It turns out that in an industry where sales are down over 20% in the first half of this year alone, there is some good news. Classical music sales are actually up 22% in 2006. MSNBC.com has an interesting article on why classical is tracking opposite of the rest of the music industry:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19877908/site/newsweek/
Classical music actually lends itself a lot better to The Long Tail trend for a couple of reasons.
- Piracy is much lower among classical music listeners. Since classical music can vary widely between releases (some have 3 tracks, some as much as 25), there is great value in purchasing and downloading classical music.
- Classical music is almost always purchased as an album or compilation instead of a track-by-track digital download. Its just not subject to the standard 3 minute instant gratification song size as pop music.
- There are many new young virtuoso artists in the classical genre which appear to the new listener environment where genres don't matter like they once did.
Believe it or not, classical music was the fastest growing music genre in 2006 (http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070117-8641.html) with a 23% increase in the US alone. That can only be a good thing for the world's IQ and the evolution of musical tastes.
1 comments:
The quality issue really comes into play with classical music. 128kbs is fine for most pop and rock but just isn't good enough for classical. That's why I prefer classical music on CD.
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