Posts by Kyle Matthews
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(by the way Kyle I honestly can't remember Te Papa charging entrance to the national collection, which is what Russell was talking about. A bit of a reading fail there, given Russell made no assertions about touring blockbusters.)
That's not a reading fail. Te Papa isn't an argument for a 100% government funded radio station focusing on a particular bit of culture. Te Papa isn't 100% govt funded, it gets a significant portion of its funding from sponsorship and entrance fees.
That doesn't directly translate to radio, but it wouldn't be completely out of this world to suggest that a company might sponsor a particular concert or series of concerts on the radio, for the privilege of having their name mentioned when those things are promoted and at their beginning and end.
Do I have to do everything?
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So let's say $47 million all up, and Concert with 10% of the radio funding and 5% of the audience (which probably compares favourably with Pacific Radio and iwi radio), and the values it adds to the NZSO etc. It's not outrageous.
Yes, those figures look better Russell. Cheers.
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Still, pretty epic judgement fail for a Minister of the Crown.
Just from the news story on stuff, it didn't seem like resign as minister material to me, but maybe they're looking to not give the opposition any traction.
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Russell, something seems to be bung with David's last blog.
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I'm struck by the assumption that some high art can justly be funded and some can't.
Paintings are, apparently, all good. Our national collection is housed at Te Papa, which cost $300 million (or 60 years' operating budget for Concert FM) to build, and $36 million annual to run. And that's just one public gallery/museum.
But Te Papa charges entrance fees for some of its exhibitions.
And it's got sponsorship all over it. So that's an argument for Concert selling advertising/sponsorship.
Concert FM receives $1 (or 2%) of the roughly $50 per capita in total that goes into public broadcasting schemes in New Zealand.
It also attracts about 5% of the radio audience in any given week.
I think that might be a maths fail Russell.
I presume you've taken 2% of the total broadcasting budget (including TV), and then compared it to the % of radio listeners.
A fairer comparison would be concert gets X% of the government funding that goes towards radio, and gets Y% of listeners.
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Jeremy they all remove water from our water cycle. The milk powder requires more water on arrival, so more expensive of this prescious resource. And of course the extra energy/pollution for its processing.
I'm not sure if adding the litre of local water back to the milk powder is the bit of the dairy process that we should be attacking. That's probably about as efficient as exporting of a pretty essential food group can be.
It's the umpteen litres of water it takes to produce a litre of milk that is the issue, plus the umpteen more litres of our waterways that get damaged.
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What does a unitary council (city and region combined) look like, given that it provides everything from rubbish collection, water and resource management consents to transport planning, tourism and business development, social policy and community venues?
But the City Council logo might be different from the 'tourism brand'.
I think in Wellington they're the same: "absolutely positively wellington" seems to be used by WCC. But in Dunedin the DCC logo and the tourism type brand are quite different.
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Let's say it was disestablished.
But I think only Danyl has ever suggested that Russell (maybe National is going to suggest it, we'll see). The middle ground of advertising/sponsorship is surely more likely.
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Because it doesn't come in little sound bites.
Wait. Neither do movies, and yet 99.9% of them have adverts in them.
I'm not actually suggesting that we get voice overs selling crap while the music is playing. But would a couple of messages after the composer and musicians bowed to applause kill you?
...as I was saying, especially those who cannot buy their own music (care to cost the content of a day of Concert FM?), cannot rent it from the library for free (show me the library!), and are not sitting at big shiny computers with broadband and the savvy to download broadcast-quality versions of that music (for free?!).
To be honest, it does sound a bit 'woe is me' from concert music enthusiasts. Yes, ok the library will charge you a dollar to hire that CD. Yes the music quality might not be as good on the internet. Yes adverts might not be the same as going to the concert and hearing it for an hour and a half uninterrupted. But these things all apply to every other form of music in NZ. What is so special about concert music? If there is a music demographic that is least able to buy music for themselves, it won't, on average, be concert listeners.
It's free music sent to you over the airwaves. At the suggestion that there might be a sponsor's name mentioned before it starts, the whole thing falls over?
I mean: "... otherwise nigh unobtainable in that form..." Are we saying that an ordinary NZer, if it was important to them, couldn't own some concert music? Most concert music followers are so short of cash that a $20/month to buy a couple of CDs is beyond them?
Meanwhile, the life-raft is still firmly attached to the deck of the cruise-ship, and there's carpetbag steak for dinner in the first class lounge tonight, with drinks on the Captain.
I like the broader analysis. If the right wingers are coming for our cultural institutions with cutbacks and overpaid executives while the actual artists really struggle, that's crap. That's why I'm certainly not arguing that they should be allowed to tamper with National Radio NZ.
But to me, full funding of concert radio, at face value, isn't defendable whether it's NACT in government, or the last lot, or an actual left wing govt. It looks like a large subsidy of people who like to listen to concert music.
I wandered past a trotskyist poster on the way back from lunch. It brought to my mind how such a government would probably shut down concert FM as being too bourgeois and only fund a more working class radio station.
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It's a cost-benefit argument. What do you lose for a relatively modest saving in the scheme of things?
Well OK. It's not a vast amount of money, but it's not peanuts either. We're not talking "well we could save $50K". For Concert it'd probably be a 7 figure sum. That's at least worth asking some questions about.
If you're talking about National, I think you underestimate the implications of such an action.
I think National radio is different. It clearly has a special unique status that concert doesn't. Concert's argument is that this is music which wouldn't appear on our airwaves if it wasn't government supported. Which I agree with. I just fail to see why concert music is more deserving of advert free than any other music.
If you're only talking about Concert FM, you have to think about how much sponsorship money there really is in that sector, and who -- particularly in the arts -- would miss out if Concert did win meaningful sponsorship. It would have a significant impact.
That's not a reason for fully funding it though. Do we fully fund anything else because then the sponsorship will flow through to other things that we want? OK, there might be adjustment and things might end up slightly thinner, but the increased opportunities would probably mean more money going into sponsorship of that sector. If the listener numbers are high, companies are going to want to be associated.
Ad free night classes, national parks, libraries, water, home care for elderly citizens
That's not a fair comparison. The night classes aren't all for concert music lovers are they? Libraries only carry a certain type of book? This is a complete subsidy of a segment of our culture, not all our culture.
And as a result the NZSO has suffered really badly from the recession.
Umpteen things suffer during a recession.
On the basis of your argument, we should fully fund things when its a recession, and then provide no funding when the economy is booming. Like everything else, there's an up and down cycle and they have to adjust to that.
But none of those reasons bother me as much as how we waltzed into having this conversation, happily conceding a huge amount of ground to the privatisers of every single last fucking thing.
Someone needs to look up privatisation in the dictionary. And, don't post angry!
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Strangely the idea that a Logo is going to tell me what my rates do or don't get me (often don't) reminds me of this particular Mythbusters episode. Sorry, that was unnecessary, but they send me a notice with my rates bill, which spells it out fairly clearly.
It doesn't seem particularly controversial to me to have something to plaster on the various buildings and services - trains, buses, rubbish collection, council buildings, libraries etc etc etc that reminds you at a glance "provided by..."
Certainly a lot more effective than on a rates bill, because most people just open that and curse. You don't market the cost, you market the service.