Category: music

There’s been a surge in copyright claims ever since Marvin Gaye’s family sued Robin Thicke over the single Blurred Lines in 2015. “The odds of getting sued in this day and age are so high, we’re going to get to a point where nobody can write anything – because everything will be derivative of something else. – BBC

Perhaps. The music festival, planned to commemorate the iconic original fifty years ago, has been plagued by financing and organizational issues. But after a favorable court ruling and new partners, organizers say it’s on again. – New York Magazine

Music streaming services such as Spotify and Apple have notoriously bad interfaces for classical music. The problem is meta-data, the absence of which makes it difficult to properly search. Now Idagio, “launched in the United States and Canada last fall, is a new streaming service focusing solely on classical recordings—but focusing on doing it right.” – Vogue

This music story has more sports metaphors than most sports stories, but let’s just run with it: Lang Lang got injured and could only perform one of the five concertos, and now, ‘four pianists are pinch-hitting: Conrad Tao, Beatrice Rana, Yulianna Avdeeva and Javier Perianes.” The LA Times spoke with all of them to find out how they’re handling this unexpected experience. – Los Angeles Times

Let’s start with the most contentious thing: Iceland, whose song seemed popular on Twitter, displayed Palestinian flags while live cameras were on the band during voting. The contest was held in Tel Aviv this year, and that did not go over well with Eurovision officials. – BBC

“The combination of necessary professional arrogance, high hopes, and even bigger disappointment has allowed conspiracy theories to gain currency among the musicians who feel cheated by Evangelista.”  – Van

The UK-Based PledgeMusic owes hundreds of thousands of dollars to artists and labels, many of them independents operating on small margins. An untold number of fans have also been shortchanged, because the projects they invested in remain unfinished, or caught in limbo. “There have been no good outcomes here,” Benji Rogers, a co-founder and former CEO of PledgeMusic, wrote last week in an open letter, “and I cannot bear that something that I created to benefit artists and fans has caused so much pain to so many people.” – NPR

The rising young maestra was about to make her Montreal Symphony debut on May 15 when she and the orchestra got word that pianist Daniil Trifonov, the soloist for the concerto that formed the entire second half of the program, had just been taken to the hospital. So, as one of the musicians posted afterward on Facebook, “We performed Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony. Cold. No rehearsing. In front of 2,000 ish people.” – CBC

The Song Company, a chamber group that has been performing repertoire from the medieval to the brand-new for 35 years, abruptly announced that it is entering (as it’s called in Australia) Voluntary Administration. While the ensemble’s board hopes to stave off liquidation and reorganize, all scheduled concerts after this weekend are cancelled. – The Sydney Morning Herald