Classical.com Blog

Have just come back from the most wonderful recital - two and a half hours of Messiaen, his Vingt regards sur l’enfant Jesus - the most inspiring performance without intermission. It meant that the cumulative effect of the music, the slow, the complex, the fast, the textures, the contemplation all built without a break for taking stock. It was immersion in the world of the baby Jesus, with all the excitement and misticism of a godly birth.

That got me thinking about Eliot Carter. He is still living, and turning 100. It is incredible that he continues to compose. Last year he was 99 and I went to a performance, after which he walked, slowly, stately, to the front of the audience, and acknowledged the applause. The music still comes out of him - think of it, he has been composing since the 1940s.

These composers, both of the 1908 vintage, had such different lives - Europe / America. Both have lived long lives, and Carter is still working, composing, thinking and feeling.

The concert this evening made me think how fortunate we are to have music produced and performed at this level. Art does serve a role for society. It makes us put our lives in perspective. Especially at this time of global chaos - economic situations completely unique in the history of mankind - Art and especially Music give one pause to think. The optimism that humankind can create, has created, and continues to create these wonderful works. An in addition we produce performers completely up to the task, who fill our recording studios, and bring us music and performances which capture the value of life, here, on earth, as our pebble speeds through the universe.

The direction of the music business is no clearer after 8 years of disruption. Any ideas out there?

After the dust settled on an initial wave of disruption, the industry realized that consumer appetites for music were greater than ever -  thanks to super-lubricated channels for sharing, discovering, and promoting content. Piracy was part of the growth, and the labels made licensing difficult so it was hard to pay even if you wanted to. 

Of course, music is always evolving, growing and changing. But the growth in consumer appetite is not the result of a revolutionary artistic change; rather, it is being stimulated by technology that encourages discovery and massive acquisition. That is happening against serious declines in paid content, driven primarily by CDs, a meltdown only partially compensated by digital and mobile formats.

By now, this is well-worn background. Welcome to the conundrum that is the music business, the vexing riddle that sinkholes millions in startup capital, motivates endless false starts, and draws a rash of profitless business models. Even Apple, one of the most successful and healthy companies in the world, makes little money from paid downloads. And they dominate the space! This is why at Classical.com we are very careful to run a business that will attract and retain paying customers to enable us to develop the service further - we are nowhere near the limits of our ambitions, and continue to scale up functionality using cash from our customers who buy music to develop new features.

Ironically, even the P2P revolution has been anything but a cash bonanza. The biggest file-sharing firms are not big moneymakers because they have costs of running their systems, and small revenue from advertising.

We aim to keep the experimentation alive. The reason is that demand for music is so immense, and so is our love of the music - we will be here for many years to find the route to customers and channel their purchases back to labels and artists.

 

Many people around the world are admirers of the American achievement and the talent of its multi-ethnic communities to foster the best in people, build great businesses and a free way of life. Music is central to the freedom of the soul achieved in America. We humbly offer some of the music of of that great nation.

In just 34 years Mozart composed music that fills 180 CDs. An incredible range of music, from intimate piano to the most dramatic operas of all time, which convey the wonders of what it means to be human, alive, fraught, inspired and in love. His string quartets contain the full panoply of life itself, and for me the String Quintets contain moving inner reveries and thoughts. It is extra-ordinary to think that one gifted man could produce so much, perform at subscription concerts of his piano concerti, and tour the European world in horse drawn carriages within just 34 years.

By comparison, the Beatles who were the first mega-band of the modern era created just 9 CDs together in a few short years between 1963 and 1969, the year man landed on the moon. Great melodies (I am sure Mozart would agree) and imaginative arrangements caught the public eye and ear, which with mass communications of TV, Ed Sullivan shows and international concerts sold a lot of records.

The music industry may not know where it is going at the moment, and the Beatles are not yet available online (Mozart 180 Albums of music online vs. Beatles 0 Albums online of the 9 they recorded!). But we can bring you the INCREDIBLE innovation and pleasure of Mozart, and for the US election we offer Woody Guthrie in some great folk songs.

The Rubics Cube is one of the world’s oldest puzzles. It starts off with all the sides a single colour, then gets jumbled up, and the challenge is to return it to the original state - flat colours on each side.

Well, you do not have to do the exact reverse of the jumbling process to get back to the original state.

We regard music services as like a Rubics Cube where staying in the jumbled state is okay IF you manage it well, cleverly, insightfully, creatively. What on earth do I mean by this?

