Here’s Allan Kozinn in the New York Times:
In the weeks since American and European authorities approved the merger of the recorded-music businesses of Sony and Bertelsmann, two of the world’s five biggest record companies, virtually all the discussion has been about what the deal means in the vast popular-music market, with barely a mention of the labels’ classical catalogs….
No one at either Sony or BMG, either in their classical divisions or among corporate spokesmen (to whom journalists are immediately referred by workers terrified to talk, lest they earn an instant spot on the list of 2,000 employees expected to be sacked), has been able to say what will become of the labels’ classical operations. So faintly do the classics register on the corporate radar that BMG’s spokesman, when told that his company had recorded the likes of Enrico Caruso, Jascha Heifetz and Artur Rubinstein, said he was pleasantly surprised to hear it.
(Read the whole thing here.)
This is an important story, right? Sort of. I’ve been writing about the crisis in classical recording since 1996, and I summed up my thoughts two years ago in an essay called “Life Without Records” (it’s reprinted in A Terry Teachout Reader) in which I predicted, among other things, that the major classical labels were doomed:
What remains to be seen is whether existing classical labels can operate profitably on the Web, especially given the fact that sound recordings go out of copyright in Europe fifty years after their initial release. This means that by the year 2015, the classic early-stereo recordings of the standard classical repertoire currently being reissued by the major labels will have entered the public domain, meaning that perfect digital copies can be legally distributed by anybody who cares to make them available for downloading. Callas’ Tosca, Heifetz’s Beethoven and Brahms, Herbert von Karajan’s Strauss and Sibelius–all will be up for grabs. Once that happens, it is hard to see how any of the major labels will be able to survive in anything like their present form.
Well, the future is now, and judging from Allan’s Times story, it seems perfectly clear that Sony-Bertelsmann, Inc., isn’t going to give a good goddamn about the classical-music treasures in its vaults. On the other hand, it’s only a matter of time–and not much of it, either–before all those old records become universally available on the Web, there being no way that American computer users can be kept from downloading them from European Web sites.
And what about the new records that Sony-Bertelsmann, Inc., won’t care to make? Once again, I refer you to “Life Without Records”:
I, for one, think it highly likely that more and more artists, classical and popular alike, will start to make their own recordings and market them directly to the public via the Web. To be sure, few artists will have the patience or wherewithal to do such a thing entirely on their own, and new managerial institutions will presumably emerge to assist them. But these institutions will act as middlemen, purveyors of a service, as opposed to record labels, which use artists to serve their interests. And while even the most ambitious artists will doubtless also employ technical assistants of various kinds, such as freelance recording engineers, the ultimate responsibility for their work will belong–for the first time ever–to the artists themselves.
For all these reasons, I’m not too terribly disturbed by the recent developments described in Allan’s piece. I’ve been expecting them for a long time, and thinking about what they might mean to the culture of classical music:
[O]ne aspect of life without records is not only possible but probable: henceforth, nobody in his right mind will look to classical music as a means of making very large sums of money. Of all the ways in which the invention of the phonograph changed the culture of classical music, perhaps the most fateful was that it turned a local craft into an international trade, thereby attracting the attention of entrepreneurs who were more interested in money than art. Needless to say, there can be no art without money, but the recording industry, by creating a mass market for music, sucked unprecedentedly large amounts of money into the classical-music culture, thereby insidiously and inexorably altering its artistic priorities….
Hard though it may be to imagine life without records and record stores, it is only a matter of time, and not much of it, before they disappear–and notwithstanding the myriad pleasures which the major labels have given us in the course of their century-long existence, it is at least possible that the 21st century will be better off without them.
To be sure, this prospect is understandably disturbing to many older musicians and music lovers, given the fact that the record album has played so pivotal a role in the culture of postwar music. Nor do I claim that life without records will necessarily be better–or worse. It will merely be different, just as the lives of actors were irrevocably changed by the invention of the motion-picture camera in ways that no one could possibly have foreseen in 1900. But one thing is already clear: unlike art museums and opera houses, records serve a purpose that technology has rendered obsolete.
We’ll sure see, anyway–and soon.