Live music events 'boost economy'

 15 May 2011 Last updated at 21:29 ET  The government should do more to boost the live music industry, UK Music said Large-scale live music events in the UK contribute almost ￡1bn a year to the UK economy, a major industry survey of festivals and concerts suggests.

At least 7.7 million visits to events in 2009 resulted in ￡1.4bn being spent, equivalent to a positive contribution to the economy of ￡864m, UK Music said.

This expenditure sustained the equivalent of 19,700 jobs, it added.

Almost one-fifth of the total spend came from overseas tourists, who spend 25% more than non-music tourists.

'Considerable asset'

UK Music called on the government to implement a live-music tourism strategy to boost the number of visitors to the UK.

"The role of music in terms of creating jobs, in terms of sustaining businesses and in terms of attracting visitors to all regions of this country comes over loud and clear," said Feargal Sharkey, chief executive of UK Music.

"We will do all we can to work with policy-makers and tourism bodies to realise the potential of this considerable economic asset."

The body made a number of recommendations to the government, including:

Addressing concerns over the difficulties that overseas performers encounter with the UK's visa systemWorking with the music industry to ensure that fans have an industry-approved facility to trade and sell on any tickets to live music events that they no longer needEncouraging live music at the grass roots by exempting small venues from the licensing regulations in the 2003 Licensing Act.Local economy

The research suggests that tourists spent ￡196m on concerts and ￡47m on festivals in 2009. UK music lovers spent ￡652m on concerts and ￡499m on festivals.

On top of this, ￡3m in total was spent on associated attractions.

Almost half of the total ￡1.4bn expenditure was spent outside music events, in local businesses such as hotels and restaurants.

Events in London generated the biggest proportion of overall expenditure, with overseas tourists and UK visitors spending more than ￡400m, sustaining almost 4,500 jobs, the report said.

The West Midlands was the next biggest contributing region, followed by north west England.

Bournemouth University's International Centre for Tourism and Hospitality Research conducted the analysis for UK Music's report, which was based on events attended by more than 5,000 people.

It had access to the data of more than 2.5 million ticket purchases to concerts and music festivals across the UK in 2009.

UK Music is an umbrella organisation representing the interests of the UK's commercial music industry.

DealBook: Warner Music Is Sold, Ending a Long Auction

 Kevin Mazur/Hope for Haiti Now, via European Pressphoto AgencyMadonna is among Warner Music’s artists.Rick Maiman/Bloomberg News Len Blavatnik is buying Warner Music and is expected to try to buy EMI.

8:52 p.m. | Updated

The Warner Music Group agreed on Friday to sell itself to the Russian-born billionaire Len Blavatnik for a total of about $3.3 billion, ending a months-long auction of the music company that is the home of artists including Green Day, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Eric Clapton.

The deal puts Mr. Blavatnik, who came to America as a penniless teenager and built a $10 billion empire by investing in oil and metal companies, at the helm of the world’s third-largest music company. It also sets up another potential blockbuster deal: Mr. Blavatnik is hoping to use his fortune to bid on the EMI Group and merge it with Warner Music, creating the world’s largest record company, people involved in the deal said.

The sale of Warner Music, long considered a trophy asset given its glamorous heritage, comes as the record industry continues to struggle with its transition to a digital future. Digital music downloads have been rising, but not nearly at fast enough a pace to replace the revenue lost from falling CD sales. Mr. Blavatnik will also have to contend with Warner Music’s strained financials; the company’s revenue declined 6.7 percent to less than $3 billion last year. His investment company will assume Warner Music’s roughly $2 billion of debt in the deal, as well as pay about $1.3 billion in cash.

Most analysts said Warner Music shareholders would receive a surprisingly rich payday — $8.25 a share, which is about 34 percent higher than Warner Music’s average stock price over the last six months. When the auction started, it was unclear if anyone at all would bid or whether bidders would seek to carve the company up.

“For Warner Music, it’s almost the perfect scenario,” said Tuna N. Amobi, a media analyst at Standard & Poor’s Equity Research. “The best outcome for the auction is to sell the entire company, and the value they’re getting is at the high of any estimate.”

Warner Music had attracted dozens of potential buyers, from other music companies to billionaires seeking to rub elbows with rock ’n’ roll celebrities.

At one point in the bidding — in what would have been a remarkable twist — Sean Parker, the billionaire co-founder of Napster, which nearly ruined the music industry with its free file-sharing, expressed an interest in making an offer as part of a consortium with the billionaire Ron Burkle.

