Local and Industry News
Fort Lauderdale has announced a live music festival to replace the annual Air Show. The show will be held Memorial Day weekend and will be produced by former Live Nation executive Michael Cohl and Events Acquisition Corp.The Sun-Sentinel reports that Broward County has received almost no income from the decade-old BankAtlantic Center, despite underwriting $185 million of the construction cost. Of the hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue the Center has generated, the county has only received $346,000. In their agreement with the operator of the 20,000-seat arena, Sunrise Sports and Entertainment, the county only receives a percentage of the revenue when the center generates over $14 million in annual profits.
Changes are afoot at the Arsht Center. In its second year, it has balanced its budget and doubled attendance. It has also increased the number of parking spots available to 3000. And in December, Interim Chief Executive Lawrence Wilker will be succeeded by M. John Richard. Richard was previously Executive Vice President of the New Jersey Performing Arts Center.
Recording
EMI revenue for the fiscal year ending March 31 was down $500,000 to $2.3 billion, resulting in losses of $1.2 billion. EMI has suffered a 45 percent decline in physical CD sales between 2005 and 2007. EMI is planning on launching a web portal by the end of this year to compete with iTunes and MySpace in marketing artists and selling downloadable tracks.
RadioTAGr.com now offers tagging for songs heard over FM radio. The website will show the artist and song title of songs played on over 2,500 FM radio stations, and will also offer lyric lookups, links to download the songs from iTunes or the Amazon MP3 store, and links to the Ticketmaster concert ticket search.
Facebook is meeting with major record labels and song-streaming services to discuss Facebook's entry into the digital music business.
Lala.com is being relaunched and now offers digital music downloads and free streaming of MySpace Music. Visitors will be able to listen to 6 million tracks for free, and will be able to download MP3 tracks for a fee. Lala.com has participation from the four major record labels, as well as 170,000 independent labels.
The music industry expressed optimism about its future at the recent ETRE08 conference. Particular areas of growth noted included a la carte downloads, ad-supported music, selling music bundled with hardware, and involvement in live music production.
Symphonic
The Shreveport Symphony is on strike and the orchestra has canceled the first concert of the season. Musicians have taken pay cuts in three of the last six seasons and negotiations became deadlocked when management insisted on on converting full-time core positions to per-service positions, resulting in a 75 percent pay cut for musicians.
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra has announced the Institute for Learning, Access, and Training, a new music education initiative designed to reach more than 200,000 students. The Institute will provide classroom materials, posters, video, and websites designed to inspire and reinforce a love of music. The Institute will also spotlight talented music students.
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