Classical Convert

What I Want From A Classical MP3 Music Store

With all the delightful Amazon hoopla, and our inevitable plummet into electronic instead of polycarbonate means of musical distribution, I’ve been musing around on what I reckon the most absolutely perfect online music download experience would be like. This was in part triggered off by a couple of great comments on this post, discussing the current limitations of classical MP3s, in which the pricing per track issue was mentioned.

Classical music doesn’t work so well in online music stores. The (well, one) problem is this: with pop music, people tend to just want a track or two from an album (you know, the only good, non-filler ones) or they buy the whole thing because they like the artist. Our musical overlords have decided that the proper price is 99c per track, and this is now the fundamental bargaining unit of the online music economy.

Well, classical kind of screws this up. No-one wants to buy just one movement from a symphony (unless you fancy putting together one of those ‘Most Relaxing Classical Album In The World!!!’ monstrosities, in which case I hate you), but how are things then priced? Is one movement still equivalent to one track? That would mean (taking some extreme examples off the top of my head) Turangalila costs over $10, but Mahler 9 costs about $4, while each lasts about the same amount of time.

It doesn’t really make sense to charge based on individual tracks… so you can charge for the whole album instead. However, while this makes sense for experimental-type pop groups (e.g. Godspeed You! Black Emperor) who have “songs” which last the entire CD long, it makes less sense for a lot of classical releases. The difference is that with the “pop” (yeah, I think pop really deserves the quotation marks this time. I can’t see Britney releasing a twenty minute long song any time soon. And that’s a very good thing.) the whole album is connected. Some classical releases are like that too: any symphony which lasts for over 50 minutes is basically going to fill a whole CD, and it makes sense to bundle it as one. However, most classical CDs contain multiple symphonies, or concertos, with maybe an esoteric suite or song thrown in for variety and padding.

It doesn’t make sense to be forced into buying this whole CD, when what you really wanted was a specific opus. For example, if I wanted to get Haitink’s Shostakovich 10 on this CD, I might well be forced into purchasing symphony No. 2 instead. Which, well, isn’t a very good piece.

Essentially the problem is that classical music does not have the same quanta (whoops, physics), the same inherent units, that pop does. Pop is almost always constructed from ~3-6 minute long tracks, combined into an ~50 minute album. Classical pieces are constructed from movements which are anywhere from 3 to 30 minutes long, bundled together into a complete piece which might be as short as the smallest unit (e.g. a single song) or might be as long as 3 hours (a looong opera).

My solution is called ClassicalConcert.com, oops, no, wait, ebay owns that. How about MyClassicalConcert.com? Too lame sounding? Well, whatever, we’ll leave the branding to the experts. The M.O. is like this:

• Classical pieces are available in their natural state. You buy a concerto, a symphony, always a whole opus at once.
• The opuses are priced in a tiered fashion < 10 minutes = 99c, 10-20 minutes=$1.99, etc. It’s not based on number of tracks, nor some 1 minute=27c conversion which gives really uncomfortable, unwieldy looking totals.
• The opuses are packaged together into concerts. This is the key selling point. Several experts will put together packages of pieces with a unifying (or contrasting) theme, just as real concerts are organized, but with more flexibility. Instead of buying by opus you tend to buy by “concert”.
• The concerts will have program notes, for a surcharge (say a couple bucks) you can download the virtual program notes for a concert, written by whoever put the thing together.
• If you already own a piece you don’t buy it again, so if someone packages together a new concert, and you already bought one of the pieces in it, you don’t pay twice. You just pay for the program notes, if you want them, and the opuses you don’t own.
• Anyone can create concerts. People can submit their own personally designed concerts. These can also be community efforts, designed online, with message boards and stuff.
• Concert designers would get a cut of the profits. If a concert you design is popular, you earn sweet, sweet moolah and the adoration of your peers.

A complete symphony cycle would be available as one “concert”, or (as that article the other day mentioned) you could have a bunch of different conductors doing one symphony cycle. You could have a concert which was two side-by-side performances of the same piece, but by different conductors. Or you could just package things up like regular CDs or live performances