The Popular Music scholar and writer, Dave Laing died suddenly on 6th January 2019. Amongst many other things, Dave was a very good friend to Live Music Exchange, someone to whom we often turned to for advice and help. Both were always freely given in a wonderfully supportive way. In this post, we offer an LMX tribute to Dave.
Music’s role in, and value to, society has emerged in the news from multiple angles recently from its health benefits, to its economic contribution, to challenges for music education and venues. With music at the centre of such a broad range of benefits, controversies and challenges, we revisit in today’s post the keynote address by Professor Simon Frith OBE from our Live Music Exchange, Newcastle event in 2016, in which he draws upon his experience as a rock critic, researcher and academic writer to examine the different criteria that we apply when making assessments of music’s value.
Our latest guest post is by Dobe Newton, OAM – an active music professional for over 40 years and leader of the 2012 Victorian Live Music Census and the 2017 Melbourne Live Music Census. Here, he presents key findings and observations from the Melbourne Live Music Census of 2017, and reflects on the census process.
With Parliamentary attention turning to ticket touting again, today’s post features Live Music Exchange’s Adam Behr writing about Ticketmaster’s decision to close its secondary market sites in Europe, and a video of an expert panel on the secondary market from the Live Music Exchange Newcastle event in 2016.
The secondary ticket market has been in the news again recently, with minister for digital and the creative industries Margot James urging consumers consumers to boycott Viagogo, as National Trading Standards launches an investigation into the company and FIFA files a criminal complaint against it. Meanwhile, a new body has launched in defence of resellers – The Fair Ticketing Alliance, whose …