“Independent record labels are responsible for 30 percent of music sales and 80 percent of all releases worldwide. If indie music were a major label, it would be the biggest in the world — and in a way, that’s what’s about to happen.”
Tag: 02.05.07
The Star Conductor And The Youth Orchestra
“Caracas is a surprising place to find Claudio Abbado. The fragile, refined maestro is one of the most wanted conductors on the planet. Yet he chooses to spend more than two months a year amid the snarled traffic and sprawling urban poverty of the polluted Venezuelan capital, rehearsing and performing with the country’s top youth orchestra.”
Buying Culture – Is It Possible?
“For years now, Gulf Arabs have confused modernity with tall buildings, sophistication with the ability to trade on the New York Stock Exchange, and true education with the construction of gleaming, albeit vacuous, campuses. But whenever they have encountered gray matter — questions of taste and the arts — their mercantile approach has crumbled.”
Architect To The Developers
Costas Kondylis has had a major career as an architect in New York. He “has established a 185-member office, completed 75 buildings in New York and currently has 15 more in the works. If the architecture profession hasn’t exalted him as much as it has some others, the city’s developers keep hiring him. Again and again and again.”
Historic Manuscript Trove Goes Digital
The historic trove of manuscripts at Egypt’s St. Catherine’s Monastery is being digitized. “Consisting of 3,300 manuscripts in 11 languages — many of them richly illuminated in gold leaf and bright, jewel-like colors — the library’s collection is second in number and importance only to the trove at the Vatican.”
Inside The Royal Ballet’s Formative Years
The letters of a young Margot Fonteyn, just released, are part of an exhibition that tells, “through photographs, letters, descriptions and a short documentary film by Lynne Wake, the story of seven intense and formative years in the company’s history.”
No E-Book Version Of Harry Potter
Author JK “Rowling has cited two reasons over the years: concern about online piracy (which has never been a major problem for the Potter books), and the desire for readers to experience the books on paper. E-books, hyped as the future of publishing during the dot-com craze of the late 1990s, remain a tiny portion of the multibillion dollar industry.”