A basic guide to downloading - Page 4

James Jolly on classical music downloads on the web

Music from the web

Where to find your music

There are various different ‘business models’ in operation for purchasing music. There is the simple pay for what you buy (the most traditional and still most popular): the average price for a new ‘full-price’ album is about £8. This is model used by iTunes, Passionato, the classicalshop, classicsonline, the French Qobuz and numerous others. A second model is the subscription where a monthly payment allows you either unlimited access to music (though with certain restrictions) or a fixed number of downloads (the eMusic model – see below). Here, for the classical music enthusiast, is a guide to some of the best sites for acquiring music.

iTunes

The mother of all DSPs is iTunes: it’s the biggest source of downloads across the entire range of genres and in the classical arena it carries an impressive selection (a quick search for Brahms’s German Requiem turned up 13 different versions from historic recordings from Toscanini and Karajan to more recent ones from Herreweghe and Rattle). And like a traditional retailer you pay for what you download – don’t expect much in the way of special offers. There is a lot of music here – from majors to independents – and by employing the Power Search you will soon find what you're looking for. Of course if you have an iPod then iTunes is a perfect fit with seemless transfer from search to purchase to syncronisation with iPod. However, downloads from the site carry Apple’s proprietory DRM and cannot be transferred to other players or computers without restrictions (though iTunes Plus recordings are DRM-free).

Amazon

Not surprisingly, Amazon (in UK, US and numerous other sites), with its huge hold on the physical retail market, entered the downloading market in 2009 – and in the size of its offering must rival iTunes in reach (there has been much jostling between the two along "mine is bigger than yours" lines). Search is comparable to that used for finding CDs, books and DVDs and while not the most "surgical" works pretty well. Music files are encoded at 256kBps – not hi-fi but fine for listening on the move (comparable to good FM sound).

eMusic

Next in size to the iTunes and Amazon mega-sites comes eMusic. It operates a payment system that allows you a certain number of download tracks for a fixed fee (at the time of writing, 24 tracks for £9.99; £13.99 for 35 and £17.99 for 50). If you consider that most symphonies have just four movements and concertos have three, that’s potentially a lot of music for very little money – and add in the free 25 tracks eMusic gives you as an incentive to join-up (and which you can keep even if you don’t stay with them), then this might be a good first destination to see if you enjoy acquiring your music in this new way. All eMusic downloads are DRM-free which means that once you’ve bought it you can do whatever you like with it. (Incidentally, eMusic’s Download Manager allows you store your music and control the audio files on your PC before you import them into your iTunes jukebox or preferred player.)

The site focuses exclusively on independent companies – it contains recordings from Naxos, LSO Live, BIS, Ondine, SDG, Guild, Danacord and numerous others – and also does rather more editorialising than other sites, containing artist profiles, reviews and so on. The eMusic site does contain many gems though finding them is always slightly difficult – you tend to to stumble over them when you least expect it (and a sense of serendipity is still nice to encounter in this too-often-streamlined world!). Though that said, the search engine is infinitely superior to that offered by iTunes which simply is not up to the task of locating classical music easily (or indeed logically).

Passionato

The largest download site devoted entirely to classical music, Passionato, has recently been revamped and re-launched. Like iTunes it offers major company recordings as well as independents (not as yet Warner or Sony-BMG though). Quality is clearly a guiding principal, so 320 KBps downloads are the norm and many files are offered in lossless FLAC sound – if you have a Network Music Player then you can enjoy CD-quality music through your hi-fi direct from your PC or laptop. This is a well-stocked site with a determination to grow substantially – and with regularly changing special offers, it’ll pay to bookmark it.

theclassicalshop

One destination that has been steadily growing in size and confidence is theclassicalshop, a digital store with an increasingly broad catalogue. Chandos, the site’s host, launched its own download site early in 2006 and suddenly we were offered over 6000 MP3 files of the company’s deleted recordings. The range is too immense to list but if you’re attracted to Chandos’s unequalled catalogue of rarer British orchestral music this could well be the place for you. There are gems like Bryden Thomson’s Gramophone Award-winning Bax Fourth, works by Finzi, Kenneth Leighton and Rubbra, and more standard fare such as the complete Rachmaninov piano concertos played by the late Earl Wild, with Jascha Horenstein conducting.

Labels other than Chandos to be found at theclassicalshop include Avie, Amon Ra, Brana, Coro, CRD, Doyen, Guild, LSO Live, Naxos, Nimbus, NMC, Onyx, Priory, Pristine, Quartz, Signum, Somm and Wigmore Hall. Again, everything is DRM-free and an increasing number of recordings – and all of Chandos’s new releases and a vast number of back catalogue items – are being offered in Lossless formats.

classicsonline.com

Naxos, despite being well represented on the larger sites like iTunes and eMusic, also has its own website, classicsonline, which also contains music from the labels the company distributes around the world. Worth checking out, though you might find that acquiring Naxos material via eMusic is a more cost effective method.  The search engine, however, is probably the best around – so finding your music is no problem here.

Another destination within Naxos’s world is Naxos's own website that is a mine of information that contains biographies, sleeve-notes, histories of music and the ability to listen to everything in the Naxos catalogue as well as a host of distributed label. All this comes for a modest annual fee.

eclassical.com

Based in Sweden, eclassical has been around since 1999 and so has a fair amount of experience. There is some helpful ‘editorial’ material to support the downloads (biographies, introductory notes on the music and so on) and a good selection of music. Performances are a little variable but there are some treasures to be found so it’s a site that’s worth exploring when you’ve time on your hands. Not surprisingly there’s good representation of the (Swedish) BIS label, and also a large quantity of recordings from Hänssler Classic. The site also suggests such music for moods: under ‘After a divorce’ it recommends three movements of Dvorák’s New World Symphony which one can only assume is a hint that emigration might be a good idea…