In 2018, a little-known Danish tech startup called Truelinked bought the website Operabase, at the time the largest database of classical music and opera performances, theaters, festivals and artists. It served as a kind of IMDb for opera, with performance listings, casting tools, and a deep archive of past events, and was used widely by […]
Tag: Music the Industry
Posted inEssay
In Defense of the Program Note
On his first visit to London in 1851, Hector Berlioz attended several chamber music concerts at The Musical Union, a subscription series run by impresario John Ella. His dispatches from the city were effusive: “The London public is very attentive and serious in its tastes and I have been able to see for myself its […]
Posted inReport
License to Earn
Judging by the number of lightsabers illuminating the packed arena, the Greenville Symphony Orchestra was doing great. Based in South Carolina, the regional orchestra settled below a screen set at the back of the Bon Secours Wellness Arena, which seats a bigger audience than their usual venue, and played the score to “Return of the […]
Posted inReport
Plenty of Fish
I was 15 the first time I went to Le Poisson Rouge. I was in New York on vacation from Canada, and a concert listing for the Kronos Quartet caught my eye. I had grown up on their recordings of Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and Morton Feldman, but to see the group up close, in […]
Posted inBreaking
KPIs by Candlelight
Fever, developer of the Candlelight Concert series, is one of the most prominent voices in our space. With 8.2 million followers on Instagram, the Candlelight Concert series is also a dominant force in classical digital marketing. Even if you’ve not attended one of their many concerts, you’ll know what they look like: a quartet of […]
Posted inEssay
Incoherence and Indignity in the Classic FM Hall of Fame
“The radio announcer for Classic FM informs his audience that Vaughan Williams’ ‘The Lark Ascending’ has landed, by popular vote, the number one spot in the station’s classical ‘Hall of Fame.’ The background is established: that Vaughan Williams is widely understood – sometimes loved, sometimes loathed for it – as the greatest representative, even as […]
Posted inReport
Welcome 2 Shorworld
In 2024, we reported on the meteoric rise of a composer named Alexey Shor. His music, which resembled the kind of music theory homework that gets Bs and Cs (and that multiple musicians compared to material produced by AI) was suddenly everywhere: in Valetta, Yerevan, and Dubai, but also in London, New York and Amsterdam. […]
Posted inReport
The Numbers Game
It begins with Timothée Chalamet’s recent offhand remark about opera, because of course it does. Things have moved quickly since I began my journalism career in 2020. That was a time of near-instant internet news. Since then, Buzzfeed died a death, news brands have pivoted to video, Google AI has allowed users to sidestep news […]
Posted inReport
Stand By Your Man
“If you want to be an opinionated columnist or a partisan campaigner on social media,” the BBC’s director general Tim Davie wrote in October 2020, “then that is a valid choice, but you should not be working at the BBC.” When Davie took over from Tony Hall as director general in 2020 (and in the […]
Posted inReport
Low Note
In a video on the social media page High Note, an account launched on July 29 featuring “street interviews with classical music icons,” the tenor Freddie De Tommaso stands outside a pub drinking a Guinness, joking with a female interviewer about whether his favorite composer is Verdi, Puccini, or Sean Paul. In about 40 seconds, […]