“A company called Lyric Culture is earning piles of money by sticking song lyrics onto expensive jeans and t-shirts – and the musicians benefit too. This is about generating new revenue streams for musicians. The record companies take a piece of the tour and the merchandise, but they can’t take a piece of this.”
Category: music
What Do National Anthems Tell You About A Country?
“Anthems reflect state power, and the powerful like their music somber, dignified and stern. St. Kitts and Nevis, the Caribbean island nation, is an exception. Listen to its almost-jaunty melody, and you just know they aren’t planning to invade anyone soon.”
CD Sales Collapse In Australia
CD album sales were down 8.5 per cent in the first six months of the year compared with the same period last year. And in an indication of profit squeeze being felt throughout the industry, revenue from those album sales fell almost 11 per cent.”
The Self-Made Music Career In The Digital Age
Jonathan Coulton’s “fans are so devoted, so involved and so technologically advanced that they create videos to his mostly folk rock songs and post them on YouTube. Coulton releases all his music under Creative Commons, a license that allows for the sharing of material. “It’s great to have someone say, ‘I love your songs,’ ” he says. “It’s even better to have them say, ‘Here’s a music video I made. I spent hours and hours putting this together.’ ”
Jackson Browne Sues John McCain For Using Song In Campaign
“Browne, a regular fixture on the Democratic front, says that he’s ‘incensed’ by McCain’s use of the song, which falsely creates a perception that he endorses the Arizona senator’s campaign, according to the copyright-infringement lawsuit filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles.”
Valery Gergiev, Grand Commissioner Of New Opera
“Recently Gergiev has exercised his enormous power at the Mariinsky to enthusiastically uncork an area that had seemed deadened by the loss of the vast Soviet theatre subsidies: new Russian opera. Shchedrin’s was commissioned by Lorin Maazel for New York, but back home Gergiev has ordered up no fewer than five new Russian operas for the Mariinsky – a feat of commissioning on a Tsarist scale.”
Dudamel Represents A Challenge To Classical Music
“Conductor Gustavo Dudamel, the product of an extraordinary Venezuelan music education system, is not only the hottest property in classical music at the moment, he also provides its chief source of hope. In short, Dudamel offers British orchestras – and the Arts Council – a number of urgent challenges; challenges that need to be addressed by a musical scene that, at its worst, can be grey, dull and mediocre.”
Opera Composer Accused Of Promoting Terrorism Speaks Out
“It seemed to me that the essence of our civilisation hung in the balance as, one by one, those values by which I thought we were defined – freedom of the individual, habeas corpus, the right to privacy, the right to jury trial – came under attack from our own governments. Little did I expect that the very mode of response, our opera Manifest Destiny, could provoke a reaction that would directly confront us with these new legal problems.”
Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame To Expand To New York
“The 25,000-square-foot annex, at 76 Mercer Street, will be the museum’s first expansion outside Cleveland and will include exhibitions on Hall of Fame inductees and on the history of rock in New York. It will also house temporary and traveling exhibitions from the Cleveland headquarters, museum officials said.”
So What’s There To This Conductor Business Anyway?
“How hard it can it be? A 70-piece ensemble is waiting expectantly for my downbeat for the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth. What kind of a maestro should I be? The conductor is, after all, not the karaoke conduit I have been play-acting for years. He is mentor, scholar, motivator, interpreter, leader, follower, idol. He is all of those and none, a cryptic figurehead who can mean everything or nothing depending on what he brings to the performance.”