Category: music

“For Yamaha, the artist’s center is the ultimate marketing tool combined with research and development. Malone’s crew will offer their free services exclusively to top artists, from a simple tune-up to completely overhauling instruments or designing new ones. And by putting its instruments in prominent musician’s hands, the Japanese company hopes to attract aspiring music students to the brand.”

“Professional musicians face many of the same issues that we do concerning fair compensation for the use of their work in new media,” the Writers Guild said in a statement, adding that it made the decision “in the interest of advancing our goal of achieving a fair contract.”

A new study says “the music business in Chicago generates $1 billion a year and employs 53,000 people, ranking behind only New York and Los Angeles and dwarfing smaller but more celebrated music towns such as New Orleans, Nashville, Memphis and Austin.” So why does the report also say Chicago is “a music city in hiding”?

“New York’s complicated new-music scene is thriving: Here, and in an assortment of other non-concert halls where ticket prices are modest, the dress code is scruffy and the vibe is one of curiosity rather than reverence. A musically voracious crowd packs into bars, Tribeca art galleries, raw performance spaces in Brooklyn, and ad hoc rooms with folding chairs.”

“I think altogether today there is an exaggeration in the industry. Of course it is not doing that well, but look at us, we have flat revenues, a good two digit margins and it’s not as dark as what many people describe.”

“North Korea’s State Symphony Orchestra may be planning to play three concerts in Britain this September, its largest tour to date.”

“They have conditioned audiences to expect an inhuman degree of performance accuracy, comparable to what a recording studio’s editing team can produce by patching together the best moments from multiple takes. Critics, meanwhile, judge performances by the degree of textual fidelity to the ‘urtext’ — a score that tries to reproduce the composer’s original intent.”

Filed two years ago, the suit alleged that a violinist in the orchstra, Peter Kaman, endured “emotional distress arising out of hostile environment and harassment … over a long and extended period of time.” Kaman Says he’ll appeal.

Global digital sales grew by around 40 percent in 2007 but this was not enough to offset the sharp fall in CD sales, meaning the overall market is expected to be down around 10 percent for 2007.

“While other leading opera companies, notably the Metropolitan Opera and San Francisco Opera, are expanding into movie theater broadcasts, bringing in directors from film and the legitimate theater, commissioning new works and generally pushing the envelope of innovation, Lyric gives every appearance of being locked into the status quo.”