Tarik O’Regan’s 2008 recording for the Harmonia Mundi label, Threshold of Night, debuted at #10 in the American Billboard chart and received two GRAMMY nominations (Best Classical Album and Best Choral Performance).
The inherent problem with the dissemination of classical music (both contemporary and historical) online is connected with two very basic issues, which, were the industry worth anywhere near its pop and rock siblings in revenue, would have been sorted out by now: duration and dynamic range. Put simply, classical music, on the whole, comes in longer ‘chunks’ during which the music is often quieter and louder (yes, believe it, Led Zeppelin fans) than its more popular counterparts.
The thing to remember is that the definitive product in classical music is the musical score, not the recorded medium, as it tends to be for popular music. Classical music is discussed in terms of interpretative variation, whereas rock music, for example, is discussed in terms of albums, singles or EPs. This is why even a very casual listener to classical music might have, for example, two versions of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, but only one copy of The Beatles’ Rubber Soul. In other words, because the score is a stagnant pile of manuscript stuffed somewhere in a library, the only thing the classical listener has to go on is the interpretative variations of a recorded performance: a conductor or performer gently shifting the speed or volume of particular passages; duration and dynamic range, in other words. Start blurring these variables and you might as well give up.
iTunes, the greatest disseminator of music known to humankind, makes two big blunders when it comes to classical music: 1) many tracks are designated ‘album only’, purely on account of their length and 2) there is no option to download music in anything but a lossy format. Recent developments in any of these lossy formats (MP3, AAC, WMA etc.) have all been focused on non-classical listeners. One example is that, unlike most popular music, vast swathes of classical music is in a dynamic range very close to silence, where the ‘room tone’ merges gently with a solo instrument playing, pianissimo. The compression algorithms in lossy formats do not prioritize the quality of low amplitude frequencies for the simple reason that most popular music is not quiet.
The classical music world has struck back with well-intentioned efforts like www.passionato.com, where users can download music in a higher quality MP3 format or in the lossless FLAC format for a slight premium. However, the files are huge and slow to download. Audio sources, using FLAC compression, are reduced by 50% at best. In addition, the prices of the FLAC versions of the recordings are too close to the price of buying a physical compact disc. The incentive just isn’t there. I’d rather buy a CD and FLAC-convert it myself for iPod or computer use. So the preferred method of classical music dissemination remains concert halls and compact discs.
Well, two events have recently taken place in the United Kingdom, which lead me to think that the pressure is on in the classical music industry to lobby developers and technological innovators to cater their products for the classical music listener:
Victims of the worldwide financial downturn, two large distributors of independent record labels filed for bankruptcy and went into administration, Pinnacle Entertainment and Entertainment UK. In other words, right before the big Holiday Season push, new releases from several hundred small record companies (a lot of them classical) are currently stuck in warehouses and not lining shop shelves, or even the stock shelves of online outlets. The fact that this temporary blip threatens to, in turn, bankrupt some of these record companies reiterates just how dependent on ‘old’ media the industry still is. Virgin Media is about to unveil a domestic 50mbps service to British consumers.
I’d like to think that the classical record companies have had their fingers burnt just enough with these recent distribution problems to find the new high-speed internet access being made available in the UK enough of an incentive to begin really thinking about providing their product in better-compressed lossless formats. One can only hope!
1 RESPONSE SO FAR.
1 randy // Dec 24, 2008 at 6:30 am
Amazon offers a 320 kbit which is lossless, right? I don’t think this is necessarily a critique of iTunes, but rather how modern recording techniques have been shaped by the digital format. Classical music might be inherently more dynamic in range than anything else, simply because it’s not being passed through electronic channels like pickup and amplifiers… but now that everything’s recorded digitally, you have full control over the dynamic range and a lot of producers are limiting the range to make the music seem louder… because it’s being listened to on headphones where you already lose detectable variability.
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