Of Recordings

Major League Soccer are auctioning off the opportunity to provide pre-game entertainment or to sing the national anthem.  Curiously, no one has bid.

Isn’t it traditional for the host to pay the band?  Exactly what kind of act are they seeking that a) has $1000 to spare and b) is wowed by the prestige of performing before the Kansas City Wizards?  (In case you are not familiar with American soccer, KC was 13th out of 13 teams in attendance last year.)

(HT: Freakonomics)

Minimalmusic.org reports that someone stole Matthew Dear’s removable hard drive– in the middle of his set.

Stealing a musician’s instrument (and if you perform with a laptop, that’s your instrument) is a particularly galling form of theft because the loss to the performer is many times greater than the gain to the thief.  A USB hard disk costs about $200, while the data on there probably represented hundreds of hours of work.  Both parties would have been better off if the thief took $300 out of Dear’s wallet instead.