Let me think now. Well, it means that each person listening to a music service has grown bored with the knowledge that they have all recordings at their fingertips. Ultimately it is boring to know you can listen to World Music from any country, or any Classical composer, or Jazz song. It is overwhealming choice. It is just like a Rubics Cube where you know that there is possible order in solving the Cube, but getting to the resolution is bewildering.

So for a music service to succeed, it needs to think like a Rubics Cube in reverse. That means the end result of flat colours on each side of the cube is boring - it is like the music you already know. Similarly the jumbled state of just searching for anything is not very fulfilling, because there is no direction in a random search for composers beginning with M, for example. So a SERVICE must give order to the jumbled state of the Rubics Cube, and treat every single INDIVIDUAL user as a unique person. (Read: Strawson, The Concept of a Person).

Then the service is getting somewhere. It gets to the point where it can present Charts to users, so that they are helped out by other users who effectively rank Composers, or Musical Genres. Just for example.

The other way is to listen to Recommendations, so that the music service can send you on your way to music it knows you will love, and take you in a structured way to new pastures, territories, feelings and emotions. That is the ‘rush’ of listening to music, all those undiscovered landscapes the great composers have found for us.

So we have a Reverse Rubics Cube as the end result. This means the music on each face of the cube is not uniform, nor random - it is aligned for each user. Uniquely for you. For your personal musical journey.

Interesting stats about Radiohead. We now know that the FREE Radiohead album, In Rainbows (a wonderfully creative album, yes it is, my preciouss, yesss, we likes to listen to itt my preciouss (said Gollum)) was analysed by analytical people.

They found that it was paid for by 38% of people! Not very many, I would say as a percentage of people. Quite depressing in fact, because the band thought their fans would fork out money.

Even more strange (yesss, stranger still, my preciouss (said Gollum)) is the fact that for all the people who took it from the Radiohead site, DOUBLE that number of people took it from P2P sites like bit-torrent. Is that not amazing? People could get copyright material for free, legally. But they chose to take the copyright material for free from an illegal source. The frisson of free, we notice!

So paid-for music is still a rare thing. It seems that people want free content (whatever that may be). They are willing to pay with their ‘attention’ and look at a quick ad before getting their content. They will pay in kind (PIK is what bankers use when they pay for an asset with paper) but do not want to pay in cash. Well, the world is evolving, and being part of that evolution, riding the wave (oh no, not that phrase again) is part of the excitement of creating commercially viable music services.

We have not been too politically involved at Classical.com because music transcends words, languages, grand political alliances, trivial pursuits and much besides. However, between us we know a lot of very impressive American women, and have met many highly capable American women. That causes us to wonder… yes, we wonder why McCain chose Palin. A perfectly fine woman, she can ‘do’ the political thing and take on rivals. But people on our team know women more qualified than her to be potential Vice Presidents and better qualified to be ‘a heartbeat away from the Presidency’. So with all that choice, why did McCain choose her? We are mystified. We felt ‘political’ for a few moments, and wanted to put forward some of the women we know who could fill that post. But then the political feeling wore off pretty quickly, and we simply support the Democratic contender. There. We said it. We have no political weight, but on behalf of our straw poll of classical musicians, we come out clearly for Obama. Next post is back to music. You will understand we wanted to digress, just this time. A little frisson of a political blog post!

There is a lot of talk about completing with free. The news today is that iTunes which pays high royalties to labels is concerned that publishing royalty increases will be too much to bear. There is a lot of truth in this, because music retail is not easy - margins are minutely thin, and Apple/iTunes argue that increases in publisher royalties will make their retail business unprofitable.

We fully understand. They are competing with free. Their market is people who want the recording digitally (similar in length to a side of a 78 RPM acetate disc 100 years ago). As my friend said the other day, all you have to do is open the window and there’s ample music! People can easily search and find a free version somewhere or other. But it is annoying to do that, the quality is frequently not great, or it may not be the performance you want.

Our central business is not the sale of downloads. We are in the experience business at Classical.com. We sell happiness, joy, despair, intrigue and elation, with some calm and relaxing moments as well. We sell unlimited listening.

So yes, we are concerned about ‘competing with free’. But that is the market of owning a particular recording. Our experience economy gives you a wonderful selection, Recommendations of music you will love, a History of your listening over the years (over 4,300 pages of listening history for some of our subscribers). We introduce you to the charts of the great composers, with background information in Bios. And you can save any track in a Playlist. So we sell you happiness in a service to feed your love of music. You need your own personal library of music to dip into, or for intensive study, or to hear that opera before you go out to hear the performance. Worth paying for at our modest prices, and we welcome you on board for the experience.

