 Big day for big music news stories, this. So here's another. The Pirate Bay have been found guilty of breaking copyright laws.
The filesharing service, which was set up six years ago, has been facing a Swedish beak on piracy allegations centred on allowing access to torrents for filesharing purposes. Its top brass intend to hold a press conference today (Friday 17th April) at 1pm Swedish time. It will be streamed on the front page of their site: thepiratebay.org
Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Carl Lundstrom and Peter Sunde have each been sentenced to a year in jail but are expected to appeal. The site, which has tens of millions of users across the globe, includes a page detailing various legal threats they've received from everyone from Microsoft to Warner and from Apple to Dreamworks. It's been pointed out elsewhere that anyone can use a search engine to find torrents too, so the verdict may have knock-on effects on how the search engines index files on the web. Yet with YouTube announcing deals with major film studios to stream movies free of charge only yesterday and Spotify scarcely seeing a day pass without being trumpeted as the saviour of the recorded music industry, it's also possible that The Pirate Bay, like Napster before it, could find itself fighting yesterday's battle before very much longer.
Keith McDonnell (that's him on the left) has been a regular contributor to musicOMH for some two years and has been co-editing our classical and opera pages for a while now.
With Simon Thomas's departure as classical editor, Keith took charge of the classical section of the site from the beginning of March. Simon will still contribute occasional articles, and we wish him well with his future plans.
While our new site is being built, Keith is keen to hear your ideas for improving the section's offering. What are we doing well? What should we be doing more of? What do you like most and least about the classical section as it is?
Zavvi, the music retailer formerly known as Virgin Megastores, has been placed in administration, adding further woe to an already miserable year for high street shops and music retailing.
Zavvi's website has been unable to sell anything since the collapse of the Woolworths-owned EUK distributor, Zavvi's main supplier. It has been reported that Zavvi owed a substantial sum to EUK. Administrator Ernst & Young have said they'll try to keep the chain running until a buyer can be found for the business.
In the same week as Whittard of Chelsea and The Officers Club folded and Woolworths' administrators began to close their shops, Zavvi's failing will leave even more shopworkers concerned for their 2009 outlook; the company operated 125 shops across the UK.
If Zavvi closes it would leave the record industry with just HMV, owners of Fopp and Waterstones, as the last major music chain selling their physical products on the high street. It's unlikely that pressure from supermarkets and the internet, in particular Amazon, will let up on the business, but the failures of Woolworths and Zavvi in quick succession should at least give His Master's Voice a breathing space.
In better news, independent record seller Rough Trade, celebrating its 30th birthday in 2008, reported its business growing by an impressive 7% year-on-year despite being caught up in the failure of the distributor Pinnacle earlier this month. If big chains failing offers hope to the likes of Rough Trade, perhaps there's some semblance of a silver lining to the gloom. Here's hoping so at least.
Widely reported across the news networks (and on BBC News) is a study by a Professor Adrian North of Heriot-Watt University which claims musical taste and personality type are closely related.
Apparently people can be lumped in to genre categories, much like some music publications lump music. And it seems being a Metallica fan tells the admen lots about you. Over to the Prof: "If you know a person's music preference you can tell what kind of person they are, who to sell to."
This might be rather sinister were it not so obviously flawed. It presupposes that classical music fans would only ever listen to classical music; that Metallica fans would only ever dress in black and thrill to the sound of Kirk Hammett's axe.
At least he clarifies one thing: "The general public has held a stereotype of heavy metal fans being suicidally depressed and of being a danger to themselves and society in general. But they are quite delicate things."
The study claims that if you identify with whatever "indie" is these days (English boys strumming their way to major label Tesco success, perhaps) then you have low self-esteem, you are creative but not hard working and, most curiously, you're not gentle.
Yet I'm probably not alone in knowing of people who are as happy listening to a Philip Glass CD as they are throwing shapes to whatever Paul Oakenfold happens to be spinning. Depending on my mood I'm as happy with The Field's electronic dystopia as I am with the lonesome acoustica of Bon Iver.
Does the Prof understand the people he presumes to study? Do you define yourself by your music taste?
I switched on Classic FM in the car the other day only to hear Schoenberg being played. Things were looking up. After a few seconds it was turned off though - it seems it was a quick illustration of how all atonal music is "rubbish". The presenter was one Alex James, a blurry sort of fellow.
