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Will The Big Five Recording Companies Become The Big Three?

The recording industry is talking merger again. In this shrinking market, the savings that might be squeezed from a merger offer a lifeline. In the past, European regulators have been an obstacle, repeatedly blocking mergers among the big five record companies—Vivendi’s Universal Music, Sony Music, EMI, AOL Time Warner’s Warner Music, and Bertelsmann’s BMG—which between them control 70% of the global recorded-music market. In 2000, they blocked a merger of Warner and EMI by imposing heavy divestment conditions. They stopped EMI marrying BMG even before a formal proposal was tabled.” But with the industry’s current woes, the merger proposition might get a more sympathetic hearing.

Houston Symphony To Musicians: Take Pay Cut Or We’ll make You Take It

The Houston Symphony said Monday that “the organization is dealing with a ‘flat-out crisis’ in its finances and the 97 musicians need to accept an average 7.4 percent pay cut. The players have until Saturday to decide or risk having the society impose the cut, which it has authority to do under U.S. labor law. Musicians still would have the right to strike.”

Broadway-In-A-Can?

The consequences of a musicians strike on Broadway could be big. “There are about 325 musicans working in the 19 musicals running on Broadway, but overall the shows are responsible for most of the 6,000 people employed by the industry each season. The theatre scene is responsible for $4.4 billion (US) pouring into N.Y.’s economy.” So the shows are practicing using canned music in case musicians walk later this week. Reports are that “aasts of shows such as ‘Chicago’ and ‘Thoroughly Modern Millie’ had no trouble in performing to the canned music. Over at ‘La Boheme’, however, it was a different story, with the rehearsal coming to a disastrous halt. Whereas it’s one thing to perform a tap routine to pre-recorded sound, singing Puccini is obviously another matter.”

Cleaning Up London’s West End

A couple of months ago Charles Spencer wrote a column complaining that London’s West End had seriously deteriorated and that the area was so rundown it was discouraging theatre-goers from going to the theatre. “It is too early to talk of a Broadway-like renaissance of the West End,” he writes now. “A zero-tolerance crackdown on vagrancy, loutish drunks and aggressive begging in the West End is urgently required.” But things seem to be getting better…

CBC Funding – Down? Up? Who Knows?

When the Canadian government announced this year’s budget for the CBC last week, it looked as though the national broadcaster was in line for a $50 million cut. Then Heritage minister Sheila Copps indicated that with supplemental funding, the CBC would be funded at an all-time high. Then a couple more budget figures came out, and clarifications failed to make things less cloudy. So will the CBC be getting more or less money? Unclear – even the CBC itself seems bewildered…

Keith Haring, The Musical

“Radiant Baby” the new musical about the life of artist Keith Haring, opens on Broadway. Nice try, but “the show never brings either Haring or his world into crisp focus, relying instead on a blurry shorthand of artist-bio clichés (the agony, the ecstasy, the egomania, the triumph of the creative spirit) and composite social archetypes. Haring’s insistently vital art is so spectacularly in evidence — thanks to the splendid projection designs of Batwin and Robin Productions — which only underscores the musical’s limitations.”

Who Will Get To Control Innovation?

Has “digital rights management” which allows copyright holders to control access to their work, gone too far, choking off innovation? And is public access to the airwaves something that should be open or should the broadcast band be tightly owned and managed? Two conferences in California last week chewed over increasingly complicated issues of control of ideas and innovation.

Can Menaker Rescue Random House?

Newly-hired Random House chief Daniel Menaker is “charged with preserving the glow of literary prestige around the imprint, which published William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, Truman Capote and a long shelf of 20th-century American classics. But to do it he also needs to revive its editors’ flagging morale while proving that he can work well reporting to Ms. Centrello and that he can keep important authors.” Is he really up for the job?

Did American Investigation Of Nazi Looted Art Fail Its Task?

A Clinton commission investigating Nazi-looted art, did not do an adequate job, and overlooked solid leads, says some scholars. “Objections to the panel’s work were so strong that some staff members said they contemplated writing a minority report. Their comments, and similar ones from leading experts in the field, were not publicly expressed when the commission reported its findings. Now critics say the commission was a lost opportunity to determine how much Nazi looted art flowed through America.