A new online music service making use of the motto “We Are Not Evil” is bucking industry trends and bypassing what it sees as an obstructionist recording industry. “Magnatune sets out to be fair and friendly to both artists and consumers. You can listen to any Magnatune album streamed complete for free from its website, download it for a suggested fee of $8, or order it on a finished CD (suggested price $8 a disc, plus $4.97 for duplication costs and postage). Fifty percent of all revenues go directly to the artist(s). All music on Magnatune has been cleared for licensing, so it can be broadcast or used in films or other audiovisual and Web-based productions.” And yes, Magnatune has plenty of classical…
Tag: 07.28.06
Tickets Going Fast In Edinburgh
Edinburgh’s famed summer festivals are having a great year at the box office. “Some venues are reporting ticket sales up by as much as 100 per cent on this time last year, as Festival-goers vie to book shows before they are sold out.” The Edinburgh Fringe, the world’s largest Fringe Festival, reports a huge increase in online sales over last summer.
West End Booming On The Back Of Song & Dance
London’s West End is awash in musicals both old and new this season, and a survey of UK ticket buyers suggests that they couldn’t be happier. “There were some concerns that musicals were squeezing out ‘straight plays’,” but some observers have pointed out that full houses for musicals are clearly far preferable to the darkened houses the West End has frequently sported over the last several seasons.
Australia’s Unique Solution To Illegal Copying
An Australian cultural fund called Copyright Agency Limited has been quietly assisting writers and publishers in protecting their work and ideas for more than 20 years, and in this age of digital information access, its work is becoming ever more important. “With digital copying gradually being corralled along with photocopying, the agency’s revenues have grown from $72 million in 2003-04 to $86 million in 2004-05 and more than $100 million in the past financial year. This will be distributed in roughly 5000 payments to its members.”
Should A Glance At Greatness Really Cost More In New York?
Since going on public display at New York’s Neue Gallery, Gustav Klimt’s 1907 masterpiece “Adele Bloch-Bauer 1” has been drawing crowds and controversy in roughly equal measures, with the latter sparked by the Neue’s quickly abandoned plan to charge visitors $50 to view the Klimt. But despite the Neue’s course correction, the outrage over the steep admission price has spread, and a much-needed debate over what it costs to gain admission to New York’s various museums and galleries is now well underway.
Walking Away
One of the opera world’s behind-the-scenes stars is leaving it all behind this summer. Peter Jonas, who has led English National Opera and Munich’s Bavarian State Opera over the course of a 21-year career as a general manager, will retire in September at the comparatively young age of 59. “Intellectual rigour and confrontational energy” are terms often used to describe Jonas’s management style, and it’s no coincidence that his happiest years came with the relatively small and provincial Munich company.
View Askew: Africa, As Seen From Europe
“The first Europeans went [to Africa] to exploit the continent and were soon followed by artists excited by the ‘primitive’. But, as a new exhibition shows, the images they produced bear the stamp of colonialism with a paint brush… Our view of Africa has been an inheritance of 19th-century colonialism, dominated by biological determinism, by repressed and perverse sexuality, and by paintings and sculptures that ignored the realities of the place and time in favour of a romanticised and polemical vision.”
Coming: A Better Form Of Academic Publishing?
“Scholars… who are as comfortable firing off comments on blogs as they are pontificating at academic conferences, are beginning to question whether the printed book is the best format for advancing scholarship and communicating big ideas. In tenure and promotion, of course, the book is still king — the whole academic enterprise often revolves around it. But several scholars are using digital means to challenge the current model of academic publishing.”