“Concert promoters study Spotify listens to route tours through towns with the most fans, and some artists look for patterns in Pandora streaming to figure out which songs to play at each stop on a tour. In fact, all of our searching, streaming, downloading, and sharing is being used to answer the question the music industry has been asking for a century: What do people want to hear next?”
Tag: 12.14
Here Are The Copyrighted Works That Would Have Gone Into Public Domain In 2015
“Under current copyright law, we’ll have to wait until 2054.1 And no published works will enter our public domain until 2019. The laws in other countries are different—thousands of works are entering the public domain in Canada and the EU on January 1.”
On Fame: Why Would Anyone Care If They’re Remembered After They’re Dead?
“The idea that fame is a kind of immortality is an ancient one that shows no sign of losing its attraction. But why? What good does it do the dead to be famous?”
Those Amazing Writing Machines (A Cult Of Typewriters)
“We felt we were more productive on a typewriter because we had to keep moving forward…. If we made a mistake, we kept typing. If we wanted to rearrange the information, we had to start over. With the word processor we’ve lost some of the immediacy. It’s too easy to delete, to cut and paste.”
Everyone Is Dumping On Humanities Scholars. But Here’s Why Their Research Methods Matter
“Nowadays specialists can’t teach the survey courses of yesteryear. They haven’t read widely or thought about the big themes of history or literature (which of course was easier back when most ideas that mattered emanated from two continents). Instead they offer seminars focused on tiny questions and single authors and artists. Charismatic in their intellect, these professors seduce the most gifted students into imitating them. The university thus becomes a machine—as the critics endlessly repeat—for producing teachers and students who know more and more about less and less.”
Reading With A Pen In Your Hand – It Changes How You Read
“A pen is not a magic wand. The critical faculty is not conjured from nothing. But it was remarkable how many students improved their performance with this simple stratagem. There is something predatory, cruel even, about a pen suspended over a text.”
When Orchestras Go Out Of Business (Doesn’t Mean They Stay Out Of Business)
Here is the story of how three orchestras collapsed, then rose from the ashes. “The resilience of orchestras cannot be
overstated,” says Jesse Rosen, president and CEO of the League of American Orchestras.
Are Humans Born With An “Instinct” For Language?
“How much sense does it make to call whatever inborn basis for language we might have an ‘instinct’? On reflection, not much.”
New Thinking In How We Engage Audiences And Where
‘The future of the arts depends on programming in both new and old spaces, creating experiences that satisfy current participants and speak to new ones. Ultimately, “where” should and will grow to be an ever more important variable in the presentation and production of art, especially as one considers “who” one serves.’
Death Of The Literary Feud?
“Writers today are less likely to engage in open antagonism because the political risks are too great. Between trolls on Twitter, libel law and the pressures of political correctness, writers no longer dare to insult their rivals in the hyperbolically abusive terms that Mailer and Vidal favoured.”