Apparently Universal Music Group - which has been dipping its toes into DRM-free waters this year - is none too worried about music pirates getting into classical music. Deutsche Grammophon, a German classical music company founded in 1898 and owned by Universal, will be launching on Wednesday an online store for MP3s called DG Web Shop.
The store will offer 24,000 albums and box sets encoded in a delectable 320 kbps (over the more standard 128-192 kbps). Six hundred of these albums are no longer available on CDs.
Albums will cost between $/€11-12 and tracks will be priced at $/€1.29 each, making purchases peculiarly cheaper for Americans. The site will be available in 42 countries and offer other things like album booklets, promotional videos, and tour information.
It may be worth noting that classical music receives less legal protection than contemporary music because only its recorded performances, not its compositions, are still under copyright.
That’s great! I am a big fan of the classics and they are one of the majors in this market.
Purchase cheaper for Americans? More like the other way round…
Wow, this is really a great step for such a traditional company. Tip o’ the hat. I will definitely use it. Much more in-line with my age group (38) than pop/rock downloads anyway. And great quality at 320 kbps, as far as the posting reads.
Notable as well that they are launching internationally. Love it.
Still, encoding classical music as mp3 is a crime.
This is good news for fans of classical music. I think I’d rather pay this than try to encode my dad’s immense vinyl collection. Makes me terribly sad to think all his Time Music vinyl might turn to dust though, we’ll keep them as long as we can.
@Vega: Mark’s maths is right, it’s the equivalent of 87 euro cents per track for Americans, or 1.91 USD for Europeans, whichever way you want to look at it.
“Albums will cost between $/€11-12 and tracks will be priced at $/€1.29 each”
Isn’t classical music normally a lot cheaper than other music? The prices are seeming really expensive to me.
320kbps is pretty good, especially considering the fact that digital radio here in Germany is very popular among classical music lovers and professionals, and comes at encoding rates of a mere 160 to 256kbps. Germany is DG’s home market, and one of the world’s biggest markets for classical music. So, it’s nice to see DG going for even better quality than the de-facto radio standard.
Having said that, and seeing clearly the economic advantage of sticking with mp3, I feel that a great opportunity to push for FLAC as the superior standard has been missed.
FLAC compresses audio data in a lossless manner, and therefore represents the exact copy of CD audio, while mp3 will always cut off something. And I think it is safe to say that customers enjoying a big enough bandwidth to allow for a smooth download of 320k mp3 files wouldn’t mind getting perfect quality at double file sizes (from my experience, maximum FLAC compression reduces file size to roughly 60%).
A word on pricing: Too bad we don’t know the EURO prices yet. $12 at the present currency rate are the equivalent of about €8,08. Which means DG will cash in big time because their new platform reduces the logistics chain to a minimum (no more dealers, no more hardware production and handling, no more shipping etc) while skimming the long-tail market with product that already became profitable a long time ago.
RE 320 bit rates: Higher bit rates combined with planned obselence of lower bit rates and increasing hard drive storage capacities, increasing audio hardware quality and decreasing costs are going to drive people to HD music and Super HD (SHD) music. Big opportunity here.
Count me in. Me and my credit card are standing by.
12 EUR = $18. Try http://finance.yahoo.com/currency/convert.
classical music receives less legal protection than contemporary music
Actually, those aren’t what the logicians call “disjoint sets.” There’s contemporary classical music, much of it still under copyright, and even composed by living, royalty-collecting people; a check made out to Beethoven will go uncashed, but a check to Joan Tower or Osvaldo Golijov would, I imagine, be most welcome.
I think there is very narrow niche for classical music, however I agree it should have less legal protection than contemporary music.
I will consider buying when they go to CD quality, e.g. FLAC compressed. Even 320Kb mp3 is still inadequate for classical music.
I have been a classical music listener for almost 10 years but I don’t think I am crazy about paying for downloads. For one thing CD’s are cheap and I am not crazy about owning too many performances.
I usually check out the composition from the library and then if I like it just buy a CD at amazon.
In my opinion this is not a valuable service for a lot of classical music fans.
Augustus
This does seem a bit high in price especially considering the low cost of new or used classical cds. Record companies got a long way to go…
“It may be worth noting that classical music receives less legal protection than contemporary music because only its recorded performances, not its compositions, are still under copyright.”
There are plenty of classical works written recently enough to be in copyright, some are very popular too (John Adams). Classical Music doesn’t just come from dead people.
Tip: stay away from their Mozart Requiem. The noise is a disgrace. What is also a disgrace is that they are still trying to sell it 20 years later. They do have good stuff as well. Be critical though.
€12 would be, well, obscene.
Buddy Holly, now THAT is classical music! This stuff just makes me go to sleep.
http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
According to the first fact sheet here, DG is making available for download 2400, *not* 24,000 albums. Thought you might want to correct the error.
It’s very expensive: they can price that high for lossless files, not for mp3s. The interface is pretty weak (I cannot see the aria titles of many, many opera tracks, and that forces you to buy the entire CD). And many of the OOP titles would have been better left OOP. It may work wonders for crossover artists, certainly: Bocelli, etc. But for a company that’s been a pioneer of the CD era this very late entry into the digital online market is pretty disappointing — but then, those were the pre Universal-Vivendi years.
It may be better than iTunes, but that’s not saying much, especially when you consider than most classical music fans have pretty decent sound systems and don’t just listen to music on their iPods.
I’ve already tried the shop and downloaded my first album. Their selection is over 2,000 albums, not 24,000… but for starters it is quite good. I think price-wise it is very acceptable, compared to iTunes, with their abominable 128kbs and DRM (not like you can’t remove that…:). For the album I downloaded, I paid 10.99 Euro; at iTunes, it would have been 9.99 Euro, with DRM and 128kbs… I think its worth it. I’ve been buying DG albums for over 30 years, and they never have been on the cheap side…..
If the download is interrupted, or if you need to download a track again, it is easily done. We had a black-out - and it was easy to resume my download. Their download manager probably works fine with steady bandwidths. With the wildly fluctuating bandwidth of my ISP, I found it easier to download with DownThemAll… The DG download manager is sensitive to time-outs.
All tracks are properly tagged; the moment you load them into iTunes, you’re ready to go. Also, in the web store, if its available, you’ll find it easily, unlike Amazon or iTunes, where you need to try out many search options (by composer, conductor, ensemble, title….)
I wasn’t aware that Americans, once again, get favoured… why should we pay 40% more? That is definitely a minus.
With 320kbs, personally, I can’t tell the difference between CD and mp3… and I do not listen to my music on the computer! I’m no enthusiast of FLAC. Not everybody (myself included) has the option to subscribe to super-broadband… and if you live in a part of the world, where BB is readily available, well, so are record stores, where you could buy the CDs…. just because you CAN download doesn’t mean you HAVE to…