We were asked
Dear Mr Mullenger,
I am currently working with a strategic plan for developing
a Swedish record label within the field of classical music.
I am interested in knowing about trends from abroad and wonders
if you know about any site and/or company that would be intresting
to look in to concerning the future of classical music (i.e
how will listeners get hold of classical music?
Thank you and thank you for an excellent website!
Annica Sandh
We replied ...
As an avid collector of "real" discs it pains me
to say so but surely logically downloading or most probably
streaming is going to be the future. With G4 and then G5 being
rolled out in years not even a decade and the concept of the
internet cloud getting ever nearer (with such high download
rates that HD movies let alone FLAC or other lossless formats
that will be easily accommodated). That fact that companies
like Chandos already offer studio master quality downloads that
are superior in hi-fi terms to the best CD can offer is the
tip of the iceberg. For many (and I include myself here) nothing
quite beats the almost ritualised pleasure of putting on a disc,
browsing a well written booklet as well as that slightly shaming
thing - POSSESSION! I know from my son's generation that he
is the ONLY person who still actually buys hard copies of discs
(regardless of content) - that change has occurred in a single
generation. A bigger question is whether ensembles and institutions
will embrace the idea of pay as you go streaming of live events
to people's home 3D-TV's and ultra hi-fi sound set-ups - live
concerts from the comfort of your own home. Where we have own-label
CD's now perhaps we'll have own-label broadcasting. The "broadcasting"
of opera from the Met to cinemas is the beginning of that. Give
it 2 generations and collecting of actual discs will be for
the tiny minority regardless of genre. I'd bet if I'm wrong
it'll be a question of timescale and things will have happened
faster and more far-reachingly - not not at all! The technology
will be there for sure - perhaps copyright and intellectual
property rights will delay rolling this out across all platforms.
regards
NICK BARNARD
As someone who straddles the worlds between technology and
music, I think often about how the music industry is evolving
and how it can survive. One thing is certain: in 10 years the
majority of consumers won't be buying little shiny discs to
bring home from the record store. Right now trends in popular
music are for artists to self-release music through things like
rcrdlbl.com, bandcamp.com, noisetrade.com, and others where
the user may have to pay a set fee or may be allowed to download
for whatever they are willing to pay. Additionally many users
are accepting a model where they don't own music, but rather
"rent" space by putting music in an online, streamable
location and playing whatever they want on demand. Additionally
for classical music, where the music (if not the recorded performance)
exists in the public domain, there are many places where acceptable
recordings of commonly performed works by university programs
are being given away for free.
In that environment, the businessman must decide how they can
add enough value to a listener's experience to make that person
want to pay for the recording. I suspect that the model will
eventually look something like this:
There will be a large number of free recordings with a short
advertisement embedded just before and after the performance
to let people know where the recording is from. Something like
"This performance of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony conducted
by Arturo Toscanini in 1945 is bought to you by audible.com.
Now sit back and relax and enjoy the show." This hopefully
draws people to that website in order to find other recordings
when they are looking for lesser recorded works, which can then
be sold on a monthly subscription or a per-download model. As
bandwidth constraints disappear, I would suspect that most works
will eventually allow the listener to either view video of the
performance or follow the score as the music is performed if
they view something streaming online.
The label itself will likely ally itself with performers able
to create recordings of a high quality on their own and become
distributors, taking little risk on the music but sharing profit
with performers looking for multiple distribution channels.
I would suspect that in the world of classical music, there
will be less need for a label to pay to record major works.
What I do expect to see, but as yet have not seen, is a trend
for labels to sponsor concerts that they record and then allow
users who attend that concert identify themselves with some
ID off of their ticket stub to download that performance. When
they tell friends and colleagues about the magical evening they
spent at the symphony, they will then be able to share that
music, and their friends will be able to purchase that same
recording for themselves. I would expect that the sponsorship
would nearly cover all costs for the engineer and the licensing
of the recordings so that a relatively full house will approximately
cover the costs of the performance and the downloaded music
will then be profit for the label and will build buzz for the
performing symphony and conductor. This might be difficult to
negotiate in the world of established performers doing pop/classical
crossover performances, such as Elvis Costello and his symphony
tour, but for most orchestras I would think that a second revenue
stream from their recordings would be welcome.
So yeah, gaze into my crystal ball and see what lies behind
the wall. I expect that the revenue model for classical music,
much like other types of music in the future, will revolve around
either gaining subscribers who want to listen to a particular
recording for a few months and then be done with it or around
distributing recordings made in conjunction with many orchestras
and chamber groups who are willing to sell recording rights
to their performances.
