The first, on Sunday with the fathers, to Melbourne Museum to see the 30 years of Festival/Mushroom exhibit Katie and I checked out in July last year in Sydney at Powerhouse Museum.
The exhibit is a collection of artifacts (records / clothing / guitars / contracts / photos etc.) from Festival records from their beginnings with the Bee Gees etc. up to now. It also includes various interactive displays such as examples of mixing (with Yothu Yindi's Treaty, being able to turn on and off various parts of the song), a drum kit and a pair of DJ decks to try your luck at beat matching.
I can only compare it to what I saw in Sydney and I was pretty disappointed. It seemed like most of the exhibit was displayed, however it was shown in a much smaller area and in a less interesting way. The Syndey exhibit showed the artifacts in date order, so you started in the 50's and finished in the 00's. Melbourne Museum seems to have just dumped everything in a room as close to each other as possible.
Also, one of my favourite parts of the exhibit (which I admit has nothing to do with Festival so it's an obvious thing to cut out) was the display of various record/CD technology from the 1800s+ to now. This wasn't shown.
The video room (with an interesting but pretty fact-empty video on various bands from Festival) had terrible quality audio too, and from a record company I figured we deserved a bit better.
To it's credit it has been updated a little with some more recent info and it is still interesting for fans of the music. I guess I was spoiled.
Melbourne Museum itself hasn't changed much since I was there last, except it's now only $6 to get in instead of the price of a movie so it's at least back on the list of possible things to do and off the "get stuffed" list. It really does feel like a giant empty building with a few closets full of badly labelled stuff.
The other exhibit was the ultra disappointing Fire and Flood in Melbourne at the Melbourne Town Hall (there until Nov 1st, free). Filling maybe a 5 by 5 metre space, some plastic murals display some interesting photos of Melbourne in the past suffering under massive floods or fire. What was there was good and informative, however I was expecting a little more.
Spent lunch time today taking a few more "after" photos of construction around Melbourne and also a few "today" photos of photos in the Fire and Flood exhibit. A bit difficult to get exactly the same photo due to trees and carparks. I love Melbournes trees.
Please buy tickets so it sells out and they do another gig so I can go to both! Seeing Faith No More twice in October 1997 was the best gig related thang I've ever done.
The Register's take on Universal's CD price cut:
As The Times points out, this is the first CD price cut since the media format came on the scene in the 1980's. Think about that for a minute. New format, volumes low, prices high. Ronald Reagan was president.In 1993, CD makers shipped 495 million units and brought in $6.5 billion, according to the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America). By 2000, units had almost doubled to 942.5 million with $13.2 billion in revenue. That's quite a run.
As the supply of CDs sky-rocketed and the cost of the media plummeted, the price would be expected to go down. Two decades and four presidents is a long time to wait for a single price cut on what became a mass market good. CD players certainly went down in cost.