“Playing a certain type of music can enhance the way wine tastes, research by psychologists suggests. The Heriot Watt University study found people rated the change in taste by up to 60% depending on the melody heard.”
Tag: 07.14.08
Pre-Olympics, China Cracks Down on Pirated DVDs
“The vendors are missing from all their usual haunts, and many of the DVD shops that usually sell the products appear closed. Normally there is a clampdown on public sales of pirate product when someone like President Bush or a senior US trade official comes to town”.
Screen Actors Guild May Put Deal In Front Of Its Members
“Guild insiders have acknowledged they have few other options left in the face of the congloms’ adamant refusal to change terms contained in the two-week-old final offer. It’s becoming increasingly apparent that SAG’s not going to ask its members for a strike authorization, since it’s highly debatable whether the guild would achieve the 75% support level needed for a work stoppage.”
EMI’s Overall Revenues Rise 61% in the First Quarter
Heartening news for the recorded music imprint, earning $119 million one year after losing $89.6 million. Still, its ownership, an investment bank, said don’t get too excited. “It can be misleading to look at just one quarter in isolation due to the timings of releases. As we all know, the recorded music business is extremely volatile and we cannot count on future quarters always being this good.”
So Why Aren’t People Outraged by The Capitol Steps?
“Although every critic of The New Yorker understood the simple satire of the cover, the most fretful of them worried that the illustration would be misread by the ignorant masses who don’t subscribe to the magazine.” Says one blogger, “That’s the problem with satire. A lot of people won’t get the joke…there’s no caption on the cover to ensure that everyone” will understand the punch line.
“WALL-E” Slams Every Corporation but One
“More troublesome is the film’s complicity in the commodified culture it ostensibly critiques. This isn’t about Disney, whose external merchandise and marketing are extraneous to the film’s artistic vision. Within the movie itself, ‘WALL-E’ betrays its true corporate overlord, and it isn’t Mickey. It’s Apple.”
Salt Lake City Looks At New Broadway Theatre
“Building a 2,400-seat, Broadway-class theatre in downtown Salt Lake City would cost $81.5 million, according to a draft report just prepared by the city’s Downtown Theatre Action Group.”
Challenging The Longtail Theory
“In 2007, 24 percent of the nearly 4 million digital songs available for sale through stores like iTunes sold only one copy each, and 91 percent of available tracks sold fewer than 100 copies each. The story is the same for the movie business, where, between 2000 and 2005, the number of titles that were purchased only a few times “almost quadrupled.” The Internet offers us a buffet of everything–and yet we’re mainly settling for the likes of The Love Guru and You Don’t Mess With the Zohan.”
The Ailing TV Sitcom
Once the staple of broadcast television, the traditional family sitcom has been relegated of late to niche cable channels.
Reinventing The Record Industry
“There’s still room for record companies but they should reinvent themselves as a service industry and not as owners. The structure of the old album and waiting for that to be finished still has some merit but you can do a lot of other things and I think it should be a lot looser and mixed up.”