Who needs streaming?

That's 3200 CDs and counting. More than enough to satisfy me until I shake off this mortal coil. Recent purchases include the following. Harry Van Der Kamp and the Gesualdo Consort Amsterdam's 17 disc box Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck: The Complete Vocal Works. Sweelinck is an important and overlooked composer who pioneered turning sacred music into an art form. From BIS Dark With Excessive Bright by Missy Mazzoli; contemporary music that might just reach a wider audience recorded in stunning SACD sound. This new release is just more confirmation that the music industry let the genie out of the bottle by ditching CDs and embracing streaming, and then went on to murder the genie by opting for the MP3 format as the de facto audio standard. 

And again from BIS and again in hi-res SACD, Autumn Equinox by the Finnish composer Sebastian Fagerlund. There is so much quality new music coming from Scandinavian composers that is being buried under the current obsession with virtue signalling. Kudos to BIS for recording where others dare not place microphones. I was horrified when I heard that Apple Music had bought BIS, followed by the equally sad news that the label's founder Robert von Bahr had departed. But judging by my recent listening, all is not yet lost with BIS. Or perhaps the Suns of Arqa were right when they famously sung, all is not lost, but where is it?

Comments

Pliable said…
To qualify my comment about BIS's future after the Apple purchase and Robert von Bahr's departure. Recording dates for the Missy Mazzoli disc are 2021 and 2022, and for the Fagerlund disc 2022.

All of which predate Apple's involvement and Robert's departure.
But let's keep an open mind. All is not lost, but where is it?
7:12 pm
Chris Isbell said…
Assuming the average CD price is £10, the cost of your discs roughly equates to over two hundred years of streaming subscriptions.

Quality is no longer an issue since 320kbps is indistinguishable from lossless expect in extremely rare and exceptional cases. Nowadays many services have a lossless option.

About the only downside of streaming is the lack of the printed material included with physical media.

The advantages of streaming are highly compelling for almost every music lover.
5:53 pm
Pliable said…
Thanks for that Chris; obviously compelling, but just not for me. I suspect the illogical resurgence in the vinyl market suggests that physical media still has a latent appeal for many others. And interestingly, CD players are now making a comeback - https://www.classical-music.com/articles/cd-players-comeback
6:04 pm
Maury said…
Leaving aside the constant fluctuation in what is available for streaming on any plan, streaming is recreating the singles era of the 1960s. Instead of radio, people mostly stream a succession of tracks and personal playlists on today's equivalent of the AM transistor radio which is called the mobile device. The fidelity of the mobile device is better than lossless to most of these listeners. The reason for that is purely the ability to play the tracks wherever you are, just like the AM radio. Yes, people technically can stream an entire album or symphony (if available) but that is a small and dwindling minority of listeners. Audio downloads of these have actually declined faster than any other format. All we need are AI DJs to complete the process.

The merit of audio physical media is that it promotes more involvement with the music. You have to listen to an LP side or the CD tracks.

As for the whole issue of fidelity it is mostly irrelevant in the face of mastering with dynamic range restriction aka the Loudness Wars which is starting to migrate even into classical and jazz mastering.. This is a large part of the appeal of vinyl records since they have physical limitations of loudness. So, the LP mastering is almost always significantly more natural than the digital version.
10:20 am
Chris Isbell said…
Music is software. (Either a score is interpreted to produce music, similar to using a conventional computer programming language like Python, or the music is improvised interactively like a spreadsheet.) The physical storage medium is, in both cases, only a practical adjunct to help make this possible. Provided it does not produce a noticeable reduction in quality, what it is becomes simply a matter of availability and convenience.

For example, changing sheet music from handwritten to printed to a screen does not affect the performance. The performer chooses whatever is most practical for them from the available options.

