Comments on: What I Want From A Classical MP3 Music Store

By: SEO

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By: Zach

Zach — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 13:39:39 +0000

I have found e-music (www.emusic.com) to be the best site for classical music. The gist of it is you subscribe I pay $24.99 for 100 tracks a month. With those tracks you can download any track you want from any album. You can download the whole album if you want, one symphony from the album, one movement, etc. Its DRM free. Once you download it, the tracks are yours. You can burn it to cd, put it on an ipod, or even download it again. Emusic keeps a tab of everything you’ve downloaded, and if say your pc crashes and you need to get your music again you can. This is also helpful if you have donwloaded one piece on a cd and then decide later you want the rest of the cd. You can download the whole album without the tracks you have already downloaded counting against you. The only downside that I can see is the per track cost tends to favor larger works with fewer tracks. Mahler’s Sixth Symphony would cost $1.00 (.25 a track) while an album of Poulenc piano music would cost $8.25 (33 tracks at .25 a track). The site is populated with a good selection of lables – Naxos, Chandos, LSO Live, CSO Resound, Avie, Pentatone, BIS, Dorian, Harmonia Mundi, Vox etc. I think the last time I looked the site had 23,000 classical albums available.

By: Ben

Ben — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 04:51:49 +0000

wahoofive, are you seriously claiming that 128Kbps AAC is better quality than 256Kbps MP3?

As for the “concert” thing, people should of course be free to download whatever the hell they liked, without being forced to buy in packages – I feel that a well designed classical package is infinity times more rewarding than a pop playlist. one of the biggest deals for me is reading peoples descriptions of why they put the pieces together, essentially, I don’t want to lose liner notes.

I think the distribution of tracks is a good point. One of the advantages that classical music has is that a piece can be performed by any orchestra who wants to play it. What would be great is if the orchestras themselves licensed the tracks for resale (I realize that any kind of openness in the music industry tends to be wishful thinking, but this is a hypothetical idea)

The pricing issue is a psychological thing. Personally I find it kind of disturbing when things are priced with essentially random values, there’s a comfort in having things priced in tiers. there’s a good reason why, when you go into most high-street stores, things are priced at $1.99, $4.99 and so on. People like standardization, and 99c looks cheaper than rounding up to the dollar.

By: wahoofive

wahoofive — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 17:50:11 +0000

You’re dreaming, Zoltan. I downloaded the same track from Amazon (in 256k MP3) and from iTunes (in AAC) and the difference is immediately apparent even on my computer speakers. See http://blog.choralnet.org/2007/09/amazon-goes-mp3.html

On another topic, I don’t think it’s practical to give “concert designers” a cut, and isn’t necessary; user-designed “playlists” are ubiquitous on iTunes without any financial incentive. But anyway, the “concert” idea puts an artificial constraint (concert length) similar to the “album” problem. It’s one thing for a website to suggest “if you like THIS, then you’ll probably like THAT”, but I think we can otherwise trust users to decide which pieces go together.

The challenge is how do you get tracks? The whole song/album concept was developed by iTunes and the other online distributors in order to encourage record companies to buy in to the deal. If the record companies don’t participate, you’re never going to have enough repertoire to be interesting.

Finally, what’s wrong with 27c/minute? You’re going to buy it on a credit card (or Paypal or something) anyway, so it’s not like you’re going to get a pocketful of pennies. Who cares whether your total is some weird number? That doesn’t bother people on any other kind of online purchase. Besides, $1.99 is itself a weird number. What’s wrong with $2?

By: Zoltan

Zoltan — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 13:23:40 +0000

One particular reason why this could be interesting for me is the following: Sometimes there’s a Vivaldi concerto I haven’t heard and don’t have it in my collection (say, a 10 minutes long piece in three tracks), yet I have all others from the CD.
It’s hard for me to buy the whole CD when I’m on a tight budget just for that particular concerto.
And a 256 kb/s mp3 should be, for all but the finest ears on some great (and pricy) equipment, be practically indistinguishable from a CD.
This also goes the other way around: perhaps I like a concerto very much, and would like to hear a performance from someone else.