I'm in the second day of a 5 day stay at the great Eastman School of
Music in NY. What a wonderful place this is! Highly talented,
motivated, and most importantly, super hard working students all over
the place attending rehearsals and classes in much time in the practice
rooms. The place fairly "reeks" of the spirits of Howard Hanson,
Frederick Fennell, Emery Remmington, Donald Hunsberger, Joseph
Schwantner, John Marcelles, Barry Snider, Walter Hartley, Ray Wright,
and so many other gifted faculty, past and present. And past students
like Frederick Fennell, Donald Hunsberger, Renee Fleming, Gordon and
Mitch Peters, Dale Clevenger, Mitch Miller, William Warfield, Nicolas
Slonimsky, Bonita Boyd, Tom Stacey, and on and on, left their blood,
sweat, and tears on those studio floors. All of this coupled with the
best academic music library in the world, and two world class concert
halls, adds up to a very, very special place.
This is my third visit there; the first without the much missed Maestro
Fennell.

A conversation today with Mark Scatterday, the present conductor of the
much recorded Eastman Wind Ensemble, brought to me a reality of the
present-day classical music recording business: It's really pretty
bleak out there. This ensemble, which has recorded over 40 albums for
Mercury, DGG, Philips, Warner, Sony, and others, basically can't get a
recording released by any of the "majors". Virtually every classical
recording, other than super stars like Yo Yo Ma and cross over acts,
lose money. I know that we all know this intellectually, but it was
kind of brought home to me this week. If we lose this niche of the
record business, we will all be so much poorer for it.

Jenn wrote:

A conversation today with Mark Scatterday, the present conductor of the
much recorded Eastman Wind Ensemble, brought to me a reality of the
present-day classical music recording business: It's really pretty
bleak out there. This ensemble, which has recorded over 40 albums for
Mercury, DGG, Philips, Warner, Sony, and others, basically can't get a
recording released by any of the "majors". Virtually every classical
recording, other than super stars like Yo Yo Ma and cross over acts,
lose money. I know that we all know this intellectually, but it was
kind of brought home to me this week. If we lose this niche of the
record business, we will all be so much poorer for it.

Is a contract with a major record label really a necessity anymore?
Heck, is a CD really a necessity anymore? Classical music downloads
have a much bigger market share than classical CDs ever did. That
suggests there are better models for the dissemination of classical
music than a major-label record contract. It may take some time for
these alternative models to shake out, but the potential is there.

If you have access to the NY Times, see this article for some
perspective:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/08/ar...in&oref=slogin

The article is ostensibly about the demise of Andante.com, but comes to
a much brighter conclusion:

And for anyone dreaming of creating a business plan around classical
music on the Internet, here's another fact: it sells. By conventional
wisdom, classical music accounts for 3 to 4 percent of overall
recording industry sales. But on Apple's iTunes, the leading site for
music downloads, classical music represents 12 percent of sales.

"The percentage has held steady," said Joseph McKesson, a member of the
original iTunes team . "If I only had the venture capital to open an
online classical music store!"

In a recent Billboard article that should be required reading for
everyone in the industry, Anastasia Tsioulcas, the classical music
columnist, described the thriving state of classical downloads. She
listed several new classical releases with significant percentages of
sales through downloads, like the violinist Janine Jansen's recording
of Vivaldi's "Four Seasons": 73 percent of its sales were through
downloads.

bob

So much for the argument that classical music lovers are the most
discerning listeners.

Scott

In article , "bob"
wrote:

Jenn wrote:

A conversation today with Mark Scatterday, the present conductor of the
much recorded Eastman Wind Ensemble, brought to me a reality of the
present-day classical music recording business: It's really pretty
bleak out there. This ensemble, which has recorded over 40 albums for
Mercury, DGG, Philips, Warner, Sony, and others, basically can't get a
recording released by any of the "majors". Virtually every classical
recording, other than super stars like Yo Yo Ma and cross over acts,
lose money. I know that we all know this intellectually, but it was
kind of brought home to me this week. If we lose this niche of the
record business, we will all be so much poorer for it.

Is a contract with a major record label really a necessity anymore?

That's a good question. It's all about distribution, I guess. Many
classical customers still like to browse, as I do. I suspect, but don't
have any evidence to back it up, that classical customers like to browse
at a higher percentage than, say, rock customers.

Heck, is a CD really a necessity anymore? Classical music downloads
have a much bigger market share than classical CDs ever did. That
suggests there are better models for the dissemination of classical
music than a major-label record contract. It may take some time for
these alternative models to shake out, but the potential is there.

I think that you're probably right. Did you hear that the NYPO is going
to sell downloads of its concerts? Probably the wave of the future.

If you have access to the NY Times, see this article for some
perspective:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/08/ar...ef=slogin&oref
=slogin

The article is ostensibly about the demise of Andante.com, but comes to
a much brighter conclusion:

And for anyone dreaming of creating a business plan around classical
music on the Internet, here's another fact: it sells. By conventional
wisdom, classical music accounts for 3 to 4 percent of overall
recording industry sales. But on Apple's iTunes, the leading site for
music downloads, classical music represents 12 percent of sales.

"The percentage has held steady," said Joseph McKesson, a member of the
original iTunes team . "If I only had the venture capital to open an
online classical music store!"

In a recent Billboard article that should be required reading for
everyone in the industry, Anastasia Tsioulcas, the classical music
columnist, described the thriving state of classical downloads. She
listed several new classical releases with significant percentages of
sales through downloads, like the violinist Janine Jansen's recording
of Vivaldi's "Four Seasons": 73 percent of its sales were through
downloads.

bob

This time of change is just worrisome to us classical folks because
we're such a small part of the market to begin with, there is not much
room for error. And then the music in which I spend a lot of my time,
the wind band literature, is a small of that small market. So, I worry.
The Gene Corporon/North Texas/Klavier series that another poster
mentioned is about to end. The literature is richer than ever before,
but there is no "personality" now like Maestro Fennell to capture the
public's imagination.