Category: music

File-trading is unquestionably illegal. It is very clearly an act which closely approximates stealing. So why can’t the recording industry get any support for its efforts to stop the piracy? Simple, says Russell Smith. Corporate slimeballs who ignore good music in favor of brainless pap don’t deserve any sympathy, and everyone knows it. “File-sharing is a rejection of the social power of bland culture. Why should we pay for crap?”

The recording industry has withdrawn a suit filed against granparents who say they’ve never downloaded music. “They use a Macintosh, which cannot even run the Kazaa file-sharing service they are accused of using illegally’. “This is what happens when you sweep away all the due process protections and all the privacy protections. Those are the kinds of things that would stop this before it gets to the stage where you sue some nice old lady who did nothing wrong.”

The media covered it, the critics sang its praises, and the organizers went out of their way to book quality acts. But the Equinox Music Festival, a jazz fest based in Boston, somehow never managed to sell the public on its concert series, and this week, the festival shut itself down and cancelled all remaining shows. According to the festival’s president, “The early events were extremely poorly attended, and the remaining events had extremely poor advance sales. It just came to the point where we had to pull the plug and stop hemorrhaging money. It’s most unfortunate, because we had a really phenomenal lineup.”

The striking musicians of the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra are set to return to the bargaining table after more than a week of stony silence. The musicians walked out earlier this month after the CSO’s board demanded that they accept a hefty pay cut to assist the orchestra in dealing with a $650,000 deficit. A federal mediator will assist in the renewed negotiations. During the strike, the musicians have been staging their own concerts in an effort to garner public support.

The New York Philharmonic and New York City Opera both want to jump out of Lincoln Center to new homes. But “given the proposed alternatives—for City Opera, a pie-in-the-sky move downtown; for the Philharmonic, a schedule-gobbling takeover of Carnegie Hall—I’m beginning to think that it would be better for the health of the two deserters, not to mention that of the city’s musical life, if they stayed put. Both organizations are doing fine where they are.”

“The musicians of the deficit-ridden Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra ratified a three-year contract yesterday that calls for a 7.8 percent wage cut for the first two years and a major wage increase in the 2005-06 season. The third-year increase – considered risky by some – will bring the PSO musicians’ salaries to 95 percent of the average of the wages at the Chicago, Cleveland, New York and Philadelphia orchestras, all of whom negotiate contracts in the next year.”

The company behind the Kazaa file-sharing software is suing recording companies who are trolling Kazaa for copyright violators. “Sharman said the companies used Kazaa Lite, an ad-less replica of its software, to get onto the network. The lawsuit also claims efforts to combat piracy on Kazaa violated terms for using the network. Entertainment companies have offered bogus versions of copyright works and sent online messages to users.”

A listener to a 6 1/2 hour Toronto performance of British composer Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji’s “Fourth Symphony For Piano Alone” is exhausted. Imagine what the pianist felt like.

Recording giant EMI confirms that it is in talks to buy Warner Music. But analysts say that EMI’s enormous debt is an imprediment to the deal, and its creditors are ready to downgrade its borrowing capacity. “They have very limited debt capacity and if they were to buy a valuable and profitable business it would have some earnings with it, but our concern is that there is not a lot of scope to increase the overall debt leverage.”

The Malaysian government has decreed a new maximum price for CDs sold there. And it’s a significant cut in price from the previous ceiling. Artists are trying to be philosophical: “Without compromising on quality, we can still release a good album. But instead of recording 10 songs at the cost of RM50,000, we can produce five songs under RM25,000. It’s just a matter of choosing between quality and quantity. After all, who said an album should comprise 10 songs? And for this new format to work, the industry should work together and not go against one another.”