Warner Music’s Dickensian efforts
p2pnet news view | P2P | Music:- “Struggling recorded music company” Warner Music, as the Los Angeles Times describes it, has created a new creative post, naming Rob Cavallo as chief creative officer.
Creatively, Cavallo has chosen Charles Dickens to generate fresh interest in the ailing company.
He speaks of, “turning the ‘drama’ of making a CD into a sort of Charles Dickens-like series” where, “artists would have to view every aspect of their career, perhaps even their inter-band relationships, as a money-making possibility,” says he LA Times.
“Why don’t we make it be more like Dickens?” he asks in the story. “What’s happening today? Making records is a drama in and of itself. Bands can decide how much and how little they want to put in it, but I know that all the records that have come out of my studio in the past 2½ years have had intense drama. People are interested in that. Some of that is private, but a lot of it can be used.”
Dickens might not have been the best creative choice, but he may have sympathised with Cavallo’s promotional efforts.
“On 9 November 1867, Dickens sailed from Liverpool embarking on his second American reading tour, which continued into 1868. Landing at Boston on 19 November, he devoted the rest of the month to a round of dinners there with such notables as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and his American publisher James Thomas Fields,” says the Wikipedia.
And while he was in the US, he had problems with Bruce Springsteen would have sympathised with — performance tickets being sold for well over the odds.
The pic on the right, “shows New Yorkers queuing up for tickets, a familiar sight in any city Dickens was to read in,” says a caption on the Dickens Museum site.
“The demand for seats had been immense from the very beginning of Dickens’s stage career,” it says, continuing »»»
Even so, the frenzy over the New York sale was quite beyond belief. His manager George Dolby recalls Mr. Dickens’s desire and principle of giving the public a fair chance in all matters, but certainly forty-five out of the first fifty men in the line were speculators’ (modern “ticket touts”) representatives, recognizable by their caps. His Chief, as Dolby calls Dickens, instructed that four tickets only for each Reading would be sold to each person, and those only to people in hats, but the speculators were equal to the occasion, for in the lapse of a few moments they had collected all the hats they could from waiters and others in the neighbouring restaurant and buy means of changing a hat for a cap at the entrance door to the ticket-office, the speculators contrived to get into their possession the greater portion of the first seven or eight rows of seats in the hall. Many were turned away as the line of purchasers exceeded half a mile in length. The second sale was even worse, with people standing outside all night in temperatures several degrees below zero. New York speculators even managed to buy some three hundred tickets for Readings in Boston, which they then sold at highly inflated prices.
“Under such circumstances it is hardly surprising to see a man in the centre of the drawing waving his tickets joyfully – few of Dickens’s ordinary fans had the opportunity to see him perform cheaply, the Dickens Museum site adds.
Los Angeles Times Warner Music Group names producer Rob Cavallo chief creative officer, October 8, 2009
generate fresh interest – We`ll Save You! Ek and Cavallo to labels, October 9, 2009
well over the odds – Springsteen angry over Ticketmaster rip-off, February 6, 2009
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