LiveHereNow is a company that specialized on Instant-Recordings

This idea is intriguing. You go to a concert and at the end of the show, while you walk out of the hall, a freshly produced instant-recording of the concert is already up for sale at the merchandise stand at the exit doors.

Think of this CD as an official souvenir of the concert you just heard. The album will be avaiable only at the concert venue after the show. It is professionally produced and packaged and contains an unedited recording of the show you just heard.

Would you buy such a CD if it were available after the next concert you visit?

If you are a musician: would you like your concert to be recorded and sold this way?

Image by Bullard

So far so good. I am somewhat surprised that the petition does not address the most apparent problem that concerns *all* collecting societies alike (ASCAP, BMI, GEMA etc.)

At a time when most classical performers are trying to market themselves via websites and social networking platforms, the ability to stream their own recordings becomes crucial. After all, you want to showcase your talent, so that more and more people will take notice of you and come to your concerts. Streaming music from your website is technically no big problem anymore, but this is where the GEMAs, ASCAPs, and BMIs of this world come into play.

Say you recorded three CDs with 15 works by 3 different composers. You host your website in the US. 2 composers are registering their works with ASCAP, one is registered with BMI. In order to stream your own recordings from your own website you would have to pay annual fees in excess of $600 to ASCAP and BMI. And this is the amount you pay if you don’t make a single $ on CD sales. If you earn money, ad even if it is only a tiny amount, you will have to pay much bigger amounts!

Why that? None of the collecting societies offers licenses for individual works or for all works by one composer only. If you want to stream one work, you have to get a comprehensive license that would allow you to stream all (!!) of the works that have been registered with that collecting society. That includes millions of works: all of Van Halen, all of Frank Sinatra, all of Motörhead, all of Björk, all of Steve Reich, all of …. and also the 15 works that you wanted to stream from your website.

How crayz is that? Let me know what you think.

Here is a link to the petition again.

PS: if you are composer and you wanted to stream recordings of your own music, you would have to buy the comprehensive license, too!

PPS: I think composers should definitely get paid when their music is played, downloaded, and streamed. I am just questioning the practice of not making the purchase of licenses more flexible.

Kent Nagano and Guy Lafleur

For those of you who think that classical music is dead, or that classical music cannot appeal to a mass audience, or even that the funding of classical music organizations is doomed to be perennially on the brink, you clearly did not attend the Montreal Symphony‘s presentation at the Bell Centre on 2 April 2009.  The concert was called the ‘Meeting of the Century’ and combined anniversaries of two of the city’s organizations: the centennial of the Montreal Canadiens — arguably the most successful hockey franchise in the National Hockey League — and the 75th anniversary of the Montreal Symphony.  Linking these two organizations together may seem gimmicky or spurious, but in fact the combination represents Nagano’s keen observations about Montreal culture.  Furthermore the program — while it did feature pieces to do with hockey — was not limited to pops highlights: indeed, the 12 000 attendees were equally enthralled with excerpts from Beethoven, Respighi, and Holst.  A sold-out arena concert is generally in the ambit of a Britney Spears, not a symphony orchestra, so it is worth considering how the OSM presented such a successful show — and benefited from the results, since the funds will assist the orchestra to tour Europe next year.

One of the main features of this concert was a performance of Les Glorieux, a work commissioned last year by the OSM.  The piece was so popular that the concert and rehearsals sold out, leading the OSM to develop the Bell Centre idea for this year.  Les Glorieux is a nickname for the Montreal Canadiens and pays tribute to the historical legacy between the city and its hockey team.  Hockey in Montreal is like baseball in Boston or football in Texas: the city’s natives follow events with a close and critical eye.  Not only is the team important today, it also has an enviable legacy with the most Stanley Cup wins of any hockey team and the second-most championships of any professional sports team in North America (the Yankees have the distinction of 26 to the Canadiens’ 24).  Nagano’s decision to commission the piece shows his understanding of Montreal’s culture and the reverence that hockey has.  Not only did the orchestra perform the work, they also invited several of the legendary players from the team to join them on stage: Guy Lafleur, Elmer Lach, Jean Béliveau, Henri Richard just to name a few.

