corollary

Entry #50

Listening to:

Bach, Goldberg variations.

I subscribe to a magazine called BBC Music magazine. I like it because in addition to lots of classical music reviews each month, it comes with a cover CD of complete works (the Britten I mentioned yesterday is one such). This contrasts with Gramophone magazine which comes with a cover CD containing a dozen or more musical snippets. To my mind, there is precious little enjoyment to be had from hearing 5 minutes of the Schumann's 4th symphony, or 3 minutes of Beethoven's Pastoral.

However, it's not my intention to whine about this phenomenon today. Instead, I am going to comment on the way the web evolves, as illustrated by the web-sites for the BBC magazine. First take a look at this site. It's only when you scroll to the bottom of the page that you find that it hasn't been updated since July last year. There is no link to the new site either.

The BBC is in a funny situation. It is a publically funded broadcaster, but I believe it has been given permission to run suitably separated bits of itself more commercially. In particular, some of its Internet operations are allowed to go down this route. Given how crap the newer site is (it gets on my wick by explicitly setting font sizes; these end up minuscule on my screen), I guess it is part of this brave new commercial world.