Oh no its not - I came across a New Yorker article by the esteemed Alex Ross - who writes a blog The Rest is Noise
And he writes about how the blogosphere has helped drive a renewed interest in classical music.
News bulletins were declaring the classical-record business dead, but I noticed strange spasms of life in the online CD and MP3 emporiums. When Apple started its iTunes music store, in 2003, it featured on its front page performers such as Esa-Pekka Salonen and Anna Netrebko ; sales of classical fare jumped significantly as a result. Similar upticks were noted at Amazon and the all-classical site ArkivMusic. The anonymity of Internet browsing has made classical music more accessible to non-fanatics; first-time listeners can read reviews, compare audio samples, and decide on, for example, a Beethoven recording by Wilhelm Furtwängler, all without risking the humiliation of mispronouncing the conductor’s name under the sour gaze of a record clerk. Likewise, first-time concertgoers and operagoers can shop for tickets, study synopses of unfamiliar plots, listen to snippets of unfamiliar music, follow performers’ blogs, and otherwise get their bearings on the lunar tundra of the classical experience.
Ross's article of course chimed with some favourite themes - The people formerly known as the audience and Pro-Ams And all media is made in the model of what is possible - audiences were local and national because that is what technology could deliver at the time. It was the reach of the broadcast masts that dictated The size and shape of the BBC regions in UK for example. Today Kate Modern on Bebo reaches 20 million people globally - and why not? This perhaps is one of the biggest challenges to legacy media companies, infrastructure and reach, existing contracts about regions and who is allowed to be in those regions, even in the same company and this links to profit centers. I could set up a media company tomorrow and my reach would be made up of two things - Hyper local and Global. From these two geographies I would be extremely successful if I can attract and sustain a mass niche community of interest.
Chris Bell, the director of worldwide product and music marketing at iTunes said
An interesting fact I recently uncovered is that, when you look at different genres in terms of sharing and cross-pollination, there’s more dabbling going on than you might expect. We sell almost as much hip-hop to classical buyers as we do jazz. We’ve made iTunes a safe place to try classical music. It is easy to sample and the buying is low-risk.
Ross goes onto say
Classical-music culture on the Internet is expanding at a sometimes alarming pace. When I started my blog, I had links to seven or eight like-minded sites. Now I find myself part of a jabbering community of several hundred blogs, operated by critics, composers, conductors, pianists, double-bassists, oboists (I count five), artistic administrators, and noted mezzo-sopranos (Joyce DiDonato writes under the moniker Yankee Diva). After a first night at the Met, opera bloggers chime in with opinions both expert and eccentric, recalling the days when critics from a dozen dailies, whether Communist or Republican or Greek, lined up to extoll Caruso. Beyond the blogs are the Internet radio stations; streaming broadcasts from opera houses, orchestras, new-music ensembles; and Web sites of individual artists. There is a new awareness of what is happening musically in every part of the world. A listener in Tucson or Tokyo can virtually attend opening night at the Bayreuth Festival and listen the following day to a première by a young British composer at the BBC Proms.
As we know, the self forming interest groups are known as Group Forming Networks or GFN's
Ross is also a beautiful writer - its wonderful to see such a gifted writer embracing the blogosphere.
By market criteria, mass culture is culture. What most people like is what most people should like. Never mind that a juggernaut of commercial forces are at play to sell this stuff, so that it isn't really possible to know what people would "like" in a world uninflected by advertising and media geared to selling whatever can be most easily sold to the greatest number of people. The commercial forces in effect predetermine choices; by spending vast amounts of money marketing, they convince audiences that their product is what most people want, and thereby reap vaster amounts of money.
Ross it seems has found an answer to that.
As ever Alan, an interesting blog on changing market dynamics. When we were first in contact I mentioned the Slow Food movement emanating out of Italy. What was fascinating about the organization was its visceral commitment to all things local. People bought into this project big time and the Slow Food campaign has truly gone global. Up to the end of last year the HQ in Italy published a quarterly magazine with an eclectic bunch of articles from around the world. So whilst being conscious of local food production systems and trying to save local specialities you were able to feel part of a greater whole.
Now the quarterly magazines have been stopped and the national offices (e.g. SlowFood UK) are to take up the reins of publishing "local" smaller magazines. The first instance of this has recently arrived on my desk and how parochial it seems. Someone has lost the plot of why Slow Food caught on - yes local is great but there is something spectacular about really connecting with people across the globe - at a human level - across borders. We don't need the drawbridge being raised!
Posted by: Tim Harrap | January 20, 2008 at 09:10 PM
To quote the earlier comment:
"there is something spectacular about really connecting with people across the globe"
Spectacular to the point that the very architecture of human consciousness at the global level is changing: Tiny flashes of local thought and action rippling outward to the world, interacting with other ripples, changing and being changed--endlessly and rapidly! All becoming part of a larger entity that we all live inside, thus can never be sure of it's true boundaries (as if there actually are boundaries!).
Historians will need to be Futurists just to keep up with today--as if they actually could keep up at all.
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