Mark Likes Music

Much more disgraceful than The Met's new logo is that the museum lies to the public. If you've ever gone, you'll know that The Met goes to every length to not only obscure that it's free to visit, but actively tries to get you to pay a "recommended" admission fee. In a passive-aggressive move designed only to end a lawsuit for its fraudulence, The Met will now call it a "suggested" fee to enter on its signage . Whether its employees will be more forthcoming with the attendance policy is yet to be seen. This kind of dishonesty is much more hurtful to your brand than any logo-design misfire.

It started with J ustin Davidson's Vulture review of The Metropolitan Museum's new logo, who called The Met's new logo a "graphic misfire" that looks "like a red double-decker bus that has stopped short, shoving the passengers into each other’s backs." Adweek panned it as a "letter-killing, article-elevating, butt-filled logo" and responded with one word upon viewing Wolff Olins's concept samples. Brand New has weighed in, as has Art Net News . Everyone loves to hate logos, which makes sense. I hate logos too: we spend way too much time arguing over marks, defending them, decoding their meaning. I'd rather talk about how an organization treats us, what it says to us, how it make our lives better. 

On Christmas Eve, Richard Florida posted an article on CityLab that draws on an article in the Economic Development Quarterly by Arthur Nelson and others to argue for the importance of the performing arts in drawing so-called knowledge workers to cities: The study finds substantial evidence that performing arts organizations add to both the growth of the knowledge class and to urban economies broadly. Those with just one type of performing arts center saw a 1.1 percent increase in knowledge-class employment between 2000 and 2010; those with two types of performing arts centers saw a 1.5 percent increase; and those with all three types saw a 2.2 percent increase.  The result of this influx of new-economy careerists is a whole bunch of money made: Over this ten-year period, the 118 metros with at lease one performing arts organization generated a whopping $60 billion in annual income and more than half a million additional knowledge-class jobs, or over 12 percent of all kn...

On his own blog, my colleague Nate Zeisler describes two models for musical careers . In the first model, musicians are mechanics, creating within "a very narrow, accepted window of performance practice which has been dictated by your teacher, conductor and the music written on a page." In the second model, musicians act more like designers, and come up with "new ways of thinking about the art form" by drawing on new genres of music and artistic disciplines. For Nate, the path toward a successful career is to fuse the two: In the field of classical music, there is very little room for people who can’t infuse qualities from both sides of the aisle into their career. Great designers in music will have little to say and won’t have credibility in the field if they aren’t great mechanics. Great mechanics, for the most part, won’t have a sustainable career if they’re not thinking as designers. I agree that the most successful musicians will be able to be both mechanic...

As a guest blogger on the Cross-Eyed Pianist , Simon Brackenborough argues that programming composers like Arnold Bax, half-lost to history but still with passionate advocates, will invigorate concert music and attract new audiences: It’s not about whether enough people will like Bax. But by confidently confronting the question of why he produces both obsessive fans and sniffy detractors, you have exactly the opportunity to engage people that the Proms should have seized with both hands. Disagreement, after all, is a sign that an art form matters: a repertoire of limited risk is a repertoire of limited relevance. The industry will be in a healthier place when concert-goers are less sure that they will enjoy the experience, but are willing to pay to find out. I'm not sure we should promote concerts with the slogan, You May Not Enjoy This: Pay to Find Out, but I do agree that there is great value in putting "masterworks"--pieces we hear all the time, season in and season...

E-mail, man . It's the worst. Back in the old days, I used to love making that walk down to the computer lab to see if any one of the handful of people who had my email address had fired an electronic missive my way. Staring at that two-tone, black-and-yellow screen, filled with anticipation, feeling that burst of joy at the sight of a line in the inbox: it was the highlight of my day. I still enjoy checking into my trusty Google account, but at work, I avoid my inbox at all costs. It's where my productivity goes to die, and it's not necessarily because of e-mail itself, but how and when people decide to send it to me. I wish more people would follow the advice of Harvey Schachter in the Globe and Mail , who also takes the time to realign our ethics of e-mail. For one, he dispells the assumption that short e-mails are rude, and asks us to "consider that lengthy emails are disrespectful of others' time." To that end, he recommends we follow a five-sentenc...

