When the New York Philharmonic announced last year that it was going to begin offering concerts as downloads, it was hard to tell how significant a move this would be. The Philharmonic’s initial, three-year contract with Deutsche Grammophon calls for four concerts to be recorded and released as downloads each season, as well as a fifth to be released both as a download and a conventional CD. A year later Zarin Mehta, the orchestra’s president and executive director, is blithely dissing that lone CD release.
The CD is “a vanity project, if you like, for sponsors,” Mr. Mehta said in a recent phone conversation. Oh, he added, it will also be sold in stores. “But how many stores are there?”
When an orchestra sees a CD release on a major label as something negligible, you know that the classical recording industry is not in Kansas anymore.
One year into its downloading venture, the Philharmonic is certainly portraying it, if not in Technicolor, then in rosy hues. The orchestra’s first release last March, of the last three Mozart symphonies, hit iTunes’s best-seller charts. Mr. Mehta said that the orchestra’s releases — six so far — have had a total of 12,000 to 15,000 downloads, a download being anything from a single track for 99 cents to a complete concert for $9.99. In an industry that sometimes measures top sellers in the hundreds, these numbers are large enough to be satisfying.
“They have definitely exceeded expectations,” said Jonathan Gruber, vice president for new media at Universal Music Group International Classics & Jazz. “The beginning of this series was a runaway success. The first release from the New York Philharmonic, if the rules were slightly different at Billboard, would have been the No. 1 classical album in the country.”
Downloading is no longer a theoretical hope for the future in the classical music landscape. Mark Berry, a spokesman for the budget label Naxos, said that digital distribution accounted for nearly 20 percent of that company’s revenue in 2006, up from about 8 percent the year before.
Universal Classics, the parent company of Deutsche Grammophon, wants to capitalize on the trend. The DG Concerts series, which began with the New York and Los Angeles Philharmonics, now includes the Chamber Orchestra of Europe and, as of last month, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Meanwhile, Decca, another Universal subsidiary, started an identical series in December, working with the Gewandhaus Orchestra and others.
It’s a welcome return to the days when major record labels recorded major orchestras. But the model is entirely different from the heyday of studio recordings. Today orchestras have learned that they must produce their own recordings if they want to record at all, and have renegotiated contracts with the musicians’ union to make live recording financially viable.
The Philharmonic concerts are, in effect, self-produced: Lawrence Rock, the orchestra’s audio engineer, prepares a master recording that is transmitted to DG in Hamburg, Germany. There are few extra costs for the orchestra or the label; and the musicians are paid with a share of the royalties.
A number of orchestras are self-producing downloads, and not all of them are working with a label. The Philadelphia Orchestra is selling its downloads from its online store, which opened in September. (Philadelphia also makes recordings with the Ondine label that are released as conventional CDs and are available on iTunes.)
Not going the iTunes route may mean fewer sales; James Undercofler, the orchestra’s president and chief executive, says about 3,000 downloads have been sold and 10,000 more have been given away. But one advantage of bypassing iTunes is that the orchestra can offer music in different formats. In addition to the MP3, Philadelphia’s downloads are available in a higher-fidelity (less-compressed) format called FLAC. Classical music lovers often rail against the inferior sound quality of the MP3; Mr. Undercofler said that about half the downloads sold on the orchestra’s site are in the FLAC format.
The classical music world is still figuring out the idiosyncrasies of digital players, such as how to convey data so it will be useful to an iPod listener. One iTunes user review of the Chamber Music Society’s DG Concerts release expressed frustration at not knowing who was playing what. The “artist” field of the database simply reads “Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.” For more details listeners must go to the DG Concerts Web site or download the entire CD to get the accompanying program notes (available as a PDF file).
Still, it seems clear that downloads represent the future of the field. Equally clear, from the DG Concerts selections, is that the New York Philharmonic doesn’t see a lot of new music in the future. While the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Chamber Music Society releases have showcased the contemporary as well as the old, the New York Philharmonic appears to be banking on reaching the Internet audience with conventional repertory. The next release, on Tuesday, features Beethoven’s Violin Concerto and Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring,” with Zubin Mehta and Pinchas Zukerman. It seems that a trailblazing technology is allowing the Philharmonic to reach a wider audience with what amounts, in the end, to business as usual.
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