iTunes fact of the day

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 winnersNelson Freire playing Chopin deserved to win Best Instrumentalist.

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