“Live music is the one part of the music industry generating sustained profits, which has meant that the balance of power has swung from record labels and artists to promoters such as Live Nation and its subsidiary Ticketmaster. The defence offered until now by Ticketmaster is that Seatwave existed to facilitate fans – both those wishing to offload tickets for an event they could not longer attend and anyone who’d missed out when a concert went on sale initially. It was undeniable, however, that professional resellers were milking the service for easy profits.”
Tag: 08.13.18
A Rock Critic Has His First Experience With Near-Total Silence
In the final entry of his 18-year column “Resonant Frequency,” Mark Richardson writes about the joys of a life lived with music blasting through headphones (and for him, those joys are very real), and his middle-age exploration of silence, culminating in a visit to an anechoic chamber.
Will We Still Need Companies When Artificial Intelligence Takes Over?
While there has been a lot of discussion about “what’s left for humans?” as AI improves at exponential rates — the customary answer is that humans need to focus on the things they are uniquely good at, such as creativity, intuition, and personal empathy — I think we now have to ask, “what’s left for firms?”
Could Audiences Really Replace Theater Critics As They Disappear? Here’s The Problem With That
Responding to Lyn Gardner’s recent column arguing for “a new approach to theatre criticism, in which theatres see developing critical voices as part of audience and artist development,” Bill Marx writes that what Gardner seems to be suggesting is both vague and, well, unlikely: “Is the money invested in theater development these days dedicated to making stage audiences more ‘critical’? Are there any plans for ‘creative power sharing’ with spectators? From what I can tell, … the goal is to buff up [theaters’] business plans and marketing efforts, not to encourage the development of ‘critical’ audiences.”
Chile’s New Culture Minister Dissed Country’s Human Rights Museum, And Now He’s No Longer Culture Minister
“Mauricio Rojas, a Chilean-Swedish political economist and member of [president Sebastián] Piñera’s center-right coalition, questioned the validity of the Museum of History and Human Rights, which opened in 2010 and documents abuses during the 1973-1990 military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.”
How Sonos Is Building The Audio Internet
“Over time, everywhere that you might want to enjoy music—in different rooms of your house as well as outside the home—we want to have a product that serves that scenario really well, and also any content that’s relevant to you. We want to make it as easy as possible for you to summon that up wherever you are. All of our work is going into those areas. And again, when I say content it’s not just music. It’s sonic culture umbrella in general: podcasts, entertainment, TV soundtracks, things like that.”
Streaming Services Are Inadvertently Recreating The Cable TV Model
The digital landscape is already fragmented, and it’s continually fragmenting further, as content creators choose to become content providers. In the process, it’s beginning to resemble cable television. Each new app or content library looks like a different channel to consider, and each one is essentially a premium cable offering that requires a separate subscription to view. Services that previously acted as content aggregators are losing outside content with the launch of each new service. Instead, they are creating their own content to maintain value in a crowded marketplace.
How Should Arts Orgs Present Work Whose Creators Are Now Seen As Morally Reprehensible? Here’s A Case Study
Journalist Cynthia Durcanin at how the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston have handled this year’s Casanova exhibition, whose curators weren’t exactly expecting the #MeToo movement when they started planning the show in 2014.
Star Actor Asks His Twitter Followers If It’s Okay To Play An Irredeemable Racist
Vincent D’Onofrio posed the question over the weekend and a 3,800+-tweet thread arose, including a number of responses from fellow actors and further contributions from D’Onofrio himself. As Patricia Hernandez reports, “opinions were all over the place.”
Joffrey Ballet Partners With College To Offer New Dance Degree
Harold Washington College announced that it has partnered with the Joffrey Ballet to offer an Associate in Arts in Dance from City Colleges of Chicago’s Loop campus.