Posts by Kyle Matthews
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So why then is it being treated here like it needs branding?
I'll repeat my earlier argument.
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I want to expand public services, not reduce them.
But if something is going to be paid from the public purse, it has to have some justification for it. I'm in favour of funding of Maori TV, that's easy. The funding for the new digital TVNZ channels, yup.
A concert station that the private market won't provide? OK, I'll buy that. Ad-free concert music? How is that important to the nation?
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How many bits of Auckland are we wrapping into one? I think Auckland Identity is so up in the air, it seems extremely difficult to determine anything let alone one symbol representing who we are.
It's a city council. It's not Auckland Identity, it's the local government organisation. It doesn't represent who Aucklanders are (unless it's incredibly well done), it represents the city council doesn't it?
Seriously, I wouldn't want to tell the New York City Council they don't exist.
Yes, but Auckland currently has a regional council, and several city councils. They're not quite equivalent to the NY model, but there's one large body with several smaller ones.
Auckland's not going to have that. It will have one council.
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Whatchatalkingabout, Willis? Maori TV is a television channel, it has a HUGE budget compared to Radio New Zealand Concert. I'm not saying it should be otherwise, mind, but let's keep a vague sense of perspective.
So your argument is "it wouldn't save much, so it's not worth doing"?
Two of my immediate family members work in government departments. Last year both had to cut into their budget by some percentage. The total amount cut from one department was greater than the total budget (pre-cut) of the other department.
Being small might make it not a priority but "it'll only save a million or two" doesn't seem like a valid argument for not looking at the budget of an organisation. Still _real_ money after all.
Fat? What fat? Russell, a day ago:
I think that report assumes "no advertising". Clearly if you opened up the radio station to advertising or sponsorship, there's money to be earned.
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Not to mention how the liberal Left in this country has bought pretty much wholesale the neoconservative arguments about trimming the fat and using the market to support anything that moves. There simply isn't a money crisis. They're cutting their own taxes! But apparently we should just allow advertising into our public radios, or even suggest to can of them ourselves, to pay for their privilege. Unbelievable really.
I can't buy that Giovanni. I think if the left was more responsible with money, and more willing to look at trimming fat where it existed, then the right wouldn't have gained so much ground in the past thirty years.
Take some real fat, point it out, and then trim the fat, the meat, and hack into the bone. And then put some fat back on, but only for your new market driven management structure. That's what we've been through.
If the real fat wasn't there in the first place, it would have been a much harder move for the right to make. The idea that being left wing can't mean being responsible with money drives me nuts.
I don't buy the argument that the market should support everything that moves. The NZSO is a mixture of govt funding and private funding and ticket sales. Maori TV sells advertising and receives govt funding. They seem to me to be as important to NZ as Concert, yet it's fully funded?
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So I thought I'd look for other city logos ... it turns out to be harder than I thought.
Some of those aren't comparable. New York is 5 different boroughs not one city council.
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Dear Lord. Yes, people with money and access to posh CD stores probably don't have much of a need for Radio New Zealand Concert. And they should be our sole constituency.
That is of course an argument you could make for any sort of music. People with money and access to iTunes probably don't need that ad-free hip hop station that the government never would fund.
And I suspect that concert station listeners will not reflect the NZ population in that they will tend to be whiter, older, and better off financially.
In simple terms, if you're allergic to the free ice cream that's kindly being dispensed to all citizens, then by all means demand that some excellent sorbet be served alongside the dairy treats. Slashing the tires on the cultural ice cream truck is, well, barbaric.
I don't think many people are saying it should be gone by lunch time. Just that there doesn't seem to be a valid argument why it shouldn't sell advertising or sponsorship to try and cover some of its costs.
My point is that I'm really sorry that Beethoven was German, and that he wrote pieces that go on a bit and are difficult to interrupt with ads.
I'm not sure if "there might have to be a fair bit of music between adverts" prevents people selling the adverts.
It's about values and principles, not about whether a thin wedge here or there is OK because I personally don't need/use it.
I fail to see a principle in "we should be able to listen to concert radio without adverts/sponsorship". Maybe there's a principle in "we should defend cultural institutions", but I don't believe we're really debating that it should be scrapped (except Danyl), just that it can probably cover a some of its costs in the traditional manner of most radio stations.
It could continue to receive strong government support, particularly if it plays lots of NZ music, and has an important role in our society that the market can't provide.
With the movements broken up into segments, at YouTube audio quality?
I'll stay with FM radio, thanks.And I'd love to see the Pixies live next month, but sadly money doesn't allow. I'll watch their live work on youtube though and be happy that it's up there.
It's of the nature of our society that people with money get quality - I'd love to have Sky TV which is about the only way that I could get to see Olympics hockey, because Prime sucks and keeps cancelling it to show figure skating, but I just have to deal with the fact that I don't have the money for it.
I'm not sure why concert music should be any different. The fact that much of it is out of copyright and therefore can be placed on the internet for free - in high or low quality - is an advantage over contemporary music.
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If I were of a free-market disposition, that would sound like a good example to support an argument that we should privatise everything, as The Free Market will provide. :)
Well yes. Quite possibly money is a strong reason why the school leans that way. Good on them for recognising a need and providing it I guess.
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I wouldn't go that far, but I wouldn't be terribly uncomfortable with some programme sponsorship.
Like Danyl, I haven't heard any arguments as to why the government should fully fund a concert radio station, any more than why it should fully fund... kiwi fm or something like that.
I don't have a problem with the government owning the station, if it's unlikely that a private provider will sustain it long term. However I don't see why its music should be free from sponsorship or adverts any more than any other form of music.
If people don't want their concert FM music interrupted by adverts, do what I did when I got sick of advertising on radio stations, and bought CDs (see also, DVDs vs watching TV etc).
I'd prefer if the Left's response wasn't "oh, okay, you can have the concert programme, because we know you work hard and deserve lower taxes". I think the correct response is in fact "fuck you".
Giovanni, I think the left (and I include myself in that) would do better if they were willing to make sensible funding decisions and cut funding to things where appropriate. If we have to be opposed to things just because they're from the right then we'll look as much like dicks as them :)
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And the reason this a bad thing is because anything that threatens the revenue stream tends to get treated like its leporous, such as for example bad students who might bring down the grade-point average.
I think you're stereotyping private schools all into one box.
Which as my example proved, isn't fair. That was a school that wasn't cutting kids for not making the GPA, indeed it had created a niche for itself in the market of being a good place for some of those kids to go.