By this week, however, three suitors had emerged with strong prospects. Mr. Blavatnik; Tom and Alec Gores, brothers who run their own private equity shops; and Sony/ATV Music Publishing, which had been working with the billionaire Ronald O. Perelman and the investment firm Guggenheim Partners.

Mr. Blavatnik had long been seen as the most likely winner of the bidding. A former Warner Music board member, he has retained close ties to top company officials like Edgar M. Bronfman Jr., the company’s chairman and chief executive.

“I am excited to extend my longstanding involvement with Warner Music,” Mr. Blavatnik said in a statement. “It is a great company with a strong heritage and home to many exceptional artists.”

Since immigrating to the United States in 1978, Mr. Blavatnik has become one of the world’s richest men through his varied investments, primarily in the industrial sector. His company, Access Industries, owns stakes in TNK-BP, the Russian oil giant, and LyondellBasell, a chemical company that has rebounded from bankruptcy. (Mr. Blavatnik is fending off a lawsuit by that company’s creditors, who contend that his takeover of the chemical maker piled it with an unsustainable amount of debt.)

His next big quest, people close to him said, will be to try to buy EMI, too, a transaction that virtually everyone on Wall Street seems to be anticipating.

“The next step is that I would expect Access to look at buying part or all of EMI and making a larger record company, to consolidate the industry into three competitors rather than four,” said Laura Martin, an entertainment and media analyst with Needham & Company. “That helps pricing power, and also helps business-model innovation go faster.”

Besides EMI and Warner, the other two big music companies are the Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment.

EMI was seized by Citigroup earlier this year after its owner, the British private equity firm Terra Firma, defaulted on a $5 billion loan. Combining Warner and EMI, analysts say, could eliminate hundreds of millions of dollars in redundancies, making the investment profitable.

But a deal would likely face regulatory scrutiny. Just hours after Mr. Blavatnik’s deal with Warner was announced, Impala, an independent music industry group based in Europe, put out a statement saying, “Any attempt to combine EMI with Warner would similarly be blocked unless there are substantial remedies to solve the competition problems of going from four to three majors.”

The sale of Warner Music, however, is music to the ears of its controlling investors, a group of private equity investors who were questioned at the time they acquired the company from Time Warner in 2004. The investors — THL Partners, Mr. Bronfman, Bain Capital and Providence Equity Partners — had bested a rival bid by, of all companies, the EMI Group. THL held the biggest position at about 51 percent, including co-investors, having poured about $525 million of its own money into the deal. Bain Capital held about a 25 percent stake, while Mr. Bronfman and Providence split most of the remainder of the equity.

The buyout group reaped a significant payday during their first year of investment, when Warner Music paid out about $1.4 billion in dividends to its shareholders.

The investors are expecting a return of about two times their initial investment from the deal with Mr. Blavatnik. THL alone expects to generate an internal rate of return of about 34 percent, some of these people said.

The deal with Mr. Blavatnik is expected to close in the third quarter. He is expected to finance the purchase with cash on hand, as well as with financing provided by Credit Suisse and UBS.

Warner Music was advised by Goldman Sachs; AGM Partners, the advisory firm run by Alan Mnuchin; and the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. Access was advised by Credit Suisse, UBS and the law firm Debevoise & Plimpton.

Ben Protess and Andrew Ross Sorkin contributed reporting.

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Middle East: Metal in the Middle East? A Music Scene Emerges

In front of the band a dozen or more young men in black T-shirts and blue jeans are jumping, bumping and generally moshing the night away.

“Many new expatriates are surprised to find any kind of metal scene in Dubai, or they’re surprised that Arabs listen to metal at all,” said Baraa (Barry) Kassab, a sound engineer who works with bands in the United Arab Emirates. “The Middle East has metal bands and they’re growing in popularity.”

One such band is Nervecell, a death metal band born in the Emirates that has released its second album, “Psychogenocide.” “Metal in the Middle East is a little different,” said Rami Mustafa, Nervecell’s 27-year-old guitarist. “The fans rarely sport the stereotypical complete metal look — tattoos, long hair, spiked bands, jewelry and leather. The focus is on the music and lyrics, and of course, the band T-shirts.”

The music is a little different, too. Psychogenocide broke new ground with a track that its lead vocalist Rajeh (James) Khazaal said contained the “first-ever Arabic growl.” It’s difficult to imagine any menacing sound from the affable Mr. Khazaal until, in an interview, he plays the track “Shunq,” featuring a duet of deep and powerful gutturals between Mr. Khazaal and Karl Sanders, lead singer of the American death metal band Nile.

