Classical Music as a Growth Industry?

Authormarty72x72_3 An item in the recent American Symphony Orchestra League newsletter:

In Sunday’s (3/16) Omaha World-Herald, John Pitcher writes about the ways classical music has benefited from the Internet, particularly in regards to downloads. “At eMusic, the world’s second-largest digital music service after iTunes, classical music now represents 12 percent of its overall European sales, and its business in the U.S. is not far behind. That’s a big increase for a genre that rarely made up more than 2 or 3 percent of total sales in record stores. … ‘What the Internet has done is fragment the entire music and entertainment industry, so in the future, I don’t think we’re going to see as many Michael Jackson-like mega acts,’ said Douglas McLennan, founder of the online periodical ArtsJournal and an expert on Web-based arts culture. ‘On the Internet, everything is a niche, and in that kind of environment, classical music is one of the bigger niches.’ … Perhaps the most amazing thing about eMusic, iTunes and other digital sites, though, is cross-genre buying. Nearly a third of eMusic’s classical sales go to customers who’ve never downloaded a classical piece. Similarly, iTunes sells as much hip-hop to classical buyers as jazz, the company recently told New Yorker magazine.”


As goes the record industry, so goes radio. It’s a fantastic paradox. We’ve had a decades-long decline in the record industry and in the number of classical stations, and yet there’s more classical music available than ever before. You can listen to hundreds of classical radio stations online anytime you want. Now, instead of tuning in your local station, you can listen to Terrance McKnight on WNYC of an evening and get some actual creative programming. Try England’s BBC 3 for a change, or maybe choose from a hundred stations on this site. You can also choose dozens of shows on demand: Performance Today, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra broadcasts, the New York Philharmonic, or The MTT Files, to name a few.

It’s still radio, but it’s radio transformed, repackaged, more convenient, and if you listen on-demand you can fast forward through the parts you don’t like, or listen again if you want. Oh yes, and it’s all free.

About Marty Ronish

Marty Ronish is an independent producer of classical music radio programs. She currently produces the Chicago Symphony Orchestra broadcasts that air 52 weeks a year on more than 400 stations and online at www.cso.org. She also produces a radio series called "America's Music Festivals," which presents live music from some of the country's most dynamic festivals. She is a former Fulbright scholar and co-author of a catalogue of Handel's autograph manuscripts.

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1 thought on “Classical Music as a Growth Industry?”

  1. Greg Sandow gave high praise to Terrance McKnight at ArtsJournal: “I think this is the classical music programming of the future, programming in which new music isn’t an occasional spice (or annoyance, for people whose main love is standard repertoire), but is — I’ll say it again — the norm. Certainly this is the kind of programming that can attract the new, young audience that classical music people always talk about.”

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