Music Pundit Deathmatch: there can be only one.

Posted in Blog Business on March 9, 2010 by properdiscord

That last post about things that won’t save classical music prompted this response from my friend Denise:

Dear lord – I can’t even start to read all of this.

You should do a March Madness bracket with this. Some of this is

trash, and some are really ideas. I say the last idea standing is

crowned as the savior. That crown may be made of thorns, but still.

How many office pools are going on, and pulling for “artistic

quality” over “Joshua Bell”?

This is a ridiculous idea, but that has never stopped me before…

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30 things that won’t save classical music

Posted in Marketing Matters, Why nobody buys your stuff on March 8, 2010 by properdiscord

Albrecht Dürer's Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

Classical music doesn’t need saving and the only thing that will increase its reach is for the people involved to do their jobs better.

Still, if you don’t want to do your job better and would rather speculate about a deus ex machina that would make that ok, then join the club. There’s a whole industry built around asking this question. Here are 30 suggestions for what it might be…

  1. Lowell Liebermann
  2. YouTube
  3. Artistic Quality
  4. Getting rid of snobs
  5. Drew McManus
  6. James Rhodes’ choice of footwear
  7. Hot young conductor eye candy
  8. Asians
  9. Facebook
  10. Dallapiccola
  11. Empowered American musicians
  12. Kronos Quartet
  13. Education
  14. Multimedia events and innovative programming
  15. Communism
  16. China
  17. Downloads
  18. 5 Mormon children
  19. Inspiring music
  20. Glitz
  21. Gustavo Dudamel
  22. Rock stars
  23. Greg Sandow’s music
  24. The Web
  25. The Internet
  26. Joshua Bell
  27. Bond
  28. Listening to the customers
  29. Crossover
  30. Classical music

Ok. That’s enough. I should probably do some work now.

EDIT: Corrected the link on Lowell Liebermann who, as you probably know, is not Asian.

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This is not useful

Posted in Is it meant to sound like that?, That looks difficult on March 5, 2010 by properdiscord

Arts Daily

Should orchestras start their own labels? Is that easy? Are CDs going to disappear? Will downloads replace them?

Somehow, Classic FM’s Arts Daily podcast managed to go all the way to the Association of British Orchestras’ conference, track down people that know the answers to these questions* and still end up with nothing close to a useful (or even coherent) conclusion. God only knows what they actually said. It sounds like there are about seven edit points in every sentence.

* Jonathan Gruber, former VP of New Media at Universal Classics & Jazz and current head of the new media consulting firm Ulysses Arts; Chaz Jenkins, head of LSO Live; and James Inverne, editor of Gramophone magazine.

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Bernard Coutaz 1922-2010

Posted in Download This on March 5, 2010 by properdiscord

Bernard Coutaz

This week, the classical record industry mourns the loss of Bernard Coutaz, founder of Harmonia Mundi, who died last Friday at the age of 87. Read more »

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Music for the masses

Posted in Funny Peculiar, Marketing Matters on March 4, 2010 by properdiscord

The Times* asked a bunch of musicians and administrators in Britain how to go about making live music more appealing to the next generation of concert-goers. The responses range from visionary to downright retarded. John Gilhooly from the Wigmore Hall says there’s no need to tinker with a system that works, violinist Nicola Benedetti blames the lighting, and Gillian Moore from the South Bank Centre wonders when it stopped being ok to dance to ballet. Check it out.

* The English one. I can’t bring myself to call it “The Times Of London” because that isn’t what it has been called since 1788, when, need I remind you, Mozart was alive and the Americans were still working on a constitution that would make George Washington president and machine guns legal. Nobody need confuse it with the New York Times (est. 63 years later in 1851) because it is called something different.

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…and now for the ladies

Posted in Instrument Roses Sheet Music, Marketing Matters, Why nobody buys your stuff on March 3, 2010 by properdiscord

(…or 5 tips to improve your album cover photo)

On Monday, I made fun of the boys. Now it’s time for the ladies. In the interests of equality, I picked seven. There are no dwarfs among them, but they do seem a bit more “Evil Queen” than “Snow White”. Several of these are from quite well-established labels. What were they thinking?

Olga Borodina Read more »

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The Seven Dwarfs of the piano

Posted in Instrument Roses Sheet Music, Marketing Matters, Why nobody buys your stuff on March 1, 2010 by properdiscord

Is there some rule I don’t know about, where the photos on their album covers have to make all male pianists look like one of seven dwarfs?*

Grumpy Read more »

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What can we learn from a Japanese girl band?

Posted in Funny Peculiar, Is it meant to sound like that?, Marketing Matters on February 25, 2010 by properdiscord

Here’s an awesome but fairly creepy idea from Japan:

AKB48 is a girl group with 48 members. They’re terrible performers, but very successful. Why? Size confers a few advantages:

1) A band this big clearly doesn’t need everybody to show up for every gig. They can tour three places at once and still have somebody perform at their resident gig every day. Read more »

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Buy this. Now.

Posted in Download This on February 25, 2010 by properdiscord

This record is completely magical in all the important ways. Check it out.

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What does a critic do?

Posted in Uncategorized on February 25, 2010 by properdiscord

New Statesman is running a competition to find a new music critic under the age of 30.

If you’ve ever wondered what good music criticism looks like, you might enjoy what the judges have to say about what they’re looking for, including this from Alex Ross:

“Perhaps the greatest challenge is to remain passionately engaged over the long term — not to become jaded, politely accepting, cynical, or, worst of all, nostalgic. To the end, critics must remain open to the possibility of being totally undone by what they hear.”

Isn’t that rather lovely?

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