Tag: 07.31.05

Audio Guides With Some Hollywood Spin

Museum audio guides are getting more and more sophisticated. “Changing expectations on the part of gallery-goers primed by a media-saturated society are prompting museums to demand Hollywood-style production values coupled with star power. If you can watch a movie on your phone and tote your entire music library in an iPod, why should your audio guide be any less entertaining?”

Philly Orchestra And Philly Pops Talk About Combining Forces

The Philadelphia Orchestra and the Philadelphia Pops are talking merger. “The orchestra and the Pops are very different kinds of organizations. The orchestra has a much larger budget, listenership and season schedule. Each has its own distinct board and audience. There is some small overlap in musicians. Still, many U.S. orchestras maintain both a serious-repertoire ensemble and a pops series or pops orchestra – most notably, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which also operates the Boston Pops.”

Cuppa Joe With Your CD?

One of the hottest new markets for CD’s? Your local coffee shop. “The Seattle-based coffee merchant Starbucks, which sold its first Blue Note Records jazz compilation in 1995, is flexing its marketing muscle by providing the very thing that the beleaguered music industry has been so desperate to find: a new outlet where music fans will eagerly spend their money on full-length, full-price CDs.”

Pittsburgh Symphony Deficit: Pops Up, Main Season Down

The Pittsburgh Symphony ends its season with a $500,000 deficit. The orchestra’s main season suffered from lower ticket sales. “This year, ticket sales for the classical subscription series generated $2.6 million, $400,000 short of projections. By contrast, revenue for the pops series, conducted by Marvin Hamlisch, exceeded the projected $2.65 million in sales by $30,000.”

In Cleveland: A Public Broadcasting Partnership Struggles

It’s been four years since Cleveland’s powerhouse public radio station WCPN joined forces with public TV station WVIZ in an attempt to forge a new multimedia empire. But so far the partnership doesn’t seem to have worked out well for radio side. “Several radio insiders who have a lot of respect for WCPN lament the deflating of a once-soaring news operation at a station they say is increasingly besieged by hiring freezes, overloaded reporters and lousy morale. ‘The feeling was that TV management, which basically took over, didn’t understand how public radio was done successfully’.”

How Disney Changed Where You Live

“Before Disneyland, with some notable exceptions, a place was what it was — the product of its own history, geography, climate, economic base, social arrangements and technological development. After Disneyland, American places increasingly came to be idealized fictional narratives about place — not real places, but metaplaces.”

Online Films Are Finally Finding An Audience

“While movie studios panic over declining theater attendance, Web sites such as Ifilm and Bay Area-based AtomFilms are growing an audience in search of an alternative to Hollywood. TV networks and film production companies in the United States and abroad scan the sites. Film festivals, such as Cinequest of San Jose, now use similar technology to screen movies online. Analysts say the growing Internet film industry is far from changing how mainstream America views movies — but the business is starting to pay off for filmmakers.”

Classical Music – CD’s Still Rule

Music downloading is still not the preferred way classical music fans get their music. CD’s are more convenient and their sound quality is better. “The 1.3 million downloads of Beethoven at the BBC created a stir among classical music labels and artist managers, who immediately raised a stink about giving professional performances away for free. But this reaction assumes that all the people who downloaded the music would have gone out to buy Beethoven anyway. The downloads have made classical music more accessible to fans of other genres — a trend that emerges as one peruses the growing web of classical music fan blogs. The iPod may not be tolling the eventual death of the disc, it may be ensuring its continued livelihood.”