“Shunq means choked or to be hanged to death,” Mr. Khazaal said. His band’s “stuff is generally in English, but we wanted to experiment our genre in Arabic.”

He added: “The track is basically about the struggle of humanity versus evil and the conclusion is the judgment of Lucifer.”

There is a widespread but mistaken assumption that metal and its various subgenres primarily appeal to young white males, said Sam Dunn, a Canadian anthropologist who has directed two documentaries about the music scene — “Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey” in 2005 and “Global Metal” in 2008.

While researching for “Global Metal,” Mr. Dunn travelled to the Gulf to attend the Dubai Desert Rock Festival, not expecting to find much of interest. The experience challenged his preconceptions. “I did not expect to find fans in the Middle East,” he said. “The fan base in the region was much bigger than I thought.”

Mr. Khazaal said metal music was first brought into the Middle East by returning students who had attended Western universities.

“Most fans and friends I know were introduced to the music in the late 1980s and early 1990s through older siblings, cousins or peers, who had a foreign connection,” he said. “In those days, we had tapes and magazines that were passed around.”

The Internet, however, opened a whole new world, allowing metal fans to enjoy unlimited and uninterrupted access the music — albeit through illegal downloads — even while it remained unavailable in mainstream music stores. The Internet, and social networking in particular, today provides the key link between the region’s bands and their potential fans.

Gene, a Syrian rock and metal band that performs in Arabic, addressing the angst and aspirations of Arab youth, is a case in point. The band benefited hugely from an easing of Syrian restrictions on Facebook and Twitter, said Maen Rajab, its guitarist. “Our fans are mostly from Syria, but the base is expanding due to our concerts abroad, our Web site, Facebook and YouTube,” Mr. Rajab said.

Performing in Syria and the rest of the Middle East remains a tough proposition, if only because production companies and event organizers are more interested in staging pop music concerts, with their mass appeal and easy marketability.

 

A Go-to Site for Tracking Music Acts

The touring market is the fastest growing sector of the music industry, yet when it comes to big-tent sites that represent the experience as a whole — and do more than just sell tickets — there are few contenders. One young company called Songkick is trying to change that by feeding its users personalized news about live shows and creating an extensive Web home where fans can share all their concert memories.

Songkick’s main function is simple on an almost Web 1.0 level. After users sign up to track their favorite bands, the service sends free e-mail notifications when those acts are going to be in town, drawing from its database of more than 100,000 concert listings around the world. To fill in any gaps, it can also scan a user’s playlists on iTunes, Pandora or other digital music services, and recommend relevant events.

“We want to make it as easy to go to a concert as it is to go to the movies on a Friday night,” said Ian Hogarth, the company’s chief executive.

Songkick, which was founded in 2007 and is based in London, has also begun to make noise within the concert industry. According to some counts, as many as 40 percent of all concert tickets go unsold. Songkick’s method of user-sanctioned target marketing helps sell more tickets, said Sarah McGoldrick, marketing manager for C3 Presents, an independent concert promoter in Austin, Tex., which supplies listings data to Songkick.

“They have the right idea,” Ms. McGoldrick said. “They’ve gotten people engaged with the Web site, and that means that when they get e-mail they see it as relevant, and not as spam. And the most crucial step in any live entertainment marketing is, if you’re not relevant then you’re wasting your breath.”

With a string of deals to syndicate its data around the Internet, Songkick has also emerged as perhaps the most ambitious listings site. Over the last year, it has begun working with YouTube, Yahoo and the BBC, and it recently signed a deal with the Warner Music Group to manage the Web dissemination of its artists’ tour dates. A mobile app is coming soon, and the company also made a prominent hire: its new chief technology officer is Dan Crow, a veteran of Apple, Google and start-ups like Blurb.

For fans accustomed to the laborious process of scouring for concert listings on blogs, MySpace pages, bands’ Web sites, nightclubs’ sites and e-mail, Songkick’s personalized system can simplify the hunt and turn up news they might have missed.

“It does the heavy lifting for me,” said Joe Zadeh, a 29-year-old tech worker in San Francisco who has been using the service for a year. “If it wasn’t for Songkick, I just wouldn’t go to as many concerts. Because it’s just too much information, too much noise to keep up with.”

Songkick isn’t the only music listings site. Pollstar, the concert industry trade publication, has an extensive online database, and other services like JamBase and Bandsintown allow users to track their favorite bands. But Songkick has emerged as the leader. According to comScore, the site’s monthly traffic has long since surpassed all its competitors’, except for the two gorillas of the market, Ticketmaster and Live Nation. (The two companies, which merged last year, maintain separate Web sites and operate as separate divisions within Live Nation Entertainment.)