I wish you much listening pleasure with your physical media. It is inevitable that it will not be around for much longer, except perhaps in very limited forms for nostalgic reasons.
9:36 pm
Post a Comment

Recent popular posts

Some music should be as boring as posible

Image
Éliane Radigue - seen above - has died at the age of 94. Writing in 2014 I explained how her Trilogie de la Mort is an intense exploration of the ragged edge of classical music that questions spatial conventions with its immersive sound, and which reaches beyond music into infrasound. At almost three hours duration and with extended periods of virtual stasis,  Trilogie de la Mort  challenges accepted concepts of musical development.  The huge influence of Éliane Radigue is shown by the breadth of the tributes, from DJ Mag , through the Guardian , to the usual lazy and accentless  Slipped Disc acknowledgement . Éliane Radigue's transcendent, unique and fearless music means a lot to me. So, as my tribute, I am republishing some of the Overgrown Path posts that over the years featured this fearless music innovator.                                     Some music should ...
Read more

Classical musician's brave journey from Mozart to Morisco

Image
In the 1950s a number of prominent jazz musicians converted to Islam, including - to use their adopted names - Ahmad Jamal , and Sahib Shihab , Yusef Lateef . One of the most notable converts was the drummer Art Blakey , while the very personal heterodox cosmology of the most celebrated jazz musician of that period John Coltrane was influenced by the beliefs of his first wife Naima, who was a Muslim convert . Many of the musicians who converted were African Americans endeavouring to escape from the shadow of Western colonialism ; they saw Islam as an attractive alternative to Christianity within the Abrahamic tradition, and jazz at that time was heavily influenced by music from cultures beyond the Judeo-Christian world. These circumstances were unique to the 1950s, and fewer jazz musicians have taken the path to Islam since. But those who have include the bass player Danny Thompson who converted in 1990; he has played with many great musicians, including Nick Drake on the legendary...
Read more

A vintage year for blasphemy and heresy

Image
2010 was a vintage year for blasphemy and heresy. A post on Salvador Dali drew attention to his forgotten audiovisual opera-poem Être Dieu inspired by the Cathar heresy, Jonathan Harvey stirred things up on my Chance Music programme by saying "the future must bring things which are considered blasphemous like amplifying classical music", while yet another path took me to new heights of heresy. In fact the path reached 2400 feet, which, as the photo above shows, is a serious challenge for anyone who, like me, who has a vertigo problem. I took the photo from the fortress of Quéribus in Languedoc, France and the view is towards Mont Canigou, the holy mountain beloved of Pablo Casals and Thomas Merton . Quéribus castle was the last Cathar stronghold to surrender in 1255 and Jordi Savall's The Forgotten Kingdom had led me to Languedoc and Catharism and on to Gnosticism. The Cathar heresy has its roots in the "dualist" religions in the Indus basin which origina...
Read more

Those are my principles....

Image
Norman Lebrecht: Slipped Disc and   Lebrecht Weekly, 12/05/2023   "Why I cannot, in good conscience, review this record I cannot, in all conscience, give this recording a star rating, or even a detailed review. The soloist is Elisabeth Leonskaja, a legendary pianist whose introspections are perhaps the strongest living reminder of her late friend Sviatoslav Richter....Christian Thielemann, in the recent film ‘Music under the Swastika’, claimed that Wilhelm Furtwängler’s complicity in the Third Reich was justified by his legacy of extraordinary recordings.  Leonskaya’s presence in Putin’s Russia is not dissimilar. What are we to make of them?... The performances, per se, have nothing to do with the present situation. And yet, everything.I cannot review them". . ..and if you don't like my principles... well, I have others . Norman Lebrecht: Slipped Disc , 19/11/2025 "The Muziekgebouw in Eindhoven has cancelled a December 4 concert by the Russian-Georgian Jewish pia...
Read more

No big bearded imam was going to tell me music was haram

Image
That header photo shows the British Muslim musician Ali Keeler playing with his Al Firdaus Ensemble. The status of music in Islam - forbidden or permissible - is frequently discussed and almost as frequently misunderstood. So I thought it useful to share an extract from an unpublished memoir by Ian Whiteman who was multi-instrumentalist for the mod band The Action and the Sufi-influenced cult psychedelic folk rock band Mighty Baby in the 1960s. Ian went on to make what is, to use a tired and devalued label , an inexplicably neglected masterpiece, the one-off album If Man But Knew by the Habibiyya. In 1971 Ian converted to Islam and became a member of the celebrated Bristol Gardens/Wood Dalling Sufi zawiya founded by the controversial Abdalqadir as-Sufi who later wrote an Islamic interpretation of Wagner's music . After converting to Islam Ian Whiteman took the name Abdallateef and as Abdallateef Whiteman has established a considerable reputation in the Muslim world as a graph...
Read more

