<< Familiar tunes, especially tunes likeable to a wide audience, breed a bit of comfort ...>>
Familiar to whom? Just what audience? How about those who do not care for the music? What if it is too loud (it is proven that hearing loss inures to those who frequently hear loud music, especially when the sound is electronically enhanced). Isn't their appreciation of the slide show thereby diminished? Suppose I'd rather hear Sonny Rollins than Sonny and Cher? I think what is missed here is that each instance constitutes the imposition by one of his musical taste on the other. <<New, unfamiliar and original music has many advantages, as Dave pointed out (add to that the copywrite problems should you decide to distribute your slide show on video), but not to the extent of eliminating familiar music altogether.>> That's another interesting supposition. Does "new, unfamiliar..." extend to the music of Ornette Coleman or Karlheinz Stockhausen? The public musical taste is also very fickle. It seems hard for many people to realize that there just might be a lot of people in the world who do not share their musical taste, railfans included (even though "taste" and "railfans" might be mutually exclusive terms<g>). Beware the copyRIGHT law. ASCAP and BMI are taking more and more interest in these "alternative" uses of commercially recorded music, and their interest has not lately been limited to video presentations. At some point, their representatives ARE going to show up at Eastrail, Winterail, and you-name-it-rail. The laws about commercial use of commercial recordings are VERY explicit, and all of these extravaganzas constitute commercial uses. It would be a lot easier to use music and recordings that are in the public domain (but, of course, these would not be so "popular" for that very reason, although to many they might be "new, unfamiliar...etc."). And before anybody starts complaining about all these impending problems, remember that we all made the problem by allowing it to become as invidious as they have in current American society. Ken H. --> SPORRS: Serious Photographers of Railroad Related Subjects X-Mozilla-Status: 0001 Content-Length: 8249
