The Internet Is Fueling Classical Sales

[DudeAsInCool]

In his article, 'The Well-tempered Web', Alex Ross of The New Yorker says that 'The Internet may be killing the pop CD, but it’s helping classical music':

"...Between 1980 and 2000, classical music more or less disappeared from American network television, magazines, and other mainstream media, its products deemed too élitist, effete, or esoteric for the world of pop. On the Internet, no demographically driven executive could suppress, say, a musicology student’s ruminations on György Ligeti’s Requiem on the ground that it had no appeal for twenty-seven-year-old males, even if the blogger in question—Tim Rutherford-Johnson, of The Rambler —was himself twenty-seven.

News bulletins were declaring the classical-record business dead, but I noticed strange spasms of life in the online CD and MP3 emporiums. When Apple started its iTunes music store, in 2003, it featured on its front page performers such as Esa-Pekka Salonen and Anna Netrebko; sales of classical fare jumped significantly as a result. Similar upticks were noted at Amazon and the all-classical site ArkivMusic. The anonymity of Internet browsing has made classical music more accessible to non-fanatics; first-time listeners can read reviews, compare audio samples, and decide on, for example, a Beethoven recording by Wilhelm Furtwängler, all without risking the humiliation of mispronouncing the conductor’s name under the sour gaze of a record clerk. Likewise, first-time concertgoers and operagoers can shop for tickets, study synopses of unfamiliar plots, listen to snippets of unfamiliar music, follow performers’ blogs, and otherwise get their bearings on the lunar tundra of the classical experience."

Read More@The New Yorker

[Singing Bear]

definitely, i personally am convinced with the words of alex from the new yorker. it is true t5hat the classic music that was on the diminishing trend in the various electronic media sources like the radio and the television, has found itself in a new avatar on the internet. IT is one the revival mode of its lost existence and glory, explains the leading classic music website ArkivMusic. the fact is classic itself means deathless and death in one source of transmission means resurrection in the other. Keeping in view the revival of classic music on internet again, the electronic media wants its revival back on television.