The music industry appears to have finally embraced downloading as the wave of the future, and many are asking what took so damn long. But John Naughton says that we shouldn’t be surprised by the industry’s slow embrace of the obvious: “The fact that the music moguls resisted music downloading for so long is par for the course. They opposed audio, cassette and video taping and, later, DVD. Yet each turned out to be extraordinarily profitable. Movie studios now earn far more from videos and DVDs than they do from cinema audiences, but they had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the DVD world.”
Tag: 07.04.04
The Disappearing Stadium
“Imagine a sports stadium that accommodates thousands of fans for an event, then folds up and disappears. Impossible? Perhaps. But it’s one of the visions that will appear in the upcoming Venice Architecture Biennale… It improbably envisions a baseball field inserted within the urban thicket of Chicago’s Loop. The field would be surrounded by a series of movable seating tiers. The tiers, some of which would be constructed into surrounding buildings, would fold and unfold as needed. As outlandish as the idea seems, [the Chicago architectural firm] Studio Gang already has proved it is possible to design and construct a performance venue whose architectural identity changes to suit changing needs.”
Rock’s Birthday? It’s A Black & White Debate
On July 5, 1954, Elvis Presley recorded his first single. That’s reason enough for BMG Records, which distributes the Presley catalog, to declare the date as the birthday of rock ‘n roll. “But the marketing blitz, by BMG as well as other companies, reopens a nagging debate: Just when did rock really begin? It’s an issue that has long been tinged with racism, specifically the notion that it took a white man to make it rock ‘n roll, whereas before it was only R&B and what was then described as ‘race music.'”
Youth, Enthusiasm, and Unfathomable Wealth
Arielle Tepper is one of Broadway’s youngest impresarios, “armed with the romantic notions of a stage-door Annie, the energy of youth and, not incidentally, a considerable fortune derived from the real estate empire of her maternal grandfather, Philip Levin, who died in 1971, the year before Ms. Tepper was born. In 2001, Ms. Tepper inherited a third of the family real estate portfolio, which Crain’s New York recently estimated at $1 billion. Ms. Tepper has used part of her share to make herself into an eager new player in the treacherous world of theatrical producing.”
The Do-It-Yourself Album
“Record labels are still vital for many musicians. They get the CD in the bins; they advertise it; they put up the money to produce it in the first place.” But for established artists who are sick of the huge revenue chunk swallowed up by traditional labels, a new do-it-yourself method is emerging, and many artists are willing to put up their own money for production costs in return for having direct control of a web-based distribution network that brings in more eventual revenue.
The Orchestral Wage Gap
Are conductors and executives bankrupting American orchestras? Blair Tindall sees a basic conflict between the skyrocketing salaries of those at the top, and the cries of institutional poverty which have led to stagnating musician salaries and increasingly bitter fights between labor and management. It’s true that, of 20 orchestras which settled new musician contracts in the last year, 19 included wage cuts. Still, most musicians don’t seem to be bothered by the high salaries of their bosses, just so long as the conductors and CEOs appear to be earning their pay. But with the industry widely perceived to be in trouble and salaries continuing to climb, those at the top may soon find themselves under fire.