On New Music Box, Armondo Bayolo exhorts musicians to think big : We must see ourselves as collaborators within a much wider network of musicians and citizens, helping each other as best we can—be it through something as complex as presenting performances or something as simple as sharing each other’s work on social media—regardless of personal payoff.  The benefits will ultimately manifest themselves and reach far beyond the immediate gratification of a paycheck (although let’s not forget the importance of that paycheck, lest we get too idealistic and starve ourselves in the process) and into the realm of real, tangible cultural change. It's dispiriting that some musicians need to be reminded that advocacy needs to be part of what they do, that it's not enough to play the gig, get paid, and go home. On the other hand, it's an encouraging sign that there are groups out there who are either engaging in new ways with other musicians-- Bayolo cites the relationship between ...

It's easy enough to walk into any workplace and hear people bragging about all the multitasking they do, but, as pointed out by Matthew Fritz , what gets undervalued today is the ability to focus and prioritize. Multitasking can be downright harmful:  Rahul Mayak on Twitter  cited a Time / Inc. article by Issie Lapowsky that discusses recent research on  the negative effects of multitasking . One big culprit? E-mail. As Lapowsky points out, almost a quarter of our work time is spent on e-mail , and almost all of it increases multitasking--and tension. According to a study out of University of California, Irvine, when employees were cut off from e-mail for five days, their levels of stress and focus increased. That's not to say that e-mail is inherently bad, but it does show how people use it to pay forward the chaos and instability their own multitasking creates.

I came across a couple of blog posts about music that talk about the shift from an industry model ("we make CDs") to a service model based on ongoing personal engagement . Classical musicians have been living this new model for years. Most of them not only perform, but they also teach, and it's common practice to engage in pre- or post-concert meet-and-greets after concerts. Even orchestras , the classical-music institution most closely tied to the industrial model, have embraced educational programs and events aimed at improving face-to-face contact with the audience. To some extent, all musicians have had to piece together a career, using all their entrepreneurial tools to sell various services. But classical music benefits having in place not only a long-standing tradition of engagement in place but also the institutions it needs to carry that out on a large scale. 

I'm really excited about this, because I just embraced the smiley-face emoticon . BuzzFeed now has its own style guide ,  as noted by Megan Garber of  The Atlantic  with notable condescension. To be fair, though, it is pretty slipshod work if you put together a guide that lets writers overrule you if anything "looks weird" to them. The point is that if BuzzFeed can have a style guide, so can you. No matter how small your organization, you'll have a lot of writing to do. Figure out whether you use Ph.D. or PhD , use serial commas, and accept smiley-face emoticons in e-mails (and, for that matter, whether you write it e-mail or email ). It'll save you a lot of time and embarrassment.

On Friday, four members of the Kansas City Symphony, including music director Michael Stern, wore Google Glass and recorded their rehearsa l. A local company will edit the videos together, and we should see a final version this week. Orchestras seem to want to bring people closer and closer to them ; it would be good if they return the favor more often.

Hypebot notes that albums on independent labels won half of the Grammys last night, and pointed to Macklemore and Ryan Lewis, and XL Recordings' Vampire Weekend as examples. But, as the Future of Music Coalition points out, independent artists need to rely on big-label distributors and partnerships to really move product--and gain the notoriety that leads to awards. Macklemore, for example, works with Alternative Distribution Alliance, owned by Warne r, and XL Recordings have a promotion and distribution deal with Sony's Columbia Records.

Back on New Year's Eve, USA Today published an op-ed by Wynton Marsalis and Harvard president Drew Faust on the importance of arts education: We need education that nurtures judgment as well as mastery, ethics and values as well as analysis. We need learning that will enable students to interpret complexity, to adapt, and to make sense of lives they never anticipated. We need a way of teaching that encourages them to develop understanding of those different from themselves, enabling constructive collaborations across national and cultural origins and identities. In other words, we need learning that incorporates what the arts teach us. This follows a spate of articles in the fall about how music can make you smarter and richer and this one back in December in The New York Times . 

According to SoundScan, vinyl record sales are up 32% over last year, but the LP is hardly back, as Mashable recently declared . Total music sales--CD, digital download, and vinyl--were about 300 million units in 2013, and of those, only 6 million, or around 2%, were of the big, black disc variety.

