Classical Convert

A Review of Boosey Radio

The other day (which is a nice concept if you really believe in the passage of time, which I do) I received through all the machinations and tubes and tin-cans with bits of string tied to them, a request to take a look at Boosey Radio. This is the new online classical music store/radio from the ever so well-known and respected classical music publisher, Boosey and Hawkes. Here are my thoughts.

Firstly, as currently designed it is going to annoy pretty much anyone who is more than casually into classical music. I’ll discuss details later, but essentially it is aiming at people who are not really familiar with the genre. While this might be deliberate, and may be a good way to attract a wider audience, anybody who really falls for the music is not going to stay on the site. This is odd, and slightly frustrating, given the eminence of the brand. It does look to be very much in Beta however, so hopefully they’ll fix up a lot of the outstanding issues.

Lets start with the good stuff:

• Sound quality - It’s streamed, so I’m not sure what the bitrate is, but it sounds pretty crisp for internet radio. Better than Naxos radio.
• The podcasts are good - I love programs in which music is interlaced with descriptions and histories surrounding the pieces and composers. They are accessible and trendy, but pretty informative and engaging.
• Nice Player - It displays the currently playing track, lets you skip, pause etc. You can also float it out of the webpage so it acts like a desktop application. Having a link to buy the track that is currently playing is a nice feature.
• Multiple operating systems - Thankyou Boosey! It’s all Java based, so it works on Windows, Mac and Linux.

Now for the bad:

• Individual Tracks, not Opuses - Aaaah! The player plays individual movements from pieces, and not the whole opus. This reeks of those horrible “Most Relaxing Classical Music Ever!!!” CDs. Anyone into classical music is not going to listen to the radio unless there is at least an option to play whole opuses. If you could switch into an “entire symphony” mode then I’d be addicted, instead of playing with it for about five minutes.
• Ringtones - Good god, just the fact that I can see this as a major option on the page makes me not want to use it. This is pretty much the ultimate cheapening of classical (or any) music, packaging it into 15 second snippets to be played while reaching into ones pocket. I know that these are popular and pay the bills, but if (as it currently does) it appears as though this is one of the primary services provided by the site, it’s going to turn a lot of people off.
• Connectivity - Searching by composer brings up a list of tracks to buy, and you can click on little icons to sample a track, but ideally there should be a way to play a track in the very nice radio player application on the front page.
• Help section - While this is a nice idea, allowing you to move your mouse around the controls and bring up tips, it ends up being quite confusing because only a small subsection of the controls have tips and it is not clear which these are until you swipe the mouse all over the screen.
• Roundabout Ordering - You pay through a third party and get a purchasing code through your cellphone which you then enter into the website? No-one is going to sit through that. You need to be able to set up an account and purchase music with one or two clicks, directly on the site.
• How much is a track? - There is conflicting information on the cost of a track. The cost should be incredibly clear as early as possible in the ordering process. Also, all tracks seem to be priced the same, regardless of length. This is insane when some will be around ten times longer than others.
• Station Names - Please don’t call stations things like: “mysterious”. At the bare minimum there needs to be some kind of longer description of what will be playing. Far better would be to avoid the cutesy names altogether.

Overall, there is a lot of potential, but in it’s current state there is no chance I would use this regularly, except maybe for the podcasts. If the site could be modified so that it could appeal both to complete newbies, as well as seasoned experts — perhaps by being able to switch between two alternate versions — then it would be infinitely more appealing.

I Want Realtime Liner Notes

Yeah yeah, I know you know I love liner notes. Since I’ve recently been lamenting and revising my previous lament on the lack of them on a certain classical web-radio type dealie, I thought I’d finish off my current whining with a more structured post.

This is what I’d like to see: while playing my exciting and varied classical playlist (in ultra-extreme quality, with the option to download and to donate money to the composer/performer/conductor, but that’s another story) there’s a little expandable link to click, which on activation gives me a couple of options. I can find out general information about the piece (the standard “Smith’s Opus fifty was composed in blah blah blah and is in five movements”) or the composer (”Smith’s first serious exposure to music was when he began glockenspiel lessons at the age of three”). That kind of thing.

Pretty standard so far.

The cool bit would be when you dig down further. The more technical stuff that is sometimes chucked into liner notes (”the third movement starts in D and, unusually, finishes in G#”) would all be interactive - switching on this technical mode would enable something like a status bar, which would constantly update with information about what was going on in the piece (”Listen as he modulates to G#, led by the winds… now”).

Ideally you could have a couple different levels of in-depthness with this. The simplest one would indicate when the different themes were present in the piece, for example, and point out different instruments. The more serious ones would bring in more subtle things: key shifts, inversions of melodies, etc. You could even make it graphical, with colors indicating various qualities (themes, instruments, etc.)

I know if I had had something like that when i started listening it would have been fascinating, and I bet it would encourage a lot of people to start listening to classical, once they realized all of the little games and complexities going on - that its not just music which keeps on going and doesn’t have any noticeable structure. I don’t think non-classical people appreciate all the structure that’s in there, and by that I mean they aren’t aware it exists. I wasn’t.

If there was something like these hypothetical real-time liner notes which illustrated that underlying structure, I think there would be quite a few more classical converts.

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