Highbrow Lament: Classical Music Online

The WSJ had two great articles on Monday about music in the digital era. Robert J Hughes writes of the problems of being a classical music lover (subscription req’d) with an iPod. There is a paucity of online offerings for classical music, which I can attest to. Places like iTunes Music Store tend to have just the popular stuff, and their catalog does not run very deep. (I just did a search for Steve Reich. They only have one album, and it’s not even from his Nonesuch catalog. ).

Actually there are two highbrow laments. Besides not being able to find much classical music online, the other problem is technical. A piece of classical music—especially symphonic works—may be indexed by multiple tracks for each movement of the work. But the music is played continuously so that the track numbers are somewhat arbitrary and are not audible within the continuous work. The problem is that when you rip your CD onto your computer gaps appear between the tracks. So if you’re listening to a classical piece spread over several tracks, there will be audible gaps between movements, which breaks the continuity of the music. Annoying, certainly. Apple’s solution to this problem (Microsoft doesn’t offer a solution for WMP) is a feature called “join tracks.” You can specify several tracks that iTunes should regard as a single work. As the WSJ article mentions, this is a kludge because once you join the tracks then you are no longer able to access the individual movements of a work but have to either fast-forward or always listen to the entire work.

The other article in Monday’s WSJ that I found fascinating was a piece called On the Wrong Track (subscription req’d) by Nick Wingfield. It talks about that song names and artist names from music you either download or rip can be really off, that is, the metadata can be disturbingly wrong. The article was talking about music in general, but it especially applies to classical music. I recently ripped all of my classical CDs into iTunes as AAC files. The metadata that iTunes automatically downloaded from Gracenote was stunningly bad. CD after CD. I know that most of Gracenote’s metadata is submitted by end users—people who were ripping their CDs and typed in the track names. The Gracenote CDDB database did a marginally okay job with my rock music discs, but the quality of it’s classical information was cringe-worthy.

So add poor metadata to the list of highbrow laments. All in all, the state of classical music online is poor. As far as sales go, there’s not much motivation for the companies to get it right: classical music makes up about 3% of annual music sales. Apparently that percentage is higher online, but still not enough to warrant much attention (though the WSJ article notes that classical is one of the few growth areas right now in music). What can be done about all of this? Shall we start a letter-writing campaign?