Category: music

Attempting to combat the lure of piracy, Betelsman is offering three different “classes” of CD’s. “The no-frills version will look virtually identical to a pirate copy, with only the title printed directly on the disc. It will cost €9.99 – about £6.70. The regular version will cost €3 more. It will include a cover and lyrics. A “luxury” version with additional material and video clips will cost €17.99.”

Scottish Opera is facing a shutdown. But the company is considering asking for donations to help it stay active. “The company is debating whether to launch a fundraising drive that would appeal for donors to keep productions up and running. There were fears that, amid headlines of crisis and cutbacks, opera backers might feel their cash would go into a black hole. But regular supporters have already come forward asking how they can help, and a few have sent cheques for hundreds of pounds.”

The 25-year-old Montreal Jazz Festival is one of the world’s great music festivals. “The festival’s sense of its own history is one. As large an enterprise as the event has become — 500 concerts, 10 indoor stages, another 12 on the downtown streets around Place des Arts, attendance approaching two million — it tempers its penchant for grandiosity with a strong sentimental streak.”

Why did Pamenla Rosenberg withdraw from running San Francisco Opera? “What Rosenberg overlooked when she returned to the US after years working in two of Germany’s most avant-garde opera houses was that a European-style artistic policy depends on European-style consistency of funding – some thing the US opera community can never provide.”

On July 5, 1954, Elvis Presley recorded his first single. That’s reason enough for BMG Records, which distributes the Presley catalog, to declare the date as the birthday of rock ‘n roll. “But the marketing blitz, by BMG as well as other companies, reopens a nagging debate: Just when did rock really begin? It’s an issue that has long been tinged with racism, specifically the notion that it took a white man to make it rock ‘n roll, whereas before it was only R&B and what was then described as ‘race music.'”

“Record labels are still vital for many musicians. They get the CD in the bins; they advertise it; they put up the money to produce it in the first place.” But for established artists who are sick of the huge revenue chunk swallowed up by traditional labels, a new do-it-yourself method is emerging, and many artists are willing to put up their own money for production costs in return for having direct control of a web-based distribution network that brings in more eventual revenue.

Are conductors and executives bankrupting American orchestras? Blair Tindall sees a basic conflict between the skyrocketing salaries of those at the top, and the cries of institutional poverty which have led to stagnating musician salaries and increasingly bitter fights between labor and management. It’s true that, of 20 orchestras which settled new musician contracts in the last year, 19 included wage cuts. Still, most musicians don’t seem to be bothered by the high salaries of their bosses, just so long as the conductors and CEOs appear to be earning their pay. But with the industry widely perceived to be in trouble and salaries continuing to climb, those at the top may soon find themselves under fire.

For orchestras like the Boston Symphony, which have revered summer homes like Tanglewood, the long hot months are a celebration of easy revenue and casual concertgoing. But for the New York Philharmonic, which has no regular summer destination, what’s needed to get its home audience into the hall during the second season is constant innovation and, um, snappy slogans? “Welcome to Summertime Classics, the fun new festival of smile-inducing classics performed live for you by your New York Philharmonic, in a lively, colourful and refreshingly casual setting. It’s classics for your favourite sneakers, not your glass slippers.”

“Album sales in the United States for the first half of 2004 are 7 percent ahead of last year’s midway point, putting the recording industry on track to end a three-year slump, according to the Nielsen SoundScan retail tracking service. Sales in the first six months of this year totaled 305.7 million units, compared with 285.9 million from January through June 2003.”