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Harmonia Mundi, one of the world's leading independent classical music labels, has finally taken the downloading plunge. In an agreement with the Independent Online Distribution Alliance (IODA), the world's largest distributor of digital music content, announced on January 24 at the annual music conference of the Marche International De l'Edition Musicale (MIDEM) in Cannes, Harmonia Mundi will make available its entire catalogue of early music and contemporary recordings to hundreds of digital music outlets around the world. IODA will also handle digital distribution of HM's catalogue within…
Back in 1992, Stereophile got into the business of concert promotion when it booked Canadian pianist Robert Silverman for two evenings of recitals in order to record his performances for a live double CD, Concert (STPH005-2). We don't believe in rushing to repeat a success, so 15 years later, on February 10, we're promoting another concert, this time featuring Attention Screen, the quartet led by Stereophile reviewer and jazz pianist Bob Reina.
Attention Screen also features Don Fiorino on guitar, lap steel, lotar (a four-string Moroccan lute), and extreme ukulele; Chris Jones on fretless…
The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) has issued a position paper on consumer recording rights, which it expects to be a "key issue in 2007." The CEA's position, in brief: "We urge Congress to refrain from limiting fair use and encourage market-based solutions to home recording and digital rights management issues."
The one-page paper is admirably succinct and free of cant. The CEA cautions that "home recording and piracy should not be confused," since home recording is not the same as re-broadcast or mass commercial distribution. The CEA also calls for warning labels on "copy-…
We reported in 2005 on the Recording Industry Association of America's (RIAA) lawsuit against Patricia Santangelo and her suit in response to the trade group's allegations that she had participated in peer-to-peer file sharing. The record companies dropped their legal actions against Ms. Santangelo in December 2006, instead deciding to charge two of her children, Robert (16) and Michelle (20), with downloading songs from Kazaa.
On January 30, Robert Santangelo and attorney Jordan Glass filed 32 defenses against five labels, counter-claiming that the suits damaged Santangelo's reputation,…
An essay with the unassuming title of "Thoughts on Music" has certainly caused a furor over the last week. Of course, it didn't hurt that it was written by Apple's Steve Jobs or that he stated absolutely that digital rights management copy restriction systems "haven't worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy."
No he didn't! we hear you saying. Oh, but he did, he did. Why would Jobs, who runs the largest DRM-encumbered download website of them all, say such a thing? There's no shortage of speculation on that point.
For one thing, the Norwegian Consumer Council had just…
On Saturday, February 10, collaborative improvisation band Attention Screen gave its debut at Manhattan's Merkin Hall at Kaufmann Center to a packed house. The event was recorded by John Atkinson for release in May as a Stereophile CD, possibly followed by a limited-edition DVD-A.
All four musicians in Attention Screen are composers as well as consummate instrumentalists. As a result, each "song" is an investigation into sonic possibilities; the group might discuss a direction, but the pieces evolve completely in the moment. As John Atkinson observed onstage, during an…
Many people remember the 1990 Milli Vanilli scandal, in which Rob Pilatus and Fabrice Morvan were stripped of their Best New Artist Grammy award when it was revealed they hadn't actually performed on the disc. Of course, "borrowing" has long been a part of the pop music world, as George Harrison's "My Sweet Lord," Led Zeppelin's "Whole Lotta Love," and almost any sampled recording can attest; however, most listeners have probably assumed things are a lot more straightforward in the world of classical performance and recording.
Perhaps not, as waves of speculation erupt over allegations…
Recordings that deliver the benefits of the high-resolution SACD format scored big at the 49th Grammy Awards Ceremony, held February 11, 2007 in Los Angeles. Telarc, which issues virtually all its classical titles and some jazz/blues releases in both DSD-native CD and hybrid SACD surround formats, won two Grammys in classical categories and three in jazz. SFS Media, the in-house label of the San Francisco Symphony conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas, received two Grammys for the seventh release in its ongoing Mahler series of live, DSD-native hybrid surround SACDs. Last but not least, Harmonia…
Like most Stereophile readers, we have grown accustomed to seeing Barry Diament's name on superb-sounding recordings, since he has mastered albums by artists from AC/DC to Warren Zevon—and every letter in between. When the magazine still had its editorial offices in Santa Fe, Diament dropped by one afternoon to say hi, so now we feel like we can brag, "Hey, we know that guy!"
Recently, we received an email from Diament, announcing his new label, Soundkeeper Recordings. Diament wrote: "Soundkeeper is something I've dreamt about since my earliest days as an engineer. Although many know me…
We wrote last week about the increasingly heated debate over DRM copy protection, with everybody from Steve Jobs to the RIAA weighing in on the subject. This week was just as wild and whacky on that front.
On February 7, Eli Harari, CEO of SanDisk Corporation, published his own "open letter", which said, "the answer is to protect the interests of everyone involved, not to chastise rights holders for trying to safeguard the entertainment they create and support." Surprise, surprise, SanDisk has a solution to proprietary DRM protection systems: "Its Sansa line of MP3 players… connect to…