Category: music

On Friday, Live Nation ditches its longstanding relationship with Ticketmaster to launch its own ticketing service. Thus “some have floated the possibility that competition will drive ticket prices and extraneous service charges down. Live Nation has no firm plans to lower either….”

“Ticketmaster just moved the fees within the ticket price. All they really said was rather than stand outside, the fees are now going to stand inside the ticket price.”

“According to the theory, Scottish slave owners took the tradition with them to the United States, where it was adopted and developed by slaves, emerging many years later as rap.”

“While people still love music enough to track it down, collect it, argue over it and judge their Facebook friends by it, many see no reason to pay for it. The emerging practical solution is to let music sell something else: a concert, a T-shirt, Web-site pop-up ads or a brand. Musicians have to eat and want to be heard, and if that means accompanying someone else’s sales pitch or videogame, well, it’s a living.”

When the National Arts Centre Orchestra in Canada’s small-ish capital signed such a big star as music director, some observers were more than a little puzzled. “Pinchas Zukerman in Ottawa? Had the great violinist lost his bow arm? Were the tax people pursuing him south of the 49th parallel?” William Littler suggests another reason: the band itself. “‘Just wait until you hear them tonight,’ says the maestro. ‘Listen to their Tchaikovsky!'”

Michael Kellet, a 42-year-old British violinist visiting Chennai (Madras) for a music festival, left two instruments behind on the local mass transit system after falling asleep on a train.

With three of Italy’s 14 major opera houses in receivership and budgets badly stretched at the rest, the upcoming cuts in the nation’s cultural budget are causing serious concern. “There is almost no private support of the arts in Italy – there are no tax incentives to drive that – and the government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi warned months ago that every theater, museum and archeological site had become a luxury.”

At the same time that the orchestra’s board president stepped down this week, executive director Peter Aaronson was let go – because the orchestra couldn’t afford to pay him. “It was not just that my salary [$125K] was overpriced, we had no cash flow to keep the doors open.” Aaronson will not be replaced.

Conductor David Handel has been attracting news coverage in the U.S. for his success at turning the National Symphony Orchestra of Bolivia from a ragtag pops band into a real classical ensemble. A recent public radio feature includes a brief interview with Handel and clips of the NSOB in performance.

“The San Francisco Opera finished its 2007-08 fiscal year with a tiny surplus of $141,377 on an annual operating budget of $72,531,193… ‘We got out of there with our pants on,’ said General Director David Gockley… ‘We were able to cut $1.2 million in expenses, and ticket sales for the fall were only about $100,000 below projections.'”