From the article:

this festival is hosted by Pitchfork Media, the online music magazine that in recent years has become a commanding authority within the indie-music scene. Over three days in July, 46 acts — ranging from the recently reunited 1990s rock band Pavement to the weird, raunchy Jamaican-inspired dance group Major Lazer — blew the collective minds of 54,000 people (average age: 27) in Chicago’s unglamorous, nonlakefront Union Park. “Rock used to be one living cell,” says Victoria Legrand, vocalist for the dreamy pop duo Beach House, which performed on the third day of the festival. “It was all grunge or all metal. But I’m glad it’s not like that anymore. The cells are dividing.”

…

The numbers back her up. U.S. album sales have dropped 38% in the past decade — but at the same time, there’s more music out there than ever before. In 2005, according to Nielsen SoundScan, 60,000 new albums were released in the U.S.; by 2009, the number had risen to almost 100,000. Factor in the millions of songs being downloaded for free on file-sharing systems like BitTorrent or being swapped on social-networking sites like MySpace and you’ve got a picture of how most industry insiders see the music business: fragmented, lawless and less and less profitable. Yet flourishing among those fragments is Pitchfork.

Read full article

I never met Michael Steinberg in person, but, by an unlikely coincidence of timing, I happened to be one of the people he worked with on two of his last pieces of writing. It was in my capacity as an editorial person for Nonesuch Records that I was asked by the label’s president, Bob Hurwitz, to write Mr. Steinberg about contributing liner notes for two classical recordings we were releasing soon: the pianist Richard Goode’s performance of the five Beethoven piano concertos, recorded with conductor Iván Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra; and the violinist Gidon Kremer’s performance of the five Mozart violin concertos, recorded live at the Salzburg Festival with the Kremerata Baltica. In light of Mr. Steinberg’s lifelong service to the giants of the German classical tradition—Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert, whose most haunting and otherworldly music was composed at the end of their lives—it seems fitting that his Mozart and Beethoven notes, both packaged in recordings released in just the past month, appear to be his last two works of published writing.

Read the rest of this entry »