Fellow weblogger Greg Sandow has a great opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal on his frustrations with Apple’s iTunes system. It seems that the way iTunes and other on-line music services classify and categorize their individual audio files is incompatible with the standards of classical music recordings. Says Sandow:
Before classical music is ever going to take off in digital downloads, the whole classical-recording database — this is a mammoth job, but it’s got to be tackled — will have to be rejiggered. Music has to show up correctly labeled, and fully searchable, by composer, composition and performers (with each artist’s role correctly specified).
iTunes and most other music download services are streamlined for more standardized recording fare — stuff with an artist, an album title, individual track names, and a few extra details. Classical works can span multiple tracks (for multiple movements), can have different soloists on each movement or track (as opera does), can have different conductors with the same ensemble or different ensembles with the same conductor, and on and on.
It sounds trivial, but it’s quite a problem. The standards and quirks of music distribution systems have always had a profound impact on what types of music get filtered, selected, and discovered by a wider audience. Just think of the three-minute song format bias of broadcast radio, and how it encouraged and rewarded certain types of performance over others (despite the frustrations of time-breakers like Queen and Pink Floyd). It doesn’t mean these forms of music can’t succeed, but that they succeed despite the prevaling system rather than being supported by it.
If one of the fastest-growing forms of audio distribution isn’t compatible with classical or non-mainstream categorization schemes, it means more swimming upstream (or off-stream) for those formats and for the listeners that love them (or might).