Chris LaRosa, music product manager at YouTube, said that integrating concert information had become more important as sites like YouTube become one of music fans’ first stops in discovering new music.

“If you look at a live concert, it’s really a content purchase,” Mr. LaRosa said. “People come to YouTube to preview what concert they want to go to.”

Songkick takes a cut of purchases made via its links, but the company wants to do more than sell concert tickets. Over fried chicken before a concert in Brooklyn one night recently (Handsome Furs, a husband-and-wife duo from Montreal), Mr. Hogarth, a cherubic 29, argued that by focusing on regional markets and doing little to retain customers, the concert industry had left open a huge opportunity: a big, overarching Web site dedicated to the experiences of fans.

Using sites like the Internet Movie Database as a model, Songkick has built an archive of two million concerts going back to the 1950s. Each concert record has an “I was there” tag for users, who can add posters, photos and links to reviews, building up a media-rich “gigography.” Eventually, Mr. Hogarth said, the company could sell memorabilia or live recordings through the archive. (So far the site does not have advertising.)

“There’s a need for a consumer brand that represents live music fans online,” Mr. Hogarth said. “Not focused on the venue or the particular ticketing system, but focused on the fan. And we believe that can be a huge company, similar to the way Yelp represents restaurants online, or Netflix represents movies online.”

He added: “If people are going to think of one brand when they think of live music, we’d like that to be us.”

Born in London, Mr. Hogarth studied artificial intelligence at Cambridge University and formed Songkick with two friends who, like him, were irritated by how difficult it could be to find concert information. Listings are scattered across the Internet, and ticketing companies’ impersonal e-mail blasts didn’t help much. After developing the basic idea for Songkick, Mr. Hogarth and his founding partners, Michelle You and Pete Smith, had a quick rise: the company received seed money and guidance from Y Combinator, an elite tech incubator in Boston. Among its investors are Index Ventures, whose media bets have included Skype and Last.fm.

But the company has already stepped on some industry toes. Songkick gets listings information from promoters and ticket services, but also has its computers trawl for it around the Web; last year Pollstar planted some dummy listings and saw them turn up on Songkick. Gary Bongiovanni, Pollstar’s editor, said his company had not taken action, but noted that in 2000 it sued another service, Gigmania, for doing something similar, and won a default judgment.

“I have no respect for anyone who tries to build a business off of other people’s hard work,” Mr. Bongiovanni said. In response, Mr. Hogarth said that Songkick no longer used Pollstar’s data.

At the Handsome Furs concert, Mr. Hogarth kept his backpack on, and made sure to stay through the encore. To stay fan-focused, Mr. Hogarth said, the company forbids its 20 employees from accepting free tickets. Instead, each employee gets a monthly gig allowance of about $40.

“As soon as we are on the list, the guest of the promoter, we’ll forget about the pain of not getting your ticket at 9 a.m. when the on-sale starts,” Mr. Hogarth said. “We’ll lose sight of what it means to be a fan.”

 

Letters: The Sound of Music (2 Letters)

To the Editor:

Re “To Tug at the Heart, Music First Must Tickle the Neurons” (April 19): Mozart’s music is deceptively simple, and performers tend to overinterpret his works. Daniel J. Levitin asked about a performance of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 27, “What is the pianist doing to mess this up?” I would venture that the pianist was occasionally adding pauses after the first beat in each measure. This practice has become increasingly common; consequently, audiences have begun to think that Mozart’s piano music isn’t so great. How sad! When they are not violated, Mozart’s rhythms grab hold of our souls.

George Jochnowitz

New York

?

To the Editor:

What is the sense of trying to pin down the magic of musical expression? So what if someone prefers the mechanized version of Chopin over some famous pianist’s? It only adds to Chopin’s luster that he can appeal to so many different tastes and experiences, and it tells us nothing about the brain, except to define some kind of illusory deviance. Daniel Levitin is brilliant at promoting his research, but he interacts not at all with humanistic music researchers. For them, the point is not to normalize music or musical expression but to defamiliarize it — to discover the infinite ways to make and hear it, and to help us understand humanity through these diverse expressions and responses. Bring on the robot Chopin!

Michael Tenzer

Vancouver, British Columbia

Science Times welcomes letters from readers. Those submitted for publication must include the writer’s name, address and telephone number. E-mail should be sent to scitimes@nytimes.com. Send letters to Science Editor, The New York Times, 620 Eighth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10018.

