Grassroots Documentary

Derek Sivers, founder of CDBaby and ardent supporter of independent music and artists, has started a new initiative to help young musicians get ahead in the music business: Grassroots Documentary.

What is the new project about? Well, essentially Derek goes out with his video camera and produces short interviews with people from the music industry. In those short videos (ca. 10 minutes each) these insiders talk about how the business works and how artists can have an impact in today’s music world. The idea is that the more information young musicians have about the way the business works, the better they will be positioned to participate sucessfully in the music market.

The first live internet broadcast of the Berlin Philharmonic

It felt vaguely ironic to be sitting before our computer in Germantown, New York, watching the first live internet broadcast from the Digital Concert Hall of the Berliner Philharmoniker, with Sir Simon Rattle conducting Dvorák’s G minor Slavonic Dance and Brahms’s First Symphony.

Interview with Alessandro Simonetto, Founder of OnClassical – The e-label for Audiophiles

OnClassical is a new e-label that sells music solely via the web. Unlike itunes, emusic, rhapsody, and amazon, OnClassical offers only high-quality downloads that sound exactly like a traditional CD. Zeitschichten.com spoke to the label’s busy founder, Alessandro Simonetto, about music in the age of the internet, OnClassical’s business philosophy, as well as their upcoming projects (they will soon license music for commercial uses)

Why improvise? A Review of Gabriela Montero’s New Album “Baroque”

In one of his countless interviews Friedrich Gulda remarked that those who cross boundaries are considered by society either as “revolutionaries or fools.” That, like so many of Gulda’s views, is somewhat exaggerated and simplistic, but there lies a kernel of truth in this assessment: going beyond the boundaries of our ordered world, one can either discover a land of wonderful possibilities or shipwreck in a stormy sea losing orientation and direction.

Rhapsody.com still not useful for classical music listeners

As some of you may already know, rhapsody.com has added a mp3-store to its portfolio recently. While I welcome this move, especially since the mp3s are DRM-free, the main drawback with the service, namely its poor user interface, still remains an issue. The problem as I see it is a lack of a sufficient search-engine […]

The Future of Music Making

Surfing the web today, I came across a very interesting talk by our music colleagues from the MIT Media Lab. In this video talk Tod Machover, Adam Boulanger, and Dan Ellsey give a quick overview on their work on new musical instruments and the impact that their research has on society. What I find most […]

A Music Search Engine

UMI is a good thing. If you ask them nicely they will send you information about and links to all the newly uploaded doctoral dissertations in North America. Today I came across an interesting thesis from McGill University by Ian Knopke (reference below). Ian worked on a music search engine that, unlike the standard search […]