I had thought classical music was flailing on-line, but perhaps I was wrong:
…classical music comprises twelve percent of sales on that site [iTunes]. Back in October I linked to a piece by Marc Shulgold in which Mark Berry of Naxos asserted that classical music accounted for six percent of all Internet downloads. We’ve been told for some years that classical music makes up only three or four percent of record sales overall. Something’s happening here, and Time, Newsweek, and Entertainment Weekly (to name three magazines that have dropped all classical-music coverage) don’t know what it is. For more, read Anastasia Tsioulcas in Billboard and Scott Timberg in the LA Times.
Read more here. I suspect many people don’t want classical music to succeed on the Internet. That would mean change. Shorter pieces? More celebrity-driven? More pieces that can withstand poor sound quality? More fusion and crossover? Listeners who reassemble symphony movements to form their own medleys? What is classical music anyway? By the way, here are the classical grammy winners. Nelson Freire playing Chopin deserved to win Best Instrumentalist.
I’m surprised classical music is successful on iTunes because the track labeling is so inconvenient for say opera, not to mention iPods (at least my old one) have a nasty fractional second skip between tracks. But obviously annoyances like these don’t matter to most consumers.
Downloads make it easier to sample different kinds of music, reducing the barrier to entry into different genres (which I have appreciated for non-classical musics, um, sometimes legally). There’s a barrier to entry in deciding what recording out of forty Beethoven Fifths at the record store to buy; there’s even a barrier against browsing in the (often empty, often sequestered) classical section at a record store. But online you can listen to whatever you like and no one can make you feel uncomfortable or anxious about it. Call it the internet-is-for-porn model.
It may not be that folks on the Internet are more inclined to classical music, or that iTunes is particularly suited for downloading classical music, but it is certainly true to P2P programs for illegal downloading are terribly suited to downloading classical (or jazz) music. It’s impossible to keep track of performers or performances when all you have is a filename to guide you downloading on Gnutella or some other network. In contrast, online services make it easy to at least search by primary artist (although not by all artists, performance date, or lots of other stuff that jazz and classical folks would probably like).
Maybe those people that get classical music would be getting music on the Internet anyway (as I am with jazz). Maybe the difference is just that the cost of downloading the song is lower than the transactions cost in never being able to find it, either through traditional channels or through illegal downloading.
However, I think the biggest barrier to downloading services really making inroads in the classical and jazz markets is their depth of music. I subscribe to the Napster service, and while I think it’s great for broadening one’s horizons, it will never take the place of special ordering hard-to-find albums.
One of the things I sometimes wonder about is the “audiophile” market, who seem willing to pay crazy money for cool-sounding technology that cannot possibly make any perceptible difference to the sound, yet play the same recordings as everyone else. If a way was found to get a few people to pay hundreds of pounds for super-duper-high-quality recording the music industry could put up with almost everyone else pirating it; the audiophile market is those people who would claim it sounds worse even if it’s bit-for-bit identical.
it’s actually pretty difficult to find decent classical/jazz on the net in this pitchforkmedia generation – hence the need to purchase. most torrents are pop/rock/indie. just try finding yo-yo ma on the music genome project (pandora.com) and you’ll see what i mean.
Umm, I don’t know or care about i-tunes. I will never own an I-POD. But I do know why the percentage of classical downloaded is greater on itunes. There are two main reasons. First, people who are older (meaning over 20) are both more likely to listen to classical music and more likely to use a paying service rather than get their music for free from torrents. Second, until just recently, it was impossible to find classical music for free online. It’s getting easier, thank god, but at one time it was nearly impossible. Just now, though, I went to a site and found a link for Karajan’s Beethoven Symphonies, Karajan’s Requiem, Gergiev’s Tchaikovsky 4-6, etc. etc. And I can actually use the media once I download it. Itunes is a joke.
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