 

To Tug Hearts, Music First Must Tickle the Neurons

 

“The song has that triplet going on underneath that pushes it along, and at a certain point I wanted it to stop because the story suddenly turns very serious,” Mr. Simon said in an interview.

“The stopping of sounds and rhythms,” he added, “it’s really important, because, you know, how can I miss you unless you’re gone? If you just keep the thing going like a loop, eventually it loses its power.”

An insight like this may seem purely subjective, far removed from anything a scientist could measure. But now some scientists are aiming to do just that, trying to understand and quantify what makes music expressive — what specific aspects make one version of, say, a Beethoven sonata convey more emotion than another.

The results are contributing to a greater understanding of how the brain works and of the importance of music in human development, communication and cognition, and even as a potential therapeutic tool.

Research is showing, for example, that our brains understand music not only as emotional diversion, but also as a form of motion and activity. The same areas of the brain that activate when we swing a golf club or sign our name also engage when we hear expressive moments in music. Brain regions associated with empathy are activated, too, even for listeners who are not musicians.

And what really communicates emotion may not be melody or rhythm, but moments when musicians make subtle changes to the those musical patterns.

Daniel J. Levitin, director of the laboratory for music perception, cognition and expertise at McGill University in Montreal, began puzzling over musical expression in 2002, after hearing a live performance of one of his favorite pieces, Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 27.

“It just left me flat,” Dr. Levitin, who wrote the best seller “This Is Your Brain on Music” (Dutton, 2006), recalled in a video describing the project. “I thought, well, how can that be? It’s got this beautiful set of notes. The composer wrote this beautiful piece. What is the pianist doing to mess this up?”

Before entering academia, Dr. Levitin worked in the recording industry, producing, engineering or consulting for Steely Dan, Blue ?yster Cult, the Grateful Dead, Santana, Eric Clapton and Stevie Wonder. He has played tenor saxophone with Mel Tormé and Sting, and guitar with David Byrne. (He also performs around campus with a group called Diminished Faculties.)

After the Mozart mishap, Dr. Levitin and a graduate student, Anjali Bhatara, decided to try teasing apart some elements of musical expression in a rigorous scientific way.

He likened it to tasting two different pots de crème: “One has allspice and ginger and the other has vanilla. You know they taste different but you can’t isolate the ingredient.”

To decipher the contribution of different musical flavorings, they had Thomas Plaunt, chairman of McGill’s piano department, perform snatches of several Chopin nocturnes on a Disklavier, a piano with sensors under each key recording how long he held each note and how hard he struck each key (a measure of how loud each note sounded). The note-by-note data was useful because musicians rarely perform exactly the way the music is written on the page — rather, they add interpretation and personality to a piece by lingering on some notes and quickly releasing others, playing some louder, others softer.

The pianist’s recording became a blueprint, what researchers considered to be the 100 percent musical rendition. Then they started tinkering. A computer calculated the average loudness and length of each note Professor Plaunt played. The researchers created a version using those average values so that the music sounded homogeneous and evenly paced, with every eighth note held for an identical amount of time, each quarter note precisely double the length of an eighth note.

They created other versions too: a 50 percent version, with note lengths and volume halfway between the mechanical average and the original, and versions at 25 percent, 75 percent, and even 125 percent and 150 percent, in which the pianist’s loud notes were even louder, his longest-held notes even longer.

Study subjects listened to them in random order, rating how emotional each sounded. Musicians and nonmusicians alike found the original pianist’s performance most emotional and the averaged version least emotional.

But it was not just changes in volume and timing that moved them. Versions with even more variation than the original, at 125 percent and 150 percent, did not strike listeners as more emotional.

“I think it means that the pianist is very experienced in using these expressive cues,” said Dr. Bhatara, now a postdoctoral researcher at the Université Paris Descartes. “He’s using them at kind of an optimal level.”

And random versions with volume and note-length changes arbitrarily sprinkled throughout made almost no impression.

All of this makes perfect sense to Paul Simon.

 

How to Submit Podcasts to iTunes Music Store

在 ServiceModel 客户端配置部分中，找不到引用协定“TranslatorService.LanguageService”的默认终结点元素。这可能是因为未找到应用程序的配置文件，或者是因为客户端元素中找不到与此协定匹配的终结点元素。
在 ServiceModel 客户端配置部分中，找不到引用协定“TranslatorService.LanguageService”的默认终结点元素。这可能是因为未找到应用程序的配置文件，或者是因为客户端元素中找不到与此协定匹配的终结点元素。

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