Category: music

“The Friends of Radio 3 have launched an all-out assault on the station’s controller Roger Wright and the way he has, since he took on the job six years ago, sought to widen its remit. Classical music, they complain, is being sidelined to make way for a trendy cultural cocktail liberally laced with world music and jazz. Now, they say, the Rubicon has been crossed – in the BBC’s statement of programme policy, released last week, the old maxim that “classical music remains at the heart of the [Radio 3] schedule” has been quietly dropped.”

The Canadian Opera Company has released the numbers on its just-completed season, declaring 2003-04 to be one of the company’s best years ever. 114,000 people attended COC productions during the season, bringing in $8 million of gross revenue, a 14% jump over 2002-03. Additionally, subscription sales were up 24%, and are already strong for next season.

Toronto’s Royal Conservatory of Music is more than halfway to its $60 million fundraising goal after announcing a new round of $12 million in donations. The money will go towards a major expansion of the school, including a 1000-seat concert hall. Another announcement is expected in June, which should bring the RCM to 75-80% of goal. The campaign has been so successful that the school recently added $10 million to its goal, and redrew the expansion plans to include more studio and rehearsal space.

The Glastonbury Festival is not where you would generally expect to find fans of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, but the UK rock fest is giving Brunhilde a chance anyway. This June, the English National Opera will travel to Glastonbury with 91 musicians and 11 soloists to perform the third act of Wagner’s “The Valkyries” before an audience of better than 100,000 fans, most of whom likely do not fit the standard profile of the opera enthusiast. For the ENO, it’s a chance to reach out to an untapped (and young) audience; for the festival, it’s just one more way to maintain its reputation as quirky and daring.

With legal music downloading services like iTunes being judged as unqualified successes in the digital marketplace, you would think that the recording industry might finally be coming around to the notion that offering consumers a good deal on pop music is an effective way to build customer loyalty and increase revenue. But industry executives apparently aren’t satisfied with the existing model: not only have they consistently resisted efforts to introduce creative pricing into the download business, they seem determined to raise the standard per-song download cost as quickly as possible.

Recording companies have made a settlement with thousands of musicians to pay outstanding royalties. “The settlement, which amounted to nearly $50 million, was the result of a two-year investigation that found the world’s largest recording companies had failed to maintain contact with many artists and writers and had stopped making required payments to them.” The companies offered “an array of explanations like `we didn’t really pay close attention,’ and none were persuasive legally.”

“For some time, DJs – at first in England and later in the United States and other countries – have been developing a new style of remix, known as mashups, in which two songs are melded together. Often, the resulting track features the melody of one song and the vocals of another. Until recently, mashups had been the province of underground DJs, in part because those doing the remixing hardly ever had permission from the original artists to do so.” But now, David Bowie has issued a mashup challenge…

Recording companies are trying to sue their fans into not downloading music for free off the internet. But while the move seems to have dissuaded some, there’s no indication that such disaffected fans have actually turned to using legal online services. It comes down to this: do musicians want people to listen to their music or not?

A US Senator wants to question the Smithsonian on the gift of four Stradivarius violins it received from Herbert Axelrod, a New Jersey businessman who is on the lam in Cuba after being indicted for tax evasion. “It is troubling that the Smithsonian may be turning a blind eye to tax mischief. Government agencies should be working in concert, not against each other. . . . Donors shouldn’t be able to get away with playing the taxpayers like a fiddle.”

Polls about attitudes towards music file-sharing are contradictory. Most people believe artists should have control of copyright. But many don’t think file-sharing is wrong. Even among musicians, the polls are split. “Thirty-five per cent said that free downloading has helped their careers. Then again, 30 per cent felt that file-sharing in general poses a “major threat” to creative industries.”