Because I don't really think the world needs more hedge-fund managers or bullying billionaires, J oan Lipman's New York Times opinion piece linking musical training to career success left me cold. Much more heartening was this recent article in the Atlantic by Lori Miller Kase . Kase looks at  ongoing studies from researchers at Northwestern, USC, and University of California, San Diego on music programs for at-risk children in low-income areas of Southern California. In all three cases, researches are finding that music dramatically improves cognitive, social, and emotional development, placing children in a better position to succeed in school: Though these studies are far from over, researchers, as well as the parents and teachers of the study subjects, are already noticing a change in the kids who are studying music. Preliminary results suggest that not only does school and community-based music instruction indeed have an impact on brain functioning, but that it co...

It never pays to be cranky and sarcastic on social media  (unless you're writing about Chad Kroeger or Justin Bieber ; then, all bets are off), which is why I enjoyed reading in the Democrat and Chronicle about what Vidler's 5 & 10 in East Aurora, NY is doing with its YouTube channel . Here's a seasonal sampling: Given the lack of blog activity , it looks as if the store is using its channel as its primary content marketing tool, blasting out awareness through Facebook and good ol' fashioned PR . This makes perfectly good sense: with limited resources, it pays to focus on one social media outlet, commit to it with regular updates, and make the content distinctive enough so that it is of real value and interest to people. These videos are wildly entertaining, but even if you find them hokey, you'll at least get some good product ideas. Vidler's are stone-cold social-media ninjas.

A few responses to NPR dropping Lisa Simeone's World of Opera because of her involvement in organizing protest s in DC, and her firing as host  of Soundprint  for the same reason: On his Baltimore Sun blog, David Zurawick says that NPR has a code of ethics and needs to enforce it. Libertarian website Reason thinks that the lengths NPR goes through to prove its objectivity only emphasizes its editorial bias; better just to acknowledge it and let its employees be Prius-driving, yoga-loving, liberal lunatics.  WDAV in Charlotte, which produces World of Opera , is sticking by Simeone. The station is keeping her as host, and will start distributing the show directly to stations beginning on November 11.  WDAV blog commenters seem pleased.  James Fallows of the Atlantic has some responses from Davidson College alumni on WDAV's support for Simeone . (WDAV's studios are on the campus of the school. FAIR found her firing "absurd."  On a related note, Michel...

Because it uses Flash, there's only an Android app for Amazon's new Cloud Player --nothing for iPhone. But I'm having no problem installing the MP3 Uploader on my MacBook and can upload and play tracks through Chrome and Safari. At least I can listen through my computer at work (a PC) and through portable speakers at home (the Mac). Here's the thing: to upload all of my music from iTunes to the Cloud Drive, I need 20 GB of storage and they only give me 5 GB for free. If I buy an MP3 album from Amazon, I get that additional 15 GB without cost for a year . But what do I do after a year? Then I pay $20 annually to keep my music in the locker. That's pretty cheap, but I'm not going to go for it before I see what Google's got to offer.  For now, I'll live with my free 5 GBs, and because they'll let me store anything I buy from them for free,  I'll use Amazon's MP3 store. (See: they got me!) Want more?  Matt Brian speculates that all of this ...

The new Amazon.com "storage locker " for music (and other stuff) is nothing fancy; it's even more boring to look at than iTunes. Amazon gives you 5 GB for free, and nothing you buy from its MP3 store counts against this amount. So, if you already use Amazon.com as your source for music, it's a good deal.  I put up Fully Completely  and am listening to it now. Loading the album was a drag: I had to upload track by track. You can download an app that helps with uploading, but I'm at work and the firewall's blocking this. I'll have to try it out at home. I couldn't use Chrome to upload and had to shift to Firefox--not a big deal, but I use Chrome as my default. I went home and tried playing around on my Mac .

Through the Daily Dish, I found this Pop Matters article on the music you can find in CD bins at 99 cent stores. Thanks to the complete devaluing of the CD and the ruination of the recorded music industry, you can find better than ever stuff at places that used to only stock not-played-by-the-original-artists '70s hits packages. I found Boston's second album at the drug store last week for well under $10. Thanks to Pathmark, I got to know the artistry of Waylon Jennings just a little bit better. Now's the time to get out there and make your finds. While we still have the chance.