What was impressive, though, was that Nagano did not allow this event to be only about hockey.  The OSM presented a program primarily of 20th-century pieces and Beethoven.  While several, such as Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man and ‘Mars: Bringer of War’ from Holst’s The Planets, can be viewed as appropriate for the pop repertoire, the OSM also played the first movement of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony and the final movement from the ‘recapitulation’ (entrance of the voices) from Beethoven’s 9th, accompanied by a choir of 1500.  Certainly these pieces are not difficult listening, but I would defy any conductor to present, say, Webern in a hockey arena and capture the subtleties.  The audience, however, was very appreciative of all the works, not just the hockey piece but of the program as a whole.  Imagine an arena filled with people cheering a performance of Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ or the last movement of Respighi’s Pines of Rome with an entire additional brass band.  Purists may see this event as little more than a gimmick, but if it brings classical music to 12 000 people while providing much needed support to arts organizations , I think that they should be encouraged.

The Berlin Philharmonic at home

It felt vaguely ironic to be sitting before our computer in Germantown, New York, watching the first live internet broadcast from the Digital Concert Hall of the Berliner Philharmoniker, with Sir Simon Rattle conducting Dvorák’s G minor Slavonic Dance and Brahms’s First Symphony.

And wonderful.  Being able to be in two places at once was incredible.  We were “there” in the concert hall even though we were thousands of miles away.  What an amazing altering of time and space.  Like all visual recordings of concerts, having one’s attention directed by the camera rather than one’s internal promptings was very different from actually being in the audience, but the intimacy created with conductor and orchestra was a joy.  This is a great thing the Berliner Philharmonica has undertaken. The video quality was superb as was the sound. Oh yes, the music was wonderful too.

The decision by the Berliner Philharmoniker to create the Digital Concert Hall is clearly a step many cultural institutions are beginning to undertake to answer the perennial problem of how to stay solvent, survive, in difficult economic times. They are selling seats to an audience that has no geographic limitation. They have increased the seating capacity beyond the restrictions of physical space.

Is this a continuation of the movement to the virtual world, a world where less and less of our physical presence is necessary for an experience? And when does that experience become accepted as how best to “appreciate” the event. Is it better to watch the football game on the TV with HD quality and eventual 3D broadcast then sit in a stadium far removed from the action but immersed in the spirit of the game.

Here are three aspects that need to be addressed by the classical music industry:

1. Develop a better infrastructure for the digital distribution of classical music. Right now 99% of classical music online sales are done via channels which were originally created for pop music. While programs and websites such as itunes or rhapsody work well for those types of music they fail entirely for classical music formats. The main reason for this is that the databases that drive the search and browse functions are not useful for classical music tracks. The third movement of a Mozart sonata should not be listed as: song title = “Allegro”; it should be considered a subset of the work title “Symphony in G-Minor, K 550.”" (See my rant on rhapsody for more information). If the classical music industry will continue to make use of the distribution channels of pop music it will fail to connect with its customer base. If customers can’t find what they want to buy/consume you will not make any money.
2. Drop mp3 and other lossy algorithms and sell lossless music files such as wav or aiff. If you think that sound, character, and atmosphere are important aspects of your classical music recordings (and – oh yes – they are!) why would you provide your customers with a file format that cuts out exactly those frequencies that are essential for character and atmosphere? If mp3 kills your sound, kill mp3 (and other lossy formats).
3. Make Hifi-Internet equipment easy to use. No classical music lover (with the exception of a few geeks) will have their computer hooked up to a top-notch hifi system. Instead of delivering classical music to your customers’ computers you will have to deliver to and sell it on their hifi system.
4. Build intelligent home hifi systems, portals, and music players that suggest new pieces, deliver background information and – most importantly – alert customers of concerts in their area that they might like to attend. Ultimately this is where the classical music industry will make most of its revenue: the life performance.
]]> http://www.zeitschichten.com/2009/01/06/how-the-classical-music-industry-will-likely-survive/feed/ 0 http://www.zeitschichten.com/2008/12/04/interview-with-alessandro-simonetto-founder-of-onclassical-%e2%80%93-the-e-label-for-audiophiles/ http://www.zeitschichten.com/2008/12/04/interview-with-alessandro-simonetto-founder-of-onclassical-%e2%80%93-the-e-label-for-audiophiles/#comments Thu, 04 Dec 2008 17:07:17 +0000 Matthias Röder http://www.zeitschichten.com/?p=354

