Missouri Classical Music News and Notes

Is classical music—a genre that has spent a seeming eternity on the commercial skids—staging a comeback? That's the buzz on Nielsen SoundScan's 2006 report card, which listed classical as the year's fastest-growing musical genre. In an otherwise dreary year, sales of classical albums—a figure that includes CDs, LPs, and downloaded albums—increased by 22.5 percent, or 3.57 million units. That put the genre way ahead of such laggards as jazz (down 8.3 percent), alternative (down 9.2 percent), and rap (down 20.7 percent).

Accustomed to dismal stories about the graying of classical's audience, aficionados were elated by the Nielsen numbers. "Who killed the death of classical music?" blogged New Yorker music critic Alex Ross, taking a verbal jab at an ominously titled 1997 book. Some industry observers, notably Wired editor Chris Anderson (a boss and friend of mine), opined that classical's rise was due mostly to increasing online sales—in other words, yet another validation of the Long Tail, his theory that the Internet will help niche media find bigger audiences. Since brick-and-mortar music stores have largely shrunk or mothballed their classical sections, Anderson wrote, fans have turned to the Web, where they've discovered a cornucopia of previously hard-to-find albums.