Chicago Classical Music

Friends have recently sent me articles suggesting the usual doomsaying about the death of classical music has never been more wrong. First came an excerpt from pollster Mark J. Penn’s book “Microtrends,” a small portion of which I will reprint here:

Classical music is growing in popularity, not shrinking.  And in the coming years, we should expect it to grow even more.

The reasons are empirical, demographic, and cultural.  Empirically, the doomsayers are ignoring some key numbers.  In 2000-01, there were over 32 million concert tickets sold, up more than 10 percent from a decade before.  Whereas season subscriptions dropped – for example, by 5 percent in Baltimore – single-ticket sales rose 46 percent at the same time.  That suggests not only that classical music regulars, including retirees, have busier lives than ever, but also that more people than ever are dabbling in classical.  Most industries would call that growth….

Here’s my favorite counter-stat.  According to Gallup surveys, the portion of U.S. households with a member who plays a musical instrument – 54 percent – reached its highest point ever in 2003, the last year the study was conducted.  And it may be that part of that growth was due to the fact that piano lessons aren’t just for fidgety kids anymore.  According to the Music Teachers National Association, 25-55 year-olds are the fastest-growing group of new piano pupils.

Even putting aside, for the moment, all the proof points that classical music is thriving and not withering, the big takeaway here is that the doomsayers’ key metrics – CD sales and presence on TV and radio – are completely irrelevant.  Musically speaking, the Internet is the place to be.  And apparently – even though the cliché classical music listener is stodgy and gray – classical music is more popular on the Internet than it was in stores.  Whereas classical music made up only 3 percent of CD sales in retail stores, it actually accounts for 12 percent of all sales on Apple’s iTunes. 

This last point is the subject of the “A Critic at Large” segment in this week’s New Yorker, authored by Alex Ross, titled The Well-tempered Web: The Internet may be killing the pop CD, but it’s helping classical music. In it, Ross interviews Klaus Heymann, who founded Naxos Records – now the world’s largest classical recording company – in 1987:

Until about two years ago, for me this whole music business was a hobby, an expensive hobby,” Heymann told me. “Only since 2006 or 2007 has there been a piece of return on the investment, through the digital.” Digital sales now account for twenty-five per cent of his revenues, and, because of drastically lower production and distribution costs, he makes much more profit on each sale. Hence the venue for our meeting: a forty-first-floor hotel suite overlooking Central Park.

Ross ends the article with a hopeful story:

For a little while the other day, a surprising name appeared at the top of Amazon.com’s Top MP3 Artists, outperforming even Kanye West: Richard Wagner.

Posted in

• Classical Music

• Jim Ginsburg's blog
• Add new comment