STUDY: Park Avenue Families Favor Major Record Labels

UPPER EAST SIDE, New York City - A recent study made by Blue Music Group Opinion & Research suggests that Park Avenue families are largely favoring major label artists in their music consumption. Parents of these families have in recent years been so busy doing other things that they haven't had time to monitor the development of their children's musical awareness. Nannies, tutors and other everyday contacts of the Upper East Side kids have been shy with trying to introduce a diversity and depth of musical choices for the sensitive preteens and teenagers. This has lead to an overall deterioration in awareness for the arts on Park Avenue, the study finds.

The Van Houten family residence is located in the corner of 64th Street and Park Avenue. When meeting with Patrick van Houten in his second floor office, conveniently located next to the swimming pool and recreation facilities, he commented: "Personally, I don't have time to raise my children. I know they shouldn't listen to those pop people, what are they called again... Britney Spears and Mariah Carey, I guess, but I can't force Vivaldi on them either, since I had to listen to the Four Seasons in my childhood, and I still have nightmares about it. Can't do it." Mr. van Houten represents an average Park Avenue family, whose tastes and exposure to music have in recent years been tragically left behind. When asking for his holiday music preferences this year, he first looked at his Blackberry's NYSE rates for an answer, but then quickly uttered: "Uhmm... Bing Crosby, right?" Secondary tutor Melissa Caldwell feels helpless but aware. "I listen to a lot of Naxos CDs, can't really afford Ondine and BIS although they're nice, but I haven't been given instructions on sharing any of that with the children." Caldwell, who is a cello performance major at the Juilliard School of Music across Central Park, is frustrated when seeing a whole generation of East Side kids being left in cultural darkness. "It's really tragic, but there's nothing I can do about it. This would never happen on the West Side." Similarly, security officer Alistair Crawley, who supervises all traffic of the house from his basement office full of surveillance monitors, has been a fan of Latin music for twenty years. "They haven't explicitly forbidden it, but I see it safer for my job to listen to Marta Gómez after work in my room [on the fourth floor]. It is pretty painful to see what the Fox TV channel is doing to these children. Fox should really feature more Latin music." The children, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said their daily activities in fact contained little music. "Whatever is on my iPhone I listen to sometimes, but I prefer to go to the pool or in the winter out skating at Chelsea Piers with friends," daughter, 11, said while her shoestrings were being tied. "Actually, I like those guys who play guitar and some singers in pink."

An initial reason for the study was to solve the mystery to what causes so many Park Avenue families to completely isolate from the rest of the country, and how they endure such a cultural misery compared to the country's otherwise diverse listening habits. The study found that indie labels and independent creative artists, located in Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, have trouble reaching this region of Manhattan due to the traffic bottleneck of the Helmsley Building, blocking the influence from the culturally fertile areas to the poorly aware quarters between 61st and 96th streets. Another reason was the strategically placed representation of the major labels, located north of the Helmsley Building, which have direct access to the Upper East Side, without any checkpoints. EMI has representation on the Avenue of the Americas, Universal and Warner Brothers on Madison Avenue, and Disney on 42nd Street at Times Square. "The major label guys can easily take cabs from midtown and drop off leaflets on the Upper East Side," Harvey S. Johnson from BMG explains. "East Side kids have a tendency to pick up stuff on the sidewalk. If it's not chewing gum, it may be a major label leaflet, advertising Madonna, or Michael Jackson at its best. The indie labels don't have these resources, cab fares have risen steeply, and the indies are located far away Downtown." An official from the RIAA, The Recording Industry Association of America, in Washington commented by email: "Since the federal dollars for the indie labels have been shrinking year after year in favor of the majors, we're hoping the majors would take responsibility by at least dropping off ads with honorable music by Diana Krall or Chris Botti, if they can't print ads of the dead greats, such as Bill Evans and Miles Davis. We know this is a problem, but the 2002 Park Avenue Freedom Act, signed by Dick Cheney, prevents us from intervening."

Listening habits have not always been pop oriented on the Upper East Side. In the 1930s, when swinging big bands were the latest and greatest around town and the radio, Upper East Side would firmly stick to music by Beethoven, Mozart and Brahms. But since the rock revolution in the mid 1960s, with the Beatles penetrating to the deepest ghetto of Park Avenue, all art education was completely left to private interests. Johnson sees a contradiction there and hopes for a balance: "We initially thanked the Beatles project, because they broke the classical dogma. But since then there hasn't been any control at all, only these leaflets. Today, the children are hardly making a difference between a music video and a CD. It is alarming when they confuse Barbie dolls with their own party photos."

The Van Houten residence has been selected as a project family for special education in order to diversify, and hence normalize, their listening habits. They will be exposed to artists such as vocalist Jill Walsh, composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein and guitarist Ben Monder. Patrick van Houten was happy about the initiative. "That's great. I may actually ask one of them to provide background music for my next cocktail party. It will be great exposure to these struggling artists, since the vice president of Deutsche Bank and the marketing manager of British Airways will be coming." When asking for a comment from Johnson, he said: "We may need to take steps to include Mr. van Houten in this project in addition to his children. But it all depends on our fiscal budget."