[contextly_auto_sidebar id="Za9VcxtAw6iJYej9lpme3Ycia9NvqadT"] JUST go on the road! Musicians who've seen their earnings from recorded music collapse should just tour more often, digital utopians tell them. But a new report shows that even with ticket prices getting higher, a 60 percent growth in touring revenues since 2000, and a supposed recovery from the depths of the recession, the … [Read more...]
Archives for June 2014
Songwriters Struggle in the Digital Age
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="xeTmAux4K4TAnAkSYsPJtKcQYgjbcieM"] TWO more musicians have expressed their frustrations with the post-label era of music distribution, which many technologists tell us is the best of all possible worlds. The first is the estimable eclecticist Van Dyke Parks, who writes in the Daily Beast about "How Songwriters Are Getting Screwed in the Digital Age." (I know Van … [Read more...]
Massenet’s “Thais” at LA Opera
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="GYlAzT4O3lEomZ10GqKrQmACXiv7ZjHE"] WHAT kind of love is the truest and most enduring, spiritual or erotic? That’s a theme that echoes through the opera I saw the other day. My experience with Massenet is limited, so I have little sense of what to expect. But Thais, which stars Placido Domingo as an earnest and confused fourth-century monk seeking out an Alexandrian … [Read more...]
Irony’s Dead End: Guest Columnist
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="8qHfyQW4oDysZVU6d4MJpCUZbSLYZHgf"] DOES irony leads us anywhere valuable? How does cultural postmodernism fit in? These are questions guest columnist Lawrence Christon gets into today, extending a much-discussed essay by David Foster Wallace (pictured). Despite being a child of Letterman, novelists like Pynchon, and the indie-rock'90s, I'm increasingly agreeing … [Read more...]
The Withering of College Radio
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="seaquox9ilXMg837yigc8XqAWK7RXXeJ"] COLLEGE radio did an enormous amount to power the indie- and alt-rock movements, as well as to create havens on campuses. But is it now being crushed? That's the argument behind a Salon story timed to the loss of music programming at Georgia State's WRAS in Atlanta, as "GSU announced an agreement to hand over WRAS’s 100,000 watt … [Read more...]
The Amazon Fight: David Carr and Malcolm Gladwell Weigh In
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="YGdDfwFUtQGZuwNoz6622v9UXTfsCNmw"] THIS fight between Amazon and the Hachette publishers doesn't seem to be going away. And it may be damaging the online booksellers' "brand," says David Carr in the New York Times. As the uproar grows, Amazon is learning that while it may own the publishing industry with a 40 percent market share of all new books sold, according … [Read more...]
The Internet and the Future with Jaron Lanier
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="00XQfisENTTZHblrkmxnirfcWjtcoQHV"] THE technologist and Internet skeptic Jaron Lanier is someone I speak to every few months whether I need to or not -- he's got some of the sharpest sense of how digital technology has reshaped life for the creative class and the larger middle class it sits inside. It helps that he's also an experimental/classical musician who … [Read more...]