It works like this. You pay a little for the music, we develop the service to make it fun an fulfilling, and we also pay the money over to labels and artists so that they can create more great recordings. Seems sensible. Not much has changed in 110 years of recording history, and we are proud to be a part of it. The BIG difference is the subscription element. Instead of paying a bit of money every month to a record shop for just a few recordings, with a subscription you pay a bit of money every month, and get to enjoy ALL the music. How much better can it get?

Enjoy.

The state of the financial markets is really quite shocking. We know some very senior bankers, who along with everyone else are taken aback by the severity of the situation today in September 2008. Even those who ‘famously’ said that things are getting out of hand in the financial world are surprised by the severity of the crisis. It is astonishing to see the world’s most powerful country so publicly discussing the financial squalour and the brooding, festering impact on the rest of the world. We all deserve some cheer, as we think towards the holiday season.

The best good news is that a Subscription on Classical.com means that everyone can afford a little happiness in their lives. Think about an English pub, and the pleasure of two pints of bitter of an evening. It is affordable by everyone out for an enjoyable time with their true love after dinner down at the pub. Similarly our Subscription is designed to be affordable to bring you some music of your choice. Leave out the radio announcer with his or her news about the world. Leave out the music you do not want to listen to on the radio. Leave out the crass radio commentary. Forget the nuisance of loading a CD. You are probably at your computer, so play music from Classical.com and plug in some speakers. Just relax, and enjoy the music you love, or the music we Recommend for you. Music you love, because you are unique and access to music you love brings happiness, joys, sorrows, relaxation and a richer life.

There is so much written about DRM, all I can do is add our distilled views of the matter:

1. DRM is a very immature technology
2. If DRM is applied to digital entertainment products it should be applied to all
3. We are delighted to use technologically mature DRM as a method to protect copyright

The discussion goes like this. DRM is so complex because different computers (hardware) and networks (connections between hardware) and software (operating systems and code that ‘does stuff’) all work in different ways. That is why Microsoft which developed a ‘Plays for Sure’ DRM system did not use it on their zune player - they needed a different DRM for their portable player. Absurd, we say. Proof that DRM is an immature technology.

Conclusion: DRM is an immature technology, and it is too early to roll it out.

We had many formats over the past century: first wax cylinders, then acetate 78 RPM discs, then 45 RPM singles, then 33 1/3 RPM LPs, then Stereo, then Musicassettes, then 8-Track cartridges, then CDs, then Downloads, then SuperAueio CDs and many other formats I can’t think of right now (like 4-way stereo for a few moments in the 1970s). The progression should have been: 78s, LPs, Cassettes, CDs, Downloads. But because Downloads are digital, the big companies said - “Oh, well yes, of course, we can slap DRM on Downloads, can’t we?”  They did this in isolation, forgetting that a CD of the Rolling Stones is equivalent to the Master tapes in Abbey Road. Why put DRM just on the download? Why not all digital formats? Let the technology mature, then use it everywhere. But do not use it when the technology is not ready. That’s what we think.

Conclusion: DRM is immature technology, and should be applied to ALL formats when it is a mature technology (yes, that includes copyrighted material whether audio, video, TV, Film, Games)

So that is why we would love to use DRM on Classical.com when it is mature. Because we believe that if all currently available formats have DRM and it is truly interoperable, then copyright owners and artists will make more money. We believe that is good. Artists need money. Their revenue from recordings has plummeted. We love artists, and wist to be a conduit of royalty income to them, from sales of their wonderful recordings.

Conclusion: we want to be the leaders in sensible DRM as soon as the technologies are mature and interoperable between devices.

So what does the mumbo-jumbo of that last conclusion mean exactly? [Yes, I admit I have been so immersed in this ridiculous verbiage I do actually know what it means]. It means that record label owners should insist on DRM being universal - when the technology is ready. Label owners should not let one company (eg. iTunes) use a DRM technology that is proprietary, lock out other retailers, and establish a type of monopolistic control of the market through a proprietary DRM. They call it Fairplay when in fact it is un-Fairplay.

So that’s enough wordplay, and let’s walk away from the whole argument and get some sanity listening to music Recommendations on www.Classical.com- enjoy the msuic itself.

… Oh, and lest I forget, the important part of this argument develops as follows: if there is no DRM and we go LP, CD, Download as a simple evolution, there will be less piracy because the music is available and people do not need to steal it. But we admit that the music has not been available for so long that it is hard to get people to stop stealing. So make it available through respected retailers, work on DRM technology, then apply DRM everywhere.