Category: music

“Last year was the fifth year in a row that the record for sales of UK singles was broken, and it appears the popularity of the one-track hit continues to rise.”

“In almost all of the problematic cases in recent years, one or more of the “sides” in a dispute is saying that they can’t, or won’t, recognize another side’s good faith, and the rhetoric all around the country has been remarkably poisonous and negative.”

“The Nashville Symphony has filed an appeal with the Federal Emergency Management Agency over some of the money obligated to it after flood waters overtook the lower levels of the Schermerhorn Symphony Center in May 2010 … Symphony officials often point to the flood as a significant factor in its current fiscal crisis.”

“An ever-whirring dynamo, Tony Pappano has arguably (by the age of 53) already done more as a populariser of his art than any media maestro since Leonard Bernstein.”

“Since the great radio purges of 2008 and 2009, when stations across the country abandoned the format, smooth jazz has been not just maligned but also marginalized — stripped of its main distribution channel just as the record business was falling to pieces. The only recourse for its musicians and fans has been to adapt, regrouping now as a subculture, often literally at sea.”

“The Proms, which run to 57 consecutive nights, are regularly billed as the world’s biggest music festival. Last year’s average attendance was 93 per cent of the Albert Hall’s 6,000-seat capacity – and that’s just a fraction of the total number listening. In the UK alone, live transmissions on BBC Radio 3 are heard by 2m people a week, and in 2012 more than 15m watched on television. BBC broadcasts reach a huge international audience, with more than 45 countries transmitting the Proms on radio and up to 20 tuning into the Last Night on television.”

“That, I think, would be a major tragedy and a major wound,” Lebrecht said. “It will be something that Minnesota and Minneapolis will not recover from easily and possibly not for a generation.”

“The past decade radically changed the music industry’s landscape. What do the next 10 hold? We asked the best and brightest to look into the crystal ball and tell us what they saw.”

“Given their record of near-total failure to identify artists of promise, why does anyone still bother to hold music competitions at all? It seems clear that they’ve become irrelevant–especially now that the road to success for classical musicians is no longer as well defined as it was in 1958.”

“There’s a realisation that most of our music schools and conservatories do a first-rate job of training young musicians in the artistic and theoretical aspects of music, but we have a long way to go [in] jumping the gap into the real world of music economics,”