Culture Institutions Go After the Short-Attention-Span Crowd

Around 3,000 people, seemingly all in their 20s and 30s, attended the first Takeover at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

New York Times

World Premiere of Sufjan Stevens' "BQE" [Brooklyn, NY; 11/01/07]

Nostalgia for modernism + urban planning + indie rock + Brooklyn reference + orchestra = Sufjan Stevens' "The BQE"

Constructed between 1937-1964 as part of infamous city planner Robert Moses's master vision for New York City's social reality, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway rose as 11.6 miles of neighborhood-severing, money-eating, limited-access overhead highway grimness. The book about Moses's modernist cruelty and obsession with cars over human needs is called The Power Broker, a relentless, detailed portrait of one man's egomania in urban planning.

Which is part of the reason why, when Sufjan Stevens said he had written a symphony about the BQE, people got so excited. Maybe Stevens would, through the power of art, convey this bleak inter-borough piece of citywide dismay as something majestic, the way he had transformed Detroit or Decatur.

Known for his chamber-pop miniatures about humble white working-poor life, Stevens has become indie's populist orchestrator. But he's also enough of a fool to try his hand at large-scale composition, having boasted of writing 50 albums extolling the dignity of local culture. Fans who celebrate his outsider ("indie") ambitions to excel in academic forms clap for his being at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave festival regardless. Given classical's lust for young flesh and filled seats, the crossover of Stevens's rapt fan base into three nights of sold-out crowds already deems the event a success.

Pitchfork

Bands find video games a ticket to fame

PARIS (Reuters) - Singer-guitarist Walter de Castro couldn't believe his luck when he found out his band's song "The Core" would be featured on "FIFA 2008," the Electronic Arts popular soccer game.

Reuters

U2 Tower

What a week for music!

So Radiohead and NIN went DIY, Madonna is consolidating her music revenues with Live Nation and the RIAA is still suing housewives.

With music downloading firmly established as the distribution method of choice and the significance of record sales as a revenue generator diminishing, it seems musicians are being forced to redefine their careers, expand their thinking on what they're marketable assets are and reconsider how they manage their income sources.

Is it any wonder then, that the Band U2 has gone into real estate.

Teaming up with, apparently Great Britain's only employed architect, Sir Norman Foster, the Irish foursome of Bono, The Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen won the contract to build Dublin's first skyscraper. The tower is a 600ft shiny tilted triangle full of luxury apartments with an egg-shaped recording studio suspended at the top.

The Telegraph

Bandwagonesque: Open source bands, flavor of the moment or full on revolution?

Some of the music industry’s biggest names are considering offering their music free online following the success of the experiment by the band Radiohead to let fans download their new album without charge.

The band’s website topped the chart of music websites with an 11-fold increase in internet hits after the announcement, according to internet monitoring agency HitWise.

Now Jamiroquai and Oasis, two major names that are not contracted to a record labels, are rumoured to be considering following Radiohead by offering work for free, according to industry sources.

The Telegraph

(Note from Adam: And why exactly would I pay for an Oasis or Jamiroquai album anyway? :) )

Yahoo Music to record execs: No more DRM, ever

Yahoo! Music's Ian Rogers gave an inspirational talk to some music execs with two messages: one, I won't build DRM anymore for you, because Yahoo customers hate it; and two, let's focus on all the ways that free-as-in-speech music can kick enormous amounts of ass.
 
Full article at boingboing