crowd-pleasing architect since Frank Gehry. His work, too, is dazzling and emotionally engaging. And, just as Gehry exploited the trend of museum building in the nineteen-nineties, Calatrava has aligned himself with the latest architectural fashion: bespoke luxury-apartment towers.”