Classical Music Online
Over the Christmas holidays a tweet caught my attention by a company I know well claiming they were the only company to offer independent artists the ability to put classical music online especially Apple iTunes and classical music is too complicated for any other company to deal with. This immediately got me wanting to know more as to my knowledge most companies have the ability to deliver classical music. By classical, we’re talking about orchestral music, things like symphonies, operas, choral works and even chamber music – music that generally is not main stream and uses instruments such as violins etc.
I hate inaccurate infomation so I should make a few things clear that the blog had clearly got wrong and was either trying to sensationalise themselves with a quick PR gimmick that was factually incorrect or just didn’t really understand how things work.
- Cross over artists such as Josh Groban, Katherine Jenkins, Myleen Klass, and many others have no additional difficulties than any other artists that choose to have a mix of music from the popular related genres to the classical styles.
- A number of people out there are talking about the death of CD and yes looking at the latest statistics, CD album sales are getting lower each month, year on year. However let’s also look at these statistics more closely. Firstly the main core of those statistics is based upon artists signed to major records. Secondly, a lot of artists don’t register their release as they don’t really sell product in shops; instead they sell direct to fans at the concert. In my opinion this is a far more sensible solution but it means these sales are never seen by the Official Charts Company.
- There are no additional copyright laws or rules governing classical music. Laws passed in all countries around the world enforce the same rules in their country in regards to IP (intellectual property) protection regardless of your music being opera or rock.
- The uploading process may take longer for classical music, as sometimes a performer may chose to record a work where a movement or work lasts an hour, but that doesn’t really matter. In the dance music field, they have music that can last equally as long.
- The only real difference between uploading a rock piece and a classical piece is in regards to the track name. In rock music, 99.9% of music does not have movements and is not called a symphony or concerto; it just has a name like “Stairway to Heaven”. In classical music you do have movements and also give additional information such as the key the movement is in along with the Italian tempo direction. In this instance for Apple iTunes there is a very specific format in how you present that information to ensure consistency that is it, nothing complicated.
Album title examples: Mozart: Symphonies Nos. 38-40 or Brahms: String Sextets, Op. 18 & 36
Track titles are in the following format:
Name of Work, Key, Catalogue Number: Movement Number. Movement Title
Example: Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, Op. 67: I. Allegro con Brio
There are many companies that offer classical distribution and it’s not just iTunes that sell classical music. Most online stores sell classical repertoire and there are also a couple of classical only stores such as Passinato and The Classicalshop.net . Each company will have their own rules on how metadata is presented, so just make sure if you’re unsure ask your distributor for some guidance but it should not be a big deal or problem and you cannot go wrong using the formula above from Apple.
Written by Nick Dunn of Horus Music Limited
Some good info here, but I think _you_ also just don’t really understand how things work on a couple of points. You apparently don’t quite understand the problem.
(1) It’s true that “it’s not just iTunes that sell classical music,” but that’s irrelevant. Most of us artists don’t want our music sold through only one online store — no more than we’d want our CDs sold in only one brick-and-mortar store. We want people to be able to find our music wherever they’re looking, whether it’s Amazon or Rhapsody or last.fm or some smaller distributor. And the fact is that iTunes is by far the biggest channel, and we certainly want our music to be available there.
So in short, you’re answering the wrong question. It’s not “where can I sell my music online?” Hell, I can sell it on my own site using Paypal, but I won’t get far that way. The real question is, “how can I make sure my music is sold reaches as many customers as possible online?”
(2) There are many services that provide an answer to that question, allowing you to upload your album to one place and then having the service send it to many stores. Those services are the problem here. Many of them — such as Tunecore, for example — arbitrarily refuse to accept anything with the genre set to “classical.” Others, for example, don’t provide a composer field in the metadata.
The particular PR campaign from Ditto that I believe you’re referring to is not just a PR gimmick. They have a point: “unlike Tunecore, we don’t have our heads stuck up our a**es.”
(FYI, I am not affiliated with any of these distributors. I did use CD Baby for distributing a CD once, with mixed results.)
Hello Paul,
Thank you for taking the time to write a really interesting comment, many of the points you raise we are 100% with you. I just wanted to make a couple of comments back:
You stated we didn’t quite understand how things work. That remove is quite untrue as we work in the industry and do the job daily so we fully understand the issues and do discuss often how can we make it easier for artists especially those who are doing it themselves without huge budgets. The post was merely to correct an incorrect assertion by another company who were saying untrue things and we unlike anyone also gave you the formula on how you deal with those issues rather than hiding behind closed doors. You have raised other points which although were not spoke about, are very true.
Putting music on any music store is not going to guarantee you sales. iTunes may still be the biggest platform in the world, but unless people know you are there, there who is going to find it except people looking around. There are of course new sites popping up that have tried to look at this and are successful developing really exciting ways for consumers to discover new artists. One site that comes to mind is Zvooq in Russia that has some really exciting ideas to deal with this problem.
The nature of distribution is that the distributor is just like the post man and delivers the content to the stores. The actual promotion to the wider world still lies with the label or artists themselves. PR and plugging is very expensive but again there are some systems out there you can buy into that are cheaper, but I don’t know if they would get the same results. In the DIY market the distributor could never offer this without huge fees or if a release was going down a more traditional route, then deals would be weighed against the artist rather than in their favour gaining the lions share.
It’s a very good point you make about some stores still not fully sporting classical artists even with just having simple fields such as composer. That is very sad really and needs to be corrected. There are developments underway that could correct that over time as more and more stores move to a delivery standard.