Why Media?

“1. …What happens when every orchestra is able to put every performance up for sale (or for free) on its own web-based store? Or is the value of electronic media for orchestras dependent on it being an activity for only a subset of orchestras?”

To begin with, there will be only a number of orchestras who will be
able to do this as there are still costs and effort required to record
and put out a recording. Even now there is a lot available online from
the commercial and non-commercial entities combined. This is also true of hard media. This amount of product on the market has created a new middle in the electronic media world of the content curator who guides the taste and buying behavior of the public. It can be a critic, an institution (e.g. the SFS suggests recordings to its patrons in the program notes and in the store), a radio station or network, a blogger or the public in an aggregated form (e.g. Amazon’s “other people who chose this liked this other item”) or as an individual (e.g. “Read customer reviews of this product”).

“2. What is the value to institutions and musicians of radio
(local or national) vs CDs or downloadable files?”

They are both important and fill different functions. Radio allows for
that random chance meeting between a listener and an institution or an unfamiliar work; it can be a curator (see above) and even though the numbers of listeners and stations may be trending down, it is far from dead. I look upon radio as a “loss leader” to bring people to our media products and to our concerts. This is similar to websites that are not online stores that inform the public.

“3. Given that orchestral performances have (as Garrison Keillor
once described himself) a “face made for radio,” is there any real
value in doing TV broadcasts? If so, why are there so few left?”

“Why there are few is a function of cost (extremely high to do it well)
and receptivity of the viewing public. I won’t go into the entire chain
of the lack of music education begets a smaller audience in the future
for live and electronic performances as that is only part of the issue.

The other reason is that the producers of these shows (and I fault the
performing institutions most of all) have not made what we do
interesting to the public. Let’s be honest – a concert on television
can be like taking a shower with a raincoat on. I think this is true
for radio as well. Programs need to be created that lead the public to
the concert experience through education, piquing their curiosity, and
by appealing to the emotional side of our art.

As to the first part of your question – the answer is yes. Given the diversity of media these days, it is important to be present in as many forms as possible to increase those chance meetings I talked about earlier. A well-produced television concert can provide insight into a work like no other medium and, if properly promoted, the numbers are larger than radio or the Web.