Classical Convert

My mp3 Player and Stereo Should Chat to Each Other

Today I was listening to (one of my utmost, blab on about favorites) Shostakovich 15, as I walked back in the depressingly early twilight. The first Sunday in November is way too soon away. That particular symphony has a huge mother of a build-up and climax in the last movement. It’s a kind of dreary passacaglia based on the invasion theme from the seventh symphony lasting something like five minutes, before screeches in the woodwinds push it over into an even more morose conclusion.

It started on the far side of the bridge, and so by the time I pranced up the road to my front door (well, prancing really isn’t so appropriate here, what’s a bit more apt… dragged, limped, something droopy and miserable) the music was almost peaking… and then I’m home. Bad timing. Closing the door should coincide with a natural stopping point in the music, not the middle of a crescendo. I don’t like keeping my headphones on indoors as I can’t hear any flatmates or assassins.

However, this time it wasn’t a problem. As I reached my room my mp3 player vibrated to let me know that it’s successfully made contact with the stereo over wifi, and now they both know which piece I am listening to and where in the piece I am currently at. I just have to press a button, and bam - the stereo starts playing at exactly the same point as the mp3 player is up to. It’s a seamless handover of music.

Well, actually of course that isn’t what happened at all, because neither of my music systems are that sophisticated. However, it would be pretty trivial to set up something like that with the newer stereos and mps. In a few years when you have your friends over, you’ll all be able to take turns ordering the stereo around with your iPods, picking and mixing across all the playlists floating in waves through the room.

Another thing that’d be nice…

You know what’d be absolutely bloody fantastic, except no-one in their right mind would do it? If there was an online music store in which you could buy an album, and you could instantly download the MP3s, but then they’d also ship out the CD to you. Since most people probably just rip the CD when they get it anyway (based on very conclusive scientific figures which I just made up a few seconds ago) it’s just a way of encouraging people to buy from you, for a little bit more cost and convenience.

I’m pretty confident that this idea is completely unworkable due to licensing issues and copyrights and other hugely boring, legal and depressingly fundamental issues. By the time the record companies realize that they wouldn’t really be losing much cash by allowing this to happen we’ll probably be getting all of our music beamed directly into our minds, and no-one will even remember what a CD looked like. Oh well.

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

Amazon’s new high-quality MP3 download service looks great for classical

Lo and behold, etc. Just about a day post my last foray into the ever tense classical-MP3 world, Amazon announces that their DRM-free, high quality music downoad service is open for public use.

And it looks pretty fantastic, actually.

There are tonnes of classical albums available (DG, Naxos, EMI, etc. are all there), and everything is encoded in super high-quality 256Kbps, variable bitrate MP3, so you can use it on any Mp3 Player, without any kind of copying restrictions. Prices are typically a little cheaper than for a regular CD.

Hooray!

The one thorn in my side is that you need to download a tiny application to get the whole album, and not just individual tracks. Unfortunately, they don’t yet have a Linux version, so I’ll just have to download stuff at work for now, although apparently they are working on it.

Classical music in an MP3ifying world

There’s a piece today in the Philadelphia Inquirer about our favorite topic, namely the collision of MP3s and classical music. The gist of it is that, while download sales seem to be a significant contribution to the total sales of some classical albums, there are two major hurdles to its widespread acceptance.

One hurdle is the standard lack of quality issue: most of us (today “us” refers to classical music purchasers) are a bit suspicious of paying CD prices for sub-CD-standard audio. That’s likely to dissuade people who are somewhat knowledgeable about the medium (i.e., they realize there’s a quality hit) and the genre (they realize that it’s going to be a particularly bad quality hit because of the sonic nature of the music) from purchasing.

Secondly, there is the technophobic hurdle. There is (unless I’ve been wildly misled) a pretty strong correlation between appreciation of classical music and age, but technological savvy is probably pretty inversely age related (I know, I sound like an obnoxious kid spouting that out, particularly since anyone reading this is gonna be pretty technologically with it. You know it’s basically true though.)

It does seem that both of these problems are creeping towards resolution. The record labels have been inching toward higher quality downloads, which are becoming more practical for portability as the storage space on the players ramps up. And of course, technological uptake keeps on soaking up through society. My grandma sends me texts and has a facebook profile, I’m sure she’d be well more than capable of working out how to use an iPod.