On the subject of populist opinions, it was amusing to see Andrew (The Lord) Lloyd Webber "getting angry" because of the public's poor opinion of who should or should not be Nancy. Doesn't it occur to him that it's the public's shit taste which has put him where he is?
Congratulations to ENO for the coverage they've got out of the complete non-story of Paul Whelan singing from the wings at Lucia on Saturday. Nearly every TV news programme, and plenty of print media besides, have fallen for it. I don't know if the team at ENO did it themselves or if they got an agent in but they've done a great spin job. Well done to them.
I must say I'm quite dismayed by the reaction to Peter Handke's The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other at the National Theatre. While of course not all responses have been negative, for the most part it's been greeted with incomprehension and even some hostility. The extraordinary musical qualities of the work have been largely unrecognised and unappreciated by the critics and public alike. Why do people have such difficulty with abstraction when it comes to drama? Nobody pulls out their hair and screams "but what does it all MEAN?" when they hear Mozart.
Mind you, we have a rash of Harrison Birtwistle operas about to hit London, so maybe we're in for more of the same. I've been watching on Youtube the scenes that greeted the revival of his Gawain in 1994, when people actually picketed the Royal Opera House with placards, protesting against modernism in music. Unbelievable. I acknowledge that both Handke and Birtwistle produce "difficult" work that makes you work a bit but they are also among the most exciting artists of today in their respective fields.
Well, the nominations for the Olivier Awards have been announced and there's a surprise in the Opera category, with the inclusion of Pelleas and Melisande as Best New Production. While I didn't hate it as much as some people did, I would never have put it there (or La fille du regiment either). Here are the nominations:
Best New Production: La fille du regiment, Agrippina, Turn of the Screw, Pelleas and Melisande
Outstanding Achievement in Opera: David McVicar for Agrippina and Turn of the Screw, Natalie Dessay for La fille du regiment, Gerald Finley for Pelleas, Angelika Kirchschlager for Pelleas
Finley and Kirchschlager are both real favourites of mine but I don't think they deserve it for this production. I think my line-up would have been:
Best New Production: Agrippina, Turn of the Screw, Death in Venice (ENO), Gianni Schicchi (ROH)
Achievement: David McVicar, Deborah Warner (Death in Venice), Richard Jones (Gianni Schicchi), the RO's revival of Katya Kabanova
A shame that Opera Holland Park doesn't qualify or I'd have got L'amore dei Tre Re in there somewhere.
Anyone else have a view?
In a recent review of an orchestral concert, my colleague Dave Paxton wrote, of a round of applause between movements, “(it’s) something that I greatly approve of incidentally: a warm, spontaneous show of appreciation seems to me far more preferable than the deadly reverential silence called for by some”.
Hmm, it’s an interesting point. If it is a genuinely spontaneous expression of appreciation, then maybe, but more often than not applause seems to be a way of an audience proving that it’s still alive, which doesn’t seem altogether necessary and is seldom welcome to those who have actually listened to the music.
It can be extremely insensitive, as intrusive as the mobile phone ring that ruined the end of this particular concert. I’m not a big fan of applause generally. I quite often leave a performance without having clapped (or very little) and I don’t think that’s disrespectful to the performers. It seems to be something people do just because it’s what you do, because it’s expected.
I tend to think of silence as less of an infliction than noise is (a bit like fresh air; no matter how unpalatable to some tastes it may be, fresh air seems to be less of an imposition on smokers than cigarette smoke is on non-smokers). But I’m aware that imposing things like silence, fresh air, good manners, freedom etc could be deemed as fascistic.
I guess you can’t please everybody – one person’s poison is another’s life blood and we have to tolerate some behaviour that we don't like. I would like people to think, though, about the act of slapping their wrists together (often resembling a performing seal), rather than just doing it automatically and indiscriminately. If you think about it, it’s a pretty daft thing to do. Like quite a few habitual human activities.
Our pick of this year's best albums:
http://www.musicomh.com/music/features/albums_review-2007_1207.htm
We'll still be sporadically publishing features and reviews in the music and film sections over the break, with normal service resumed on Wednesday 2nd January.
Meantime, thanks for reading in 2007, happy Christmas and all the best for your 2008.
Fanciful kisses,
Michael and all at musicOMH.com
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