There's an extremely interesting and well-considered piece today in the Grauniad by Simon Jenkins.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2164109,00.html

His thrust is that by swamping the market with recordings available for little or nothing, the perceived value of such recorded material has (or will soon become) $0...  and in response, the public are sick of it, and now want the live performer, not a recording.

Your views on this, ladies and gents?

(PS "Pavva" is being amply discussed in other threads, so let's try to keep off that - despite it appearing, inevitably, in Jenkins's piece....)

Jenkins is a fool. Everything that issues from his pen, mouth (and probably from his other orifices, too) should be treated with automatic scepticism, if not instant derision.

You only have to look at his track record to realise that he's been consistently wrong about everything for years and years. 

He's a friend of Tony Blair and was the principal advocate of disastrous Millennium Dome.

He knows nothing of music, art, literature, politics (despite frequently writing about it), or London (despite frequently writing about it).  But I will concede he must know a lot about making himself agreeable to influential people. 

With live performance out of the financial reach of many people - and with all the imponderables to be debated before tickets are purchased ('Will it be any good?/What if I'm delayed getting there?/What if I'm delayed getting back?'), the recording remains - and, I believe, will remain, the prime means of recreational listening.

Most of the rock artists I like are now past their best....do I need to shell out a lot of money to see them in their decreptitude, or do I - for an infinitely smaller outlay - purchase CDs and DVDs of them at their best?

Do I pay an inflated price to see a possibly dodgy staging of, say, Die Frau Ohne Schatten', with all the attendant problems of inadequate orchestral balance, cut price sets and at least two ropey singers in the cast, or do I put on Sir Georg Solti's recording of the same piece (purchased for thirty notes eight years ago and now to be had for less than half that) and picture it all in my head while the supreme vocal/orchestral performance is unfolding before my ears?

It is, as our American colleagues say, a 'no brainer'.

As for Jenkins, he must have been short of something to write about today, before joining his pals on the golf course.

 

You'd be surprised! There's SO much out there.


Well, not the decent ones.