Imagine you’re at a club, or in a concert hall, completely engrossed in a performance. As a music consumer, you are at your most susceptible in situations like these, but promoters and musicians have rarely been able to take advantage of your concertgoing euphoria, because they have no way of selling you a piece of the live music experience to take home. But a bar in New Jersey is becoming one of several testing grounds for a new digital kiosk which allows audience members to plug in and download a digital recording of the show they just saw, almost immediately after it ends. It’s “the next step in instant audio gratification,” and the possibilities for its use seem to be limitless.
Blog
Writers’ Trust Awards Announced
The Writers’ Trust of Canada has handed out its annual awards, with the coveted lifetime achievement prize going to British Columbia-based author Audrey Thomas. The prize, valued at CAN$20,000, is one of the most lucrative in the country. Other winners included Kevin Patterson, for his short-story collection Country of Cold, and Brian Fawcett for his non-fiction work Virtual Clearcut: Or, the Way Things Are in My Hometown.
There’s No Point Trying To Please Everyone
“The Canada Council yesterday announced the recipients of this year’s Governor-General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts: visual artists Iain Baxter, Eric Cameron, Garry Neill Kennedy and Ian Wallace; sound and performance artists John Oswald and Istvan Kantor; and museum director and First Nations cultural activist Tom Hill. Now the discussion will begin. Is it a good list? Is it a fair list? The G-Gs seems to be the one place where you can never make everybody happy.”
Ravinia Looks Inward For Its Centenary
Illinois’s Ravinia Festival is celebrating its 100th birthday this summer, and organizers have created a season designed to call everyone’s attention to that fact. “The nation’s oldest music festival will surround the resident Chicago Symphony Orchestra with programs and activities — 100 nights in all — that look back to Ravinia’s origins in 1904 as a ‘high-class amusement park,’ its early reign as the summer opera capital of the world, and its subsequent history as a major international center of music, dance and theater.”
Reading Gibson’s Passion
“Obscured by the furor surrounding Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ is one relatively mundane bit of trivia: Last week’s debut marked the widest release ever of a subtitled film in North America. The subtitles were actually Plan B. Gibson originally intended to show the movie without them, letting the sound of the Aramaic, Hebrew and Latin — not to mention the spattering blood — speak for itself.” In addition, the scholar who was in charge of creating the dialogue confesses that he threw in a few intentional inaccuracies, some for artistic reasons, and some just for a laugh.
The Naxos Future
The founder of Naxos records says that classical music isn’t dying at all. In fact, Klaus Heymann thinks that the only part of the industry that will fall by the wayside in the future is the part made up of musicians, managers, and union bosses who can’t see past the end of their own noses enough to notice that the old formulas for such essentials as recording no longer work. Heymann envisions a future in which the concert experience is more informal, the musicians of a major symphony orchestra are contractually bound to work in area schools and play at local weddings, and recordings are made cheaply and quickly.
Finding The Silver Lining
Cleveland’s proposed “arts tax” went down to defeat at the polls this week, but arts advocates in the area say that they were encouraged by the level of support the idea received, and are looking into other innovative ways of increasing the level of public support for the city’s cultural scene. “One strategy under consideration is asking Ohio lawmakers to permit counties to increase user fees such as the real-estate conveyance tax on land sales. Another is to persuade lawmakers to allow counties… whose major municipality has a population under 500,000 people to establish countywide arts districts and levy property-tax increases to support them.”
CSO Musicians Won’t Beg Barenboim
Following a meeting between the musicians of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the CSO’s executive director and board chairman, the musicians have voted not to hold a referendum on whether to ask outgoing music director Daniel Barenboim to reconsider his resignation. The referendum, which would have amounted to a vote of confidence in Barenboim, and an indirect vote of no confidence in board members who were reportedly dissatisfied with him, was pushed by a handful of musicians loyal to Barenboim, but there were fears that it could have driven a wedge between different factions of the CSO organization.
What Is Piracy, Anyway?
Lost amid all the bluster over intellectual property and illegal file-swapping is the undeniable fact that a large part of America’s cultural history wouldn’t exist without some form of piracy. The film and recording industries got their start through the work of individuals skirting the edges of copyright and patent law, and radio still operates under a bizarre set of rules in which authors and composers are paid for the right to broadcast their work, but performers aren’t. Is online file-swapping really any worse than any of these practices?
A Right To Privacy, So Long As You’re A Kid
“Two lawmakers introduced a bill in the U.S. Senate Wednesday to prohibit corporations from selling the personal information of children under the age of 16 without their parents’ consent. Senators Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) and Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) introduced the Children’s Listbroker Privacy Act to limit the sale of personally identifiable information for purposes of marketing to children, as part of a larger package of legislation intended to help parents combat commercial attacks on their children.”