Making Innovation Happen
Friday, September 9, 2011 at 09:56AM Whether it's choosing words to make up a sentence or walking along a crowded street, we're all capable of improvising. But musical improvisation fills us with amazement. How do musicians make the moment-by-moment decisions to create spontaneous music that's more than noise -- and what's going on in their brains to make it all happen?
Monday, November 15, 2010 at 11:59PM Recently, the UK government passed The Digital Economy Act which included many, perhaps draconian, measures to combat online music piracy (including withdrawing broadband access for persistent pirates). Much was proclaimed about how these new laws would protect musicians and artists revenue and livelihoods. But how much money do musicians really get paid in this new digital marketplace?
Thursday, April 15, 2010 at 06:05PM Last week one of the world's truly great innovators passed away. Malcolm McLaren, the inventor of the punk movement. McLaren's life work was that of a Renaisance man, an ideas man who changed popular culture both as an entreprenuer and as an artiste. His journey of invention was often misunderstood by artists, academics and the industry in which he operated because he continually moved outside the norms to create new forms and new products that questioned the accepted practice of his peers. As a manager, he was not a traditional band manager. He interfered artistically. As an artist, he was held in deep suspicion by musicians and practicing artists alike because he was seen as an entrepreneur first, part of the profit making machine artists inherently mistrust. Even worse, he couldn't play a musical instrument used digital sampling technology to create his work way before it was the accepted norm.
Friday, March 12, 2010 at 03:59PM The story behind our featured video of the month is the perfect example of generational change. A perfect case study in what happens when organisations fail to recognise the changing nature of the market and fail to adapt their business models to suot the market. It is OKGo that has shown creative leadership here, not EMI. It is worth reading their blog to see how well they handled this.
Monday, August 17, 2009 at 09:08PM Since writing a bestselling book on her fascinating and complex extra-dimensional theory of the universe, Harvard physicist Lisa Randall has been busy re-imagining it as an appropriately cerebral art form—opera. After three years of development, Hypermusic Prologue: A Projective Opera in Seven Planes premiered at Paris’s prestigious Centre Pompidou in June and, like Randall’s book Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions [Buy], it manages to translate the impenetrable world of theoretical physics into something that not only appeals to scientists, but to anyone willing to look beyond the obvious for clues about the nature of reality.
