Category: music

Legal music downloads will soon surpass illegal downloads. “Around 35% of music consumers now download tracks legally via the Internet and the percentage will soon pass the 40% who have pirated music, according to a new survey released Monday by Entertainment Media Research.”

Short on money, Houston Grand Opera is considering cutting back on many of its activities next year, including some free performances and broadcasts…

London’s Covent Garden has come up with a solution to a costly moth problem. “In a plot that could have come from an opera, males attempt to mate with the false females, but do not succeed. Until the new pheromone traps were pioneered by Exosect, a company with close links to Southampton University, moths were costing the Royal Opera House tens of thousands of pounds a year. The worst affected are ballet dancers’ costumes, which get engrained with sweat, clothes moths’ favourite taste.”

The St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and the University of Minnesota have teamed up to take a different approach to training musicians. “We’re trying to address the fact that orchestra jobs are changing dramatically in the 21st century. The demands that are being placed on members of orchestras, the breadth of musical skills, the scope of interpersonal skills they have to bring, the score of entrepreneurial skills they need, are vastly different from the expectations of 25 to 30 years ago.”

That’s the hope of Bob Geldof and his amazing international music fest. But is this kind of concert activism of any use? “He is in danger of becoming one of the leaders of Compassion Lite, where people in the West, especially young people in the West, get to announce their compassion very cheaply, for the price of a wristband or a concert ticket or a plastic cup, without any meaningful demand on them to change their lives or look into their hearts.”

“Seventy-five years after Arthur Fielder took over the Boston Pops and turned it into the most famous and influential series of its kind, pops concerts are very different. Increasingly, in Boston and elsewhere, pops means Rockapella, medleys of TV themes, Doc Severinsen, celebrity crooners doing music from last year’s blockbuster movie. It means what Richard Dyer, the Boston Globe’s classical music critic since 1975, calls ‘the hits of 25 or 30 years ago — the favorites of the target audience, when young’.”

Oboist Blair Tindall says she has figured out how getting jobs works out in the classical music world. “Tindall claims that sex played a decisive role in her musical career. She says she was simultaneously involved with three leading New York oboists — two married — who gave her work in their orchestras. One had a maxim: ‘The section that lays together plays together’.”

A “successful” violinist in a small town in the western US decides to give up music. “There are too many music schools and departments, and too many string players being trained as it is. Could I live with myself by pandering to the dreams of young and blissfully unaware musicians? Even if I were to be offered a tenure-track position at a music department, I would face some moral dilemmas about doing the job. I know that I would be under pressure to recruit string students to fill my studio and the school symphony, thus ensuring my own position. But how could I do that knowing the abysmal state of the job market?”

In 1989, 83 million cassettes were sold in the UK. Last year only 900,000 were sold. But in some other countries cassettes are the preferred format. “In some markets, performers record directly onto cassette. Turkey still sells 88 million cassettes a year, India 80 million, and that cassettes account for 50% of sales in these countries. In Saudi Arabia, it is 70%.

The New Mexico Symphony Orchestra has been negotiating with its musicians on a new contract for a year, but the 2004-05 season has now ended with little progress. Could there be a strike? “Since 1995, the salary for the NMSO executive director has gone up by more than 65 percent, and expenses for administration and production personnel have increased by more than 100 percent. Yet most of the orchestra’s 35 core players earn an annual salary that’s less than what they were paid in 1992.”