OnClassical is a new e-label that sells music solely via the web. Unlike itunes, emusic, rhapsody, and amazon, OnClassical offers only high-quality downloads that sound exactly like a traditional CD. Zeitschichten.com spoke to the label’s busy founder, Alessandro Simonetto, about music in the age of the internet, OnClassical’s business philosophy, as well as their upcoming projects (they will soon license music for commercial uses).

Zeitschichten.com: Your recording label OnClassical distributes its recordings solely via the internet. The music can be downloaded in .wav format without any copy protection (DRM-free). What brought you to this unusual business model?

Alessandro Simonetto: I have always thought that trust in the buyer is a great way to get respect from them. In this sense the philosophy of Creative Commons was a pleasant discovery and confirmation, so that control no longer depends on such entities as the royalty societies and other authorities, but on the artists themselves. With respect to OnClassical, it also means replacing the interest of the many (very often these are small record labels, agents, or producers) with the interest of the individual, because the interests of the many limits the artist in every way. So, in the end, it is the artist who benefits the most.

Download audio file (onclassical_mikulska_chopin_ballade_f-minor.mp3)

Aleksandra Mikulska plays Chopin’s Ballade no. 4 op. 52

Zeitschichten.com: According to your business model customers can decide how much they would like to pay for the recordings. Possible prices start at 6 Euros (= $9) and go all the way up to 20 Euros (= $30). The artists will get half of this amount, which is many times more than they would normally earn per CD. Apart from this, how do artists benefit from working with your label?

Alessandro Simonetto: The average price paid is normally 7.50 Euros so musicians get about 3.00 Euros which is 50% minus half the IVA (Italian tax) and bank fees. Buyers, not infrequently, pay up to 12 Euros, more rarely up to 15 or 20 Euros, especially when they return and are satisfied with a previously purchased album (this fortunately happens!).
Artists also benefit from an unrestricted advertising on the Web and in music magazines, trade shows, and conferences, especially here in Italy. We have just printed a CD that contains the best of productions by onclassical.com for each instrument; selected artists have been included free of charge and have the CD for free.
Finally, signing a contract with OnClassical means not having to pay for distribution, and the contract is never exclusive (i.e. the holder of the record remains the artist) and he or she can record at less than half the price we normally ask for a recording.

Zeitschichten.com: When you say that contracts are never exclusive, does this mean that the artist could also distribute their CDs via an alternative distribution channel?

Alessandro Simonetto: Yes. We ask only the artists who record with us to publish online only at onclassical.com. This situation enables us to cut back the recording fees which we applicate to our artists.

Zeitschichten.com: In addition to producing new albums you also take over the distribution of CDs that were produced by others (i. e. self-produced by independent artists). Do you see yourself as a competitor to places like CD-Baby when it comes to music distribution? Or is this service envisioned more as a complement for those artists who already record with OnClassical and would like to sell older recordings via your website as well?

Alessandro Simonetto: Yes, the recordings which we publish, but which we do not produce directly – in other words, the recordings sent to us by the artists – can be advertised through other web sites. Let me stress some important points about our competitors:
OnClassical sells only high-quality audio albums: as a matter of fact only 0.5% of CDs received so far have been published (i.e. one in every 200 disks; and about 75% of the times, these few disks have also been revised!).
At OnClassical we take a great deal of care in selecting performances (while at CDBaby and 90% of other sites there is a lot of minor quality work and sadly no selection).
CDBaby claims $35 per disc to publish it. They also ask for $20 for the bar code required to distribute MP3 files at the various shops and $4 for every CD sold! The artists then have to add all the shipping costs for every 5 CDs sent. If we consider that every CD has a cost of 1 Euro, and that artists usually have to print at least 1000 CDs, then they would spend at least 1000 euros (which equals approximately $1300!). We call that real torture. OnClassical does not ask for any of this; all it requires is quality.
OnClassical sells .wav files (not .mp3 o hard CDs) for the reason
specified here.
OnClassical gives the artist a respectable niche alongside a family of other important artists (this is certainly not the case with 90% of the other web sites).
So I think it should be clear to all why we do not consider CDBaby or other websites as our competitors.

