[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...]
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...]
Are Human Tastemakers Waging a Comeback?
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="Y8fDWKTQR4PySZdf0pqVQLolQa6bMrQS"] THE phrase "we love you people" may have a new resonance: Apple's purchase of Beats may mean Silicon Valley may be turning toward actual people as "curators" over the faceless algorithms it's been using. Years into a process by which your bookstore or record store clerk found himself made obsolete by an Amazon recommendation, this … [Read more...]
Amazon vs. Hachette Fatal to Non-Superstar Authors
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="8GbWVEDH47AifqGz31d8Z6pNMkmzPLRY"] SO far most of the coverage of the battle between Amazon and the Hachette publishers has looked at the impact on bestselling authors like James Patterson and J.K. Rowling, whose work becomes harder to get or impossible to pre-order during the current feud. But a new story argues that the writers really hurt by this are lesser known … [Read more...]
The Savage Brilliance of Jo Nesbo
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="862z7etB0M2rQ0o5trkD8bwrkhOQ67rT"] THE Norwegian crime writer Jo Nesbo is being read and discussed on our shores these days, with a new novel, The Son, out earlier this month. (The book, set in Oslo, is not one of those built around troubled detective Harry Hole. I spoke to Nesbo when he and his publisher were making a big push into the U.S. market in the wake of … [Read more...]