There isn’t a body. There isn’t a weapon. And the motive remains obscure. But
we already have an inquest – and a chief witness – into the death of the
classical music record industry. And the verdict, apparently, is suicide.
The witness is the writer and broadcaster Norman Lebrecht, and in his latest
book, Maestros, Masterpieces and Madness, he brings to a grisly and
breathless climax the story that he has been predicting for more than ten
years.
It’s the story of how the big record labels were born, rose, triumphed,
overspent and then killed themselves off. You want tombstone statistics?
Lebrecht has plenty, the most frightening perhaps being the slide at Decca,
once Britain’s flagship classical label, which dropped from a respectable
120 recordings in 1990 to just 20 last year. This from the label that sold
18 million copies of the first studio recording of the Ring cycle,
made between 1958 and 1965: classical music’s biggest seller.
But there’s a giant hole in Lebrecht’s argument. The truth is that the baton
has been passed to smaller labels that are busy recasting the genre. And
yes, making money.
The big labels, too, might have refuted Lebrecht’s argument if they weren’t
busier planning the next round of the Classical Brits on Thursday. It’s
their showcase and manifesto, taking place, like its bigger brother the Brit
Awards, under the aegis of the BPI (British Phonographic Industry). A quick
glance at the nomination list tells you all you need to know about who is
bank-rolling the event, and banking on it. The three conglomerates remaining
in the game – EMI, Universal and SonyBMG – have more than 80 per cent of the
nominations. And they’re the ones pushing the live performers at the event:
from Sony, the violinist Joshua Bell, and from Universal, the Chinese
pianist Lang Lang and the Peruvian tenor Juan Diego Flórez.
Not one of these stars has any nominations, however, while the ten nominees
for Album of the Year are almost exclusively crossover. “But that’s based on
sales performance,” Barry McCann, the Brits co-chairman and former EMI
Classics man, explains. “What the nine awards in total cover is a pretty
broad gamut of classical to what we call crossover.”
Those album awards confirm the labels’ financial dependence on this year’s
clutch of crossover successes – a dependence that they have always justified
with a tried-and-tested motto: one sector subsidises the other. “Any profits
made within a division are reinvested back into the classical music, whether
it’s the latest fiddle player or a string quartet,” says McCann. Or, as Bill
Holland, the boss of Universal Classics and Jazz, recently told The
Times: “We’ve expanded our activities to become a pop company, which is
a way of protecting the interests of classical music.”
But is making 20 recordings, however well produced and glossily subsidised,
really protecting your so-called “core” rep-ertoire? The argument isn’t so
much about attacking crossover – now a long-established genre with an
established market – as making a case for the core classical as a
viable industry in its own right, with a large but specialised audience
hungry for more of it. At this year’s largely unreported BBC Music
Magazine Awards the headline was simple: classical indie in, the majors
out. The myriad budget or specialist labels that have arisen to fill the
gaps left by the majors, often produced and even financed by the artists
themselves, are now reaping the rewards. “As consumers,” reported Oliver
Condy, editor of BBC Music Magazine, “it means we’ve never had so
much choice and so much freedom.”
“Fragmentation” – the buzzword so often applied to the
pop-music industry at the moment – has had its own effect in classical,
spawning labels such as Avie, Capric-cio, BIS, and orchestras’ own in-house
efforts, most notably LSO Live, whose recent recording of The Planets has
been in the iTunes Top Ten for the best part of a year. Just as in pop, it’s
the major labels that have suffered from the advent of downloads and been
slow to respond to the positive potential, while the indies and go-it-alone
orchestras rely on their products reaching customers via the internet and
have grabbed that opportunity with both hands.
There’s another milestone to mark. Next month the mother of all the budget
labels, Naxos, marks its 20th anniversary. And, true to form, the
invitations to the birthday party are as spartan as the company’s
utilitarian designs: white background, blue text, cheap card. Don’t expect
much in the way of gloss at the label’s celebratory Wigmore Hall concert,
Naxos Live, either.
But Klaus Heymann, the label’s owner and founder, isn’t likely to apologise.
“In terms of units sold we are probably the No 1 label,” he says from Hong
Kong, where he is based. “We sold about seven million last year, and we
released 238 recordings.”
Would anyone have bet on that success 20 years ago, when Naxos began trading
with a 20-strong catalogue of obscure recordings offloaded from Slovakia?
“Well, it’s unexpected for many,” chuckles Heymann, “but the majors were so
greedy trying to squeeze maximum margins from their old recordings that for
three or four years I really had no competition.” Heymann’s formula –
a CD for the price of an old LP, using cut-price orchestras and unknown
soloists recording the great classics – instantly gained a large
following.
Yet he didn’t stand still. When the majors woke up to the potential of
producing their own budget series, Naxos had expanded in other directions. A
sizeable amount of what it produces now is niche repertoire. “We don’t have
to make money on everything so we do a lot of crazy projects – the
complete Pend-erecki, or the Naxos Quartets [by Peter Maxwell
Davies]. But at the end of the day we have to make a profit, and although in
the early days I subsidised it from other businesses, in the last five years
I’ve had to live on Naxos – and I do live very comfortably.”
The formula doesn’t involve turning it into a pop company. “I have no
objection to crossover,” Heymann says. “The whole industry ‘crossed over’ in
the beginning when Caruso recorded the pop music of his time. But it should
be additional income and not subsidising the regular repertoire.”
He offers a cheeky comparison, with the major label that reportedly paid
£220,000 – not including marketing – for their Carmina
Burana (led by a star conductor and orchestra) and sold a respectable
60,000. “But our Carmina Burana, produced with Marin Alsop and
the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, cost us £20,000 and sold 30,000 or
40,000. Of course that was a budget price but we certainly recouped our
investment.”
The big label, naturally, did not: the man who commissioned it, Heymann says,
feared he would lose his job for doing so.
There is a riposte to the Naxos and indie credo. Le-brecht deplores the
“risible economic level” of budget recordings, which, as he sees it, go
“untouched by editorial intervention, unfiltered by objective
consideration”. Recently a spokesman for Universal tersely reminded me that
performers who went down the indie road could never get the financial or
artistic support that Universal could offer its artists.
But no major label would ever have taken a risk with the unknown pianist
Yevgeny Sudbin, whose most recent album on BIS (featuring Tchaikovsky’s
First Piano Concerto) has been greeted with rapturous acclaim across the
board. And in a market overloaded with shoddy opera DVD releases, the indie
label OpusArte has triumphed with imaginative and lavish presentations,
headed by their ultra slick recording of Glyndebourne’s Giulio
Cesare, rightly a BBC Music award-winner. And all CDs issued by
ECM, an increasingly prolific jazz and classical label, are imbued with a
rich, open acoustic favoured by the label’s boss, Manfred Eicher.
Heymann now has his eye on the bigger picture. First, new media: Naxos
currently offers its entire catalogue via both download and a
subscription-only streaming service, at naxosmusiclibrary.com. “That’s a
result of our enormous investment in IT – we have more people working
in that department than all the major record labels put together.”
Secondly, his company knows it needs to keep finding new audiences for
classical music as a whole. Hence its series of audio books, web-site guides
and the careful marketing to the 250,000 who subscribe to the Naxos
catalogue or site. And if the punters do start with Beethoven’s Fifth, say,
Heymann wants to coax them in more adventurous directions.
“That was my main complaint with the Three Tenors recordings,” he says. “It
was only ever looked at as a stand-alone project and the label [Decca] never
tried to get people into complete operas.”
Back at the inquest, the evidence is starting to look less clear. “A