In the course of a discussion about state v.  private control of music Don
Satz challenges Deryk Barker:

>Well, we only have the private system to look at and analyze and
>criticize.  If we did have a public system, I think the majority of list
>members would strongly regret the change.

It's no doubt true that control of music in a totalitarian state presents
problems.  Both in Hitler's Germany and in the Communist bloc that went
belly-up in 1989 traditional music was strongly pushed and post-romantic
music either forbidden outright or disadvataged.  But there was still
plenty of subsidized live as well as recorded music of the kind the regimes
wanted people to experience.

Nowadays in places like Germany, Austria and Switzerland serious
music remains subsidized but modern music is included, not excluded.
My impression is that the record companies, which are private enterprises
in these countries, discriminate against modern music to about the same
extent as they do in,say, the United States.

But it is true that state control never did for the recording industry
what private enterprise has done for it.  Yet for live repertory the
subsidy-happy Germans, as an example, offer much more in more places,
proportionate to population, than do the subsidy-chary countries, the US
very notably included.

Denis Fodor                     Interneyt:[log in to unmask]