Missouri Classical Music News

Music itself hasn’t gone out of favor – just the opposite. There has never been a better time to be an artist or a fan, and there has never been more music made or listened to. But the traditional model of marketing and selling music no longer works. The big players in the distribution system – major record labels, retail giants – depend on huge, platinum hits. These days, though, there are not nearly enough of those to support the industry in the style to which it has become accustomed. We are witnessing the end of an era. . . .

technology didn’t just allow fans to sidestep the cash register. It also offered massive, unprecedented choice in terms of what they could hear. The average file-trading network has more songs than any music store – by a factor of more than 100. Music fans had the opportunity for limitless choice, and they took it. Today, listeners have not only stopped buying as many CDs, they’re also losing their taste for the blockbuster hits that used to bring throngs into record stores on release day. If they have to choose between a packaged act and something new, more and more people are opting for exploration. . . .

When it comes to lost marketing power, nothing compares to the decline of rock radio. In 1993, Americans spent an average of 23 hours and 15 minutes per week tuned to a local station. As of summer 2005, that figure had dropped to 19 hours and 15 minutes. Time spent listening to the radio is now at a 12-year low, and rock music is among the formats suffering the most. Since 1998, the rock radio audience has dropped 26 percent.

In the past 60 years, since World War II, we've seen the rise of the early music movement, the rise of musicology as a serious scholarly discipline, explosive new styles of new music, new ways of staging opera, a far better (clearer, less idealized) view of classical music history, an exploration of forgotten parts of the classical repertoire, and much more, including the rise (in the US) of orchestras and opera companies all over the country, along with attempts to make classical music more accessible, and attempts to bring classical music and popular culture together.

But at the same time, classical music began to turn in on itself; it lost its popular touch. In some ways, this was the downside of some of the excitement I've talked about. The expansion of the repertoire brought with it an eruption of scholarship. Anyone willing to buy enough recordings could hear all of Haydn's 104 symphonies, all of Bach's nearly 200 cantatas, and all of Verdi's 26 operas, many of which had gotten obscure even during Verdi's lifetime. But you can't encounter this music without also encountering (in program notes, CD liner notes, and elsewhere) scholarly discussion of it. What then gets lost is the direct appeal of the music. To talk about that, or at least to talk about it without reference to classical music scholarship, is somehow low-rent.