Zeitschichten.com: Given that your label is geared towards audiophiles who often put a lot of value on packaging as well, are you thinking about offering traditionally packaged CDs at some point? Or will you limit yourself to the distribution of high-quality sound files only?

Alessandro Simonetto: For the moment we will only distribute files, not CDs. With our philosophy, infact, we would like the user to make his own packaging with the instruments that are now readily available to anyone (e.g. printers, burners, etc.). This important preference helps users save costs.
I am thinking, instead, of suggesting a good burner, possibly an open source one (but so far I haven’t found a suitable one!), and of offering the file from the mastering session so that the process of making the CD would become immediate. I am also considering the idea of hiring the services of a professional graphic designer to work on new captivating covers.

Zeitschichten.com: What are your current recording projects? What music will come out soon?

Alessandro Simonetto: Our next records include Bach’s Goldberg Variations in a trascription for two pianos by Joseph Reinberger; then organ works by Mendelssohn (we will record the complete set eventually), Reubke, and Liszt.

Zeitschichten.com: In twenty years from now, how will the music industry look like? Will people still buy recorded music? Will there be more concerts? Or less? What is your prediction of the future?

Alessandro Simonetto: That’s a dangerous question! Frankly I am not a soothsayer, but I can say what I would like to see happen: first, computer and data transmission will become the only electrical appliance, so the music will be heard directly from the network (without having to worry about saving it) in very high definition. I hope the current rights protection system and the distribution of royalties will disappear, leaving space for other, more fluid and transparent ways of paying artists. I also hope the economic system – but not our identity and privacy! – will become increasingly more electronic and easy to use.
As for concerts I believe these will still be held; yet, maybe they’ll differ slightly. For instance, I think we pianists will play at home – not so much with our hands but rather with ideas, or our minds – and people will listen from their own homes.
I think that one’s performances in the future will not be filtered by technical limitations (for instance, the body, the shoulders, the arms, the hands, one’s agility). And maybe even music recordings will be performed by non-musicians: clearly, there will always be a difference between professionals and non, but even mere music lovers will be able to interpret music thanks to new technology.

Zeitschichten.com: Thank you for this interview!

Visit OnClassical’s website at http://www.onclassical.com/ or find them on facebook.

]]> http://www.zeitschichten.com/2008/12/04/interview-with-alessandro-simonetto-founder-of-onclassical-%e2%80%93-the-e-label-for-audiophiles/feed/ 0 http://www.zeitschichten.com/2008/07/17/konzerthaus-is-the-best/ http://www.zeitschichten.com/2008/07/17/konzerthaus-is-the-best/#comments Thu, 17 Jul 2008 08:44:02 +0000 Matthias Röder http://www.zeitschichten.com/?p=153 Going through my old post for tagging purposes I once again realized that the Berlin Konzerthaus is the most fabulous music institution in the German Capital. Best programming. Period. Someone should really give them a medal. Here are my Konzerthaus-related articles.
]]> http://www.zeitschichten.com/2008/07/17/konzerthaus-is-the-best/feed/ 0 http://www.zeitschichten.com/2008/07/15/rhapsodycom-still-not-useful-for-classical-music-listeners/ http://www.zeitschichten.com/2008/07/15/rhapsodycom-still-not-useful-for-classical-music-listeners/#comments Tue, 15 Jul 2008 13:35:41 +0000 Matthias Röder http://www.zeitschichten.com/2008/07/15/rhapsodycom-still-not-useful-for-classical-music-listeners/ As some of you may already know, rhapsody.com has added a mp3-store to its portfolio recently. While I welcome this move, especially since the mp3s are DRM-free, the main drawback with the service, namely its poor user interface, still remains an issue.

The problem as I see it is a lack of a sufficient search-engine for classical music on their site. How is Real hoping to win over classical music audiences, if those customers will not be able to find the music they are interested in?