Music for four accordions

Image
Charles Ives , Umberto Giordano , Osvaldo Golijov , Paul Hindemith and Alban Berg all wrote music for accordion. So did Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky; in fact he wrote a score that calls for four diatonic button accordions. Tchaikovsky's Suite No. 2 for Orchestra is not as well known as the Suite No. 4 'Mozartiana' . Which is surprising: as they say on Amazon, if you like Tchikovsky's ballets you will like his Suite no. 2. Or is it because, as they say in the music director's office today: - if your score needs four accordions don't expect us to programme it? I have Michael Tilson Thomas' recording with the Philharmonia Orchestra; which also includes 'Mozartiana' . The performance is excellent as is the sound. The latter is explained by CBS sub-contracting the recording to EMI. The venue was Abbey Road Studio One in 1981 with EMI's Neville Boyling at the mixing desk. My research indicates that this CD of the two orchestral suites is currently only ...
Read more

Could LSD have saved Tchaikovsky?

Image
Classical music and hallucinogens may seem an unlikely combination, but there is a reason why consciousness altering substances have featured in several recent overgrown paths. As was described in my recent post Elgar takes a trip , prior to the global proscription of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) in the late 1960s the drug had been used with promising results in experimental psychotherapy. Among those participating in the clinical trials more than fifty years ago were sufferers from severe depression. Statistics show that between 20% and 25% of adults will have an episode of mental illness in any given year and as a journalist who has experienced severe depression explained “…mental illness is a taboo…. few people talk about it or let on – unless they are so ill that they can't help it”. Depression can hit anyone, including musicians. Tchaikovsky was one of classical music’s many depressives, as the final tortured Adagio lamentoso of his Sixth Symphony testifies, and it ha...
Read more

David Munrow - more than early music

Image
'David Munrow and the Early Music Consort of London transformed our view of medieval music. The impact of their performances far surparssed any that had gone before: by demonstrating how medieval music could sound normal, they created a niche for it in the concert hall and on record that it has never lost' ~ From Daniel Leech-Wilkinson's notes for Music of the Gothic era May 15 2007 is the thirty-first anniversary of the death of David Munrow. His contribution to the acceptance, understanding and performance of early music almost defies summary. He was born in 1942, and learnt the bassoon and recorder as a child. Between school and university he travelled and taught in South America , and started the collection of ethnic instruments that were to give him, and the world, a new perspective on early music making. He read English at Pembroke College , Cambridge, and was encouraged by Thurston Dart to take an active role in the music-making of that most musical of cities. ...
Read more

What price a classical radio presenter?

Image
New York Magazine's ' What Do You Get Just for Showing Up? An appearance-fee pecking order ' can usefully be extended to classical music. A noticeable appearance-fee beneficiary is the BBC's self-styled 'Prom Queen' and 'Maestro' star Katie Derham whose recent Tweets include "Sofya Gulyuk tickling ivories v effectively right now on @bbcradio3 Rach 3. Beautiful". In addition to a reported salary of £250,000 Ms Derham will just show up for corporate and public sector clients for a fee of "£5k - £10k" per appearance. Katie Derham is positioned as the BBC's 'face of the Proms' and the BBC Proms are subsidised by the public via the TV license fee to the tune of around £75,000 for each concert . Others benefit from appearance-fees more clandestinely , but it's all part of classical music's celebrity economy . Also on Facebook and Twitter . Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair us...
Read more

Classical music's biggest problem is that no one cares

Image
These photos were taken by me in 2008 at independent record retailer Prelude Records in Norwich. Jordi Savall's impromptu viol recital and signing session preceeded two performances at the Norfolk and Norwich Festival. One was a solo recital by Jordi in Peter Mancroft Church ; the other was an immensely moving performance of his visionary Jerusalem multicultural project at the Theatre Royal*. As reported here Prelude Records closed earlier this year; it was a victim of predatory online retailing, and today its premises stand empty awaiting occupation by a mobile phone or E-cigarette retailer. The Norfolk and Norwich Festival has been the victim of savage funding cuts , but continues in a more modest form due to the dedicated work of its small management team. A few days ago I wrote about a two-thirds empty Snape Maltings concert and proposed that classical music's heartland is facing a perfect storm caused by the convergence of the shifts in consumer tastes and the r...
Read more