Category: music

“With its relaunch on Thursday, Napster, the most notorious name in music downloads, will collide with the hottest music player on the market, the iPod. That’s because music downloaded from Napster will not be playable on Apple’s insanely popular iPod. The newly legal Napster service and the iPod use incompatible file formats.”

“The strains of Mozart, Bach and Beethoven played in restaurants makes diners feel more affluent and encourages them to spend, according to research released by the University of Leicester in central England on Tuesday.”

Talks for the proposed merger between Carnegi Hall and the New York Philharmonic never progressed very far because the two sides couldn’t agree on the basics. “The talks about artistic control, shared finances and combined boards came apart mainly over dividing up performance and rehearsal time in the main hall, Isaac Stern Auditorium.”

“Irish singer-songwriter Damien Rice took home the third annual Shortlist Music Prize, beating out acts such as the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Floetry and The Black Keys for an award that celebrates the best non-commercial music artists.”

In the last several years, the language of diversity has begun to creep into the lily-white world of symphony orchestras, and it’s a big mistake, says Norman Lebrecht. “Diversity, or the policy that speaks its name, is a means of diverting orchestras from what they ought to be doing, making music, to what the Government ought to be doing, creating social harmony… It amounts to a mirror image of Hitlerite policy which entailed the removal of non-aryan races from German music, even though this would relegate the art to the margins of civilisation.”

“As the major record companies scramble to put a lid on peer-to-peer file-sharing networks like Morpheus and Kazaa, an upstart California record label is trying to revolutionize the industry by taking the opposite approach: making file sharing the heart of its business. Berkeley-based Magnatune calls its approach ‘open music,’ a blend of shareware, open source and grass-roots activism. The idea is to let users try music before they buy, and when they do, to give half of every sale to the artist. Magnatune’s motto: ‘We are not evil.'”

The much-ballyhooed MediaMax CD3, a copy-protected disc which was designed to prevent its contents from being ‘ripped’ to computers and converted into digital music files, apparently needs fewer loopholes. The discs operate by launching a driver onto any computer into which they are inserted, and the driver blocks the ability to copy the disc. But the driver doesn’t work on Mac or Linux machines, and a college student is already publicizing his discovery that the driver can be bypassed on Windows machines, simply by pressing the key.

The failure of the Carnegie Hall/New York Philharmonic is a public embarrassment, writes Greg Sandow. “If you ask me, Carnegie Hall and the Philharmonic both look dumb. One issue, as anybody could have guessed beforehand, was how to accomodate all the concerts the Philharmonic gives each year with Carnegie’s strong and diverse schedule. How could it take all these months to figure that out? And how could the two organizations have announced plans to merge – actually announce that the meger was a done deal, with everything set except for the details – without settling such an obvious issue before the announcement was made? I can barely believe it.”

“To many minds, the merger never made sense. Looked at solely from the perspective of the New York Philharmonic, the primary advantage was obvious: instead of being a tenant in the acoustically challenged Avery Fisher Hall, the orchestra would have become a co-resident at America’s most storied and acoustically excellent auditorium. But it was much harder to see how Carnegie Hall was supposed to benefit from the merger, unless you viewed it essentially as a business venture that would have combined two endowments and two subscriber bases at a time of economic uncertainties.”