Reply #42: Nonesuch

[OneBlueSky]

eclectic music for thinking adults . . .

The Industry Standard
By RUSSELL SHORTO
The New York Times Magazine
October 3, 2004

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/03/magazine/03NONESUCH.h...


Hitmakers, the Nonesuch way. Top row, left to right: Brad Mehldau, Bob Hurwitz, Steve Reich, Emmylou Harris; seated: Stephin Merritt (Magnetic Fields), Jeff Tweedy (Wilco), Laurie Anderson, David Harrington (Kronos Quartet).

(snip)

Which brings us to the point of our story. What these disparate artists have in common is a record label. I'm spending the evening with the staff of Nonesuch Records, the tiny, vigorously eclectic label, housed on the 24th floor of a high rise on the Avenue of the Americas in Manhattan, that has become a kind of American cultural institution. It has an influence far out of proportion to its size, and some think it could be a guidepost for a record industry in desperate need of direction.

One secret to the label's success is the conviction that the distance between Carnegie Hall and Irving Plaza has shrunk; that, in an age of category blurring, the fault lines in the audience are not between genres like classical, rock and hip-hop, but between sensibilities; that a person might, depending on his or her mood, put on a Beethoven symphony, a compilation of Cuban jazz, some urban rock or a country chanteuse like K. D. Lang. A crucial fact about that someone is that he or she is likely to be over the age of 30. Two further facts flow from this, which Nonesuch exploits: this listener has money to spend on CD's, and he or she would rather have the packaged product than snag a few songs off the Internet.

''Nonesuch is piracy-proof,'' the singer Emmylou Harris -- who became the label's first ''adult pop'' signing four years ago -- said when I asked her to list the things that set her label apart. ''Their audience actually enjoys buying a record. When I got into music in my teens, the album was a thing in itself. It was a whole piece of work that had a reason to flow the way it did. You weren't interested in just one or two songs. Nonesuch is still in the business of supporting album artists.''

- much more . . .

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/03/magazine/03NONESUCH.h...