[NewMusic] Book Review - Alex Ross = Gannicide

[Sarah - 21 Grand]

George wrote:
Well...maybe, maybe not.
The *real* NPR demographic might be represented by
the woman who called in to yesterday's Forum show ...

-- several years back Forum did a show about the Music for People &
Thingamajigs Festival. I think I called in and got to plug a 21 Grand show
featuring one of the musicians.

More George:
And elsewhere in the program,
there were statistics cited that Americans now watch 8 hours of TV per
day. Does anyone know if this is true?

-- I'd guess that statistic could be true if applied to the average American
household - that the TV is on 8 hours per day. If the average American
worked 8 hours a day, spent at least an hour commuting, and then watched 8
hours of TV, when would the average American have time to go shopping? But
of course, that would be the average American, not every American. Even if
statistically 90% of Americans watched too much TV, that still leaves 10%,
which is a large number of people.

George continues:
Or maybe the programmers just give the listeners what they want, all
of them, programmers and listeners, being folks cut from a similar cloth.
And what they want is to *feel* like they're culturally informed -... These
people don't 
want Roscoe Holcomb, or even Billie Holiday - they prefer Bela Fleck and
Madeleine 
Peyroux. That's your NPR demographic.

-- I agree with you, George, to some extent, and I'm rarely one to
overestimate the cultural curiosity and taste of the American people ... but
I think there's something of a contradiction in what you're saying.
Basically, the audience is relying on the programmers to give them that
feeling of being culturally informed, thus they are saying, "Tell me what I
should like." Let's say, instead of Bela Fleck or Ben Goldberg, the NPR
programmer played Xenakis or Metal Machine Music. I don't doubt that the
majority of the listeners would probably not like that. However, there would
probably be some that would, or at least find it interesting. The issue is,
how many people does that "some" translate into? Probably thousands. Yes, we
are talking about minorities of minorities (at this point in time, I wonder
if there is music or film or even a TV show that is consumed by the majority
of people), but the numbers are still significant in terms of potential
audiences for experimental music.

sl