Industry News
Yet again, inflation in south Florida far exceeded the national average. For July and August 2007, inflation in south Florida was at a 3.7 percent annual rate, compared to a national rate of 2 percent. The biggest increases are from food and from rent, which jumped 7.4 percent.
South Florida demographics are changing. According to a recent article in the Sun-Sentinel, south Florida is getting more crowded, more ethnic, and younger. Almost 250 people a day are moving to south Florida. Seventy percent of them are foreign-born, and more than a third of south Florida's current population is of Hispanic background. And south Florida's over-65 population is down to sixteen percent and shrinking. Another interesting statistic is that half of the population moves every five years--giving credence to the statement that south Florida has a very transient population.
Recording
Apple, the number-three music retailer behind Wal-Mart and Target, has signed a deal with Starbucks to offer the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store in their coffee shops. The deal will turn each Starbucks location into a digital entertainment center which can carry a huge inventory of music and videos without taking up any shelf space. Apple already controls over 73 percent of the retail digital music market.
MTV sees video games as a market of huge potential growth and plans to invest over $500 million in the industry.
Universal Music and Warner Music have announced plans to diversify income by investing in artist management and web networking, hoping to share in revenue from artist touring, sponsorship, and merchandising, in addition to record sales.
Toronto has announced plans to build the largest studio and media-facilities cluster in North America outside of Los Angeles. Seven sound stages are already under construction, and the district will eventually have 550,000 square feet of production offices and sound stages and a 45,000 square foot megastage.
Symphonic
In a vote conducted by the National Labor Relations Board, musicians of the Orlando Philharmonic voted 56-50 to be represented by the Central Florida Musicians Association.
The south Florida chamber choir Seraphic Fire has received a $250,000 grant from the Knight Foundation to create a professional chamber orchestra. The orchestra, which will be a flexible 14-30 players, will debut in the 2008-2009 season with four concerts.
The Florida Orchestra has hired Andrew Grams as Resident Conductor. Grams was previously assistant conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra and an American Symphony Orchestra League Conducting Fellow.
Classical recording sales grew by 22 percent last year, the bright spot in an industry that saw a five percent decline in sales in the same time period. The strength of classical sales is attributed to a larger percentage of earnings from digital sales (20 percent, versus 7-10 percent for the industry as a whole) and the ability to make money by selling a only few units each of a huge catalog, as opposed to trying to make a lot of money off of a few "superstar" recordings.
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