It is interesting to see how leading edge marketing seems to have moved towards classical music rather than pop these days. I have already mentioned the case of Brilliant Classic in a previous post (and by the way they also launched a very successful double-CD called 'My first Mozart' aimed at children). Here are a couple of other examples:
- Harmonia Mundi was initially founded in 1958 (focusing on middle age to baroque music) and have since then become the No.1 independent classic label in France. Their strategy is the opposite of what people like Brilliant have done: instead of selling as many CDs for as little as possible, they include it into a 320 page artbook on Mozart. Alia Vox (Jordi Savall's label) is following a similar approach with 'Christophorus
Colombus' which includes a 270-page artbook. - Universal Classics has started selling since end October live recordings of famous orchestra like the NY Philarmonic exclusively on the
Deustche Grammophon and Decca internet sites. Results have been apparently outstanding (Universal mentions for instance that the NY Philarmonic Mozart concert ranked #35 on iTunes US and #2 in classical music), although we will have to see if this is a long term trend ... - Last example: ArkivMusic which offers to classical music lovers the possibility
of getting out-of-press, otherwise unavailable recordings burned on CD [spotted on Stereophile].
As long as the files are available in CD (or ideally, higher) quality, this is good news and hopefully a continuing development. The audio quality of MP3s and other compressed formats is not up to the task of full musical production. Even "CD-quality" does not properly capture full dynamic range acoustic music, such as classical or jazz.
Posted by: mkii | February 18, 2009 at 06:38 AM