Decius wrote:

Download all nine of Beethoven's symphonies here the day after they are broadcast.

Grab Beethoven, free, while it lasts...

In view of the recent Beethoven posting, I encountered this excerpt in an essay from "A Jacques Barzun Reader" and just had to share:

The first thing to do on arriving at a symphony concert is to express the wish that the orchestra will play Beethoven's Fifth. If your companion then says "Fifth what?" you are safe with him for the rest of the evening; no metal can touch you. If, however, he says "So do I"--this is a danger signal and he may require careful handling.
-- Donald Ogden Stewart (more), author of Perfect Behavior

Beethoven and 'Perfect Behavior'

"If everyone else is putting out horrible CD's," he said, "why not buy something from people with taste you more or less trust?"

Little-Known Bands Get Lift Through Word-of-Blog

Download all nine of Beethoven's symphonies here the day after they are broadcast.

Grab Beethoven, free, while it lasts ... the first five symphonies are available now; the last four will be posted at the end of the month.

BBC - Radio 3 - Beethoven Experience - downloads

At last, the music recommendation technology that consumers have been waiting for ... one that is based on the music itself.

It's fun to use, supremely responsive, and driven entirely by the unique tastes of each individual.

To power this unique software, Savage Beast created the Music Genome Project, the most comprehensive musicological database of its kind.

The result is the first music discovery tool to truly put control in the hands of the consumer.

The CTO is a veteran of Pets.com!

Savage Beast Technologies

Even the Gray Lady gets it.

Today new albums from Coldplay, the Black Eyed Peas and the White Stripes hit the stores. If you needed to be told that, then you are probably not part of the target audiences for these very popular bands.

Even blowout sales for all three would really do nothing to change the feeling that something is terribly wrong in the music business.

The real problem in the music industry is an addiction to blockbusters, and that is what today is all about -- feeding the monster this industry has become.

The big record companies continue to insist that the only route to profitability is blockbuster sales of a few titles, and the result is all too predictable -- music that matters more for how it sells [1] than how it sounds.

[1] I have always been fond of this little rant by the Jeff Goldblum character in Jurassic Park:

I'll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you're using here: it didn't require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn't earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don't take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could and before you even knew what you had you patented it and packaged it and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you're selling it, you want to sell it!

Cold White Peas

Perhaps it was inevitable that a group like this would eventually emerge, peddling an energetic but inoffensive variant of hip-hop. But did we have any way of knowing that the results would be so unpleasant?

Clean-Scrubbed Peas Rap in a Phunky Groove

"We have to be more aggressive when it comes to motivating the casual consumer."

There are simply more concerts to choose from. "The pressure on the consumer entertainment dollar becomes very dramatic between Memorial Day and Labor Day."

Clear Channel had hoped to exploit synergies between radio and concerts through advertising and tour sponsorships. Those extra advantages never materialized. Last week, Clear Channel Music announced some steps aimed at getting more people into the cheap seats.

It is not clear whether price reductions will increase demand for tickets.

"The promoter gets 15 percent of the upside and 100 percent of the downside."

"With the increase in the cost of talent, we increased ticket prices. And when fewer people show up, we can lose money on what otherwise would be a great show."

The Trick of Making a Hot Ticket Pay

How technology has transformed the sound of music
by Alex Ross

For most of us, music is no longer something we do ourselves, or even watch other people doing in front of us. It has become a radically virtual medium, an art without a face.

For music to remain vital, recordings have to exist in balance with live performance, and, these days, live performance is by far the smaller part of the equation.

Like Heisenberg’s mythical observer, the phonograph was never a mere recorder of events: it changed how people sang and played. Katz, in a major contribution to the lingo, calls these changes "phonograph effects."

In 1916, the conductor Ernest Ansermet brought Igor Stravinsky a stack of American pop records, Jelly Roll Morton rags apparently among them, and the composer swooned. "The musical ideal," he called them, "music spontaneous and ‘useless,’ music that wishes to express nothing." (Just what Jelly Roll was after!)

Contemplate Coldplay for a moment.

At a Dada concert in 1920, Stefan Wolpe put eight phonographs on a stage and had them play parts of Beethoven’s Fifth at different speeds.

How could a single record do justice to those endless parties in the Bronx where, in a multimedia rage of beats, tunes, raps, dances, and spray- painted images, kids managed to forget for a while that their neighborhood had become a smoldering ruin?

It thrives on the buzz of the new, but it also breeds nostalgia, and a state of melancholy remembrance.

Feedback is the sound of musicians desperately trying to embody the superior self they glimpsed in the mirror and, potentially, turning themselves into robots in the process.

Is there any escape from the "feedback loop"?

This is a paradox common to technological existence: everything gets a little easier and a little less real.

I’ll take "Rubber Soul" over "Sgt. Pepper’s," because the first recording is the more robust, the more generous, the more casually sublime. The fact that the Beatles broke up three years after they disappeared into the studio may tell us all we need to know about the seductions and sorrows of the art of recording.

The Record Effect

Are you a Coldplay fan? I know we have a few here. Enjoy!

Coldplay, the most insufferable band of the decade.

The lyrics can make me wish I didn't understand English.

Coldplay has spawned a generation of one-word bands that are more than eager to follow through on Coldplay's tremulous, ringing anthems of insecurity.

Coldplay follow-throughs are redundant; from the beginning, Coldplay has verged on self-parody.

The new album is faultless to a fault, with instrumental tracks purged of any glimmer of human frailty.

It's supposed to be compassionate, empathetic, magnanimous, inspirational. But it sounds like hokum to me.

The Case Against Coldplay

MBM has a new album. (Long-time fans take note: the jazziness of this album is something of a departure -- more Spooky than Subliminal, if you will.)

In Meat Beat Manifesto’s nearly twenty-year existence, what began as a collaboration with fellow Perennial Divide member Jonny Stephens quickly became a revolving door forum for multi-instrumentalist Jack Dangers’ investigations into sonic possibilities and contemporary electronica rhythms.

For more than 20 years, Meat Beat Manifesto has remained on the cutting edge of sound design.

At the root of MBM's work is rhythm -- sometimes hypnotic, elsewhere more insistently dance-floor. But it’s more than just about the beat. "Want Ads One" and "Want Ads Two" have a deadpan voice reading a series of seemingly disconnected newspaper ads that just might reveal a greater link on further examination.

(These "Want Ads" tracks are creepy, by the way.)

'At The Center' - Meat Beat Manifesto