Like with other music services, rhapsody’s native interface is geared mainly towards popular music, allowing for searches of artist, keyword, track, album, and composer. While it is thus possible to search for the composer “Johann Sebastian Bach,” the results one gets are absolutely useless, since the composer’s page lists all available albums (255) and tracks (6991) – way too many to browse as you will agree.

In addition, track titles are most often not overly informative. What is a user supposed to understand from a title like “Aria“? This kind of naming is fun when playing music quizzes at late-night musicological geek parties, but I doubt that most of us have subscribed to rhapsody for this very reason.

The lack of even rudimentary meta-data is accompanied by an equally annoying lack of meaningful listening and organizing tools. For instance, why a list of “most popular tracks” when it should be a list of “most popular works (or albums)?” In general what needs to be top priority at rhapsody.com is a list of works associated to each composer. For each work all of the recordings of that particular work should be listed. Combine this functionality with user tagging, commenting, and recommendations and you would have a killer application for classical music geeks.

What real/rhapsody should keep in mind is that as soon as we see easy-to-use networked music players which can be operated intuitively by everyone above 40, the market for online classical music services is going to explode. In general, people interested in this kind of music have a bigger buying power and are more willing to pay high prices for the music they consume. In order to win these customers the music industry (and rhapsody in particular) must develop better music players and online catalogues. As it stands right now the rhapsody.com website can’t even compete with the traditional print catalogue in my local CD store (no website, but yes, they still exist), both in terms of ease of use and comprehensiveness.

For those of you who are interested, I have written about this topic before.

]]> http://www.zeitschichten.com/2008/07/15/rhapsodycom-still-not-useful-for-classical-music-listeners/feed/ 2 http://www.zeitschichten.com/2006/11/07/what-rhapsody-is-lacking/ http://www.zeitschichten.com/2006/11/07/what-rhapsody-is-lacking/#comments Tue, 07 Nov 2006 11:24:05 +0000 Matthias Röder http://www.zeitschichten.com/2006/11/07/what-rhapsody-is-lacking/ Real Rhapsody is a music subscription service that I have been using for quite a while now. It features millions of pop songs, jazz tunes, and classical works. The catalogue is pretty amazing, rarely do they not have what I am looking for. All it takes to listen to days of music is a broadband internet access, the rhapsody software, and a subscription plan for $10/month.

Most of the times I use rhapsody to listen to pop, jazz, or world music. Why? Because Rhapsody’s search engine is just not made for finding classical music. This is the one backdrop that most (all?) music subscription plans have: their search engines are not finding the classical music I am looking for. Here’s an example: Let’s say I want to listen to Brahms’ wonderful first piano trio in B-major. I type “Brahms piano trio no 1″ into the search engine and it comes up with 72 hits, mostly piano trios by Brahms, some quartets, quintets, Schubert trios, etc… Also: the search results will list the track name, the artist, and the album title only. No performers, album labels, or date of recordings… The problem is also that the track name will be something like “Trio No. 1 in B-Major, 1st movement” or just “Allegro con brio”, or a combination of both. The artist will be either “Bamberger Symphoniker” or “Johannes Brahms” (in the case of which I am always so excited to find out that Brahms did record his own music). And album titles for classical music are especially revealing: “Piano Trios”, “Trios”, “Life and Works: Brahms, Schubert, Schumann”. Great!

Wouldn’t it be cool though, to search for “BWV 71″ and get a page where there is a list of performers who recorded this cantata by Bach. You could then rearange the recordings according to performers’s names, label, date of recording, (or color of the cover ;-)) You would be able to compare performances, you could browse genres like “piano quartet” across composers from all times. Imagine that you could combine this sort of search engine with some service that gives you information about the pieces and performers. The possibilities are endless.

The problem is that the subscription services would have to restructure their databases in order to allow for good classical search engines. They probably think the investment is not worth it. They probably look at the number of people actually listening to classical music and say: see, only a few people are listening to our classical collection anyhow. They probably don’t realize that people don’t listen to classical music over their subscription plans because they cannot find what they are looking for! They probably don’t have a clue about how many people out there would be willing to pay substantially more than 10 bucks for the kind of service I outlined above.

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