PATRICK GARY
It's 2021 and a new article by the now very elderly Mr Lebrecht
is published in The Times proclaiming the death of the classical
CD; in this he is of course to all intents and purposes right
although some affluent die-hards continue to rejoice in the
medium. His earlier articles predicting the death of the strangely
irrepressible CD now ring unnervingly dull. In fact the Sony-Philips
pioneer format continues to sell well though downloads and Cloud
draw-downs are very popular on players built into ear-piercings
and controlled through eye-level hologram heads-up displays
pioneered by Apple which is now part of the Microsoft empire.
Chandos have at this stage been bought out by Naxos. Naxos in
addition to selling downloads now offer a miniature 5000Tb hard
drive on which the entire Chandos catalogue appears; the last
Chandos issue came out in 2019. These small drives plug into
the latest mobile communication devices - very convenient but
sadly distressingly easy to drop and lose as they are so small
though whistle-response technology has been built into the more
pricey machines .... well, more dots than machines.
Gramophone (now edited by Jonathan Woolf) and IRR are no longer
printed in paper form and can be downloaded from the cloud onto
Amazon's latest Kindle machine - The Spark. Only Fanfare continues
to print on paper. MusicWeb International - which celebrated
its twentieth anniversary last year - thrives and a surge in
volunteering by retired baby-boomers now means that the site
(still subscription-free) fields some 40 live concert reviews
daily and 50 recording reviews every working day. The site has
attracted great acclaim through issuing on its own label a series
of vividly rendered private concert recordings by Gerard Hoffnung
courtesy of the Hoffnung family. Kicking against the current
Hoffnung's humour has begun to catch the public imagination
again. Dr Len Mullenger OBE (for his services to classical music)
has for the last five years been in terrific demand to speak
at conferences about the musical arts and volunteering.
Naxos have released all the Havergal Brian symphonies and indeed
have re-recorded some of the earlier issues. Their cycle of
the 67 Hovhaness symphonies came out in the form of a prestige
cabinet set in 2018. Dutton have recorded the complete Arthurian
Cycle of operas by Rutland Boughton and have issued it in a
14 CD boxed set. In the face of a continuing thirst for rarities
music students are now studying research and appraisal methods
for the tracking down of very obscure scores - the envelope
continues to be pushed out even further. Never has so much music
from every era been available at one time though re-issues have
been somewhat decelerated by the extension of commercial copyright
protection of recordings up to seventy years old; this took
place in 2015 but was preceded by a phenomenal burst of 'last
chance saloon' issues designed to beat the new moratorium. Another
extraordinary coup in the musical world came in 2015 when following
instructions in a secret codicil to his will Sibelius's symphonies
8 and 9, complete in every detail and deeply moving, are released
from a Boston bank safe deposit vault. A storm of scholarly
infighting about their authenticity ensues. They are promptly
recorded by Bis with the Lahti orchestra conducted by Osmo Vanska.
A report in New Scientist this month sets out the groundbreaking
work to extract, disentangle, capture and reconstitute acoustic
data from the stone and other building materials of old concert
halls and churches. The technology seems to be present to capture
Mozart's piano concerto premieres and much else - HIP experts
are feeling queasy but are ready to claim that the results cannot
be a faithful representation. Media companies begin to buy up
concert halls in anticipation of being able to exploit the locked
up aural history of these venues. This looks likely to overtake
the burgeoning industry in software, heavy with interpretative
data, that can recreate/synthesise performances by the great
conductors at various stages in their lives and at various venues.
There is a blistering trade in 'Furtwangler recordings' as recreated
in the acoustics of the Kingsway Hall by the Decca team of the
early 1970s. The software can be set to produce the performances
and sound of the 30 year old Furtwangler and at each stage in
his life. Some particularly effete enthusiasts have paid for
software add-ons that project by trend extrapolation the style
of conductors had they lived 10, 20, 40 years after their actual
date of death. Now strangely vapid if very realistic-sounding
computer projections of 'new' symphonies by Brahms, Mozart and
Beethoven, once very popular in the period 2018-2020 are beginning
to lose their Frankenstein-speculative glamour. Fashion begins
to turn against melodic music again and a lively interest in
the avant-garde works of the 1960s and 1970s bubbles up in academia,
broadcasting and the concert hall. Some of the performing materials
for works by the likes of Ferneyhough, Bedford (who died in
2011), early Maxwell Davies, Nono, Globokar and late Carter
have been lost and graphic scores of that Roundhouse era are
proving increasingly difficult to decipher and realise as the
generations who played them die away.
Classical music seems as lively as ever though the mores of
live concert attendance now mean that people come and go freely
at symphony concerts, walk around and chat with friends while
the music plays.
ROB BARNETT
Klaus Heyman has read this article. Whilst he found Rob's version
entertaining he found the others wide of the mark. Below is
a recent interview he gave to NewMusicBox
http://www.newmusicbox.org/articles/klaus-heymann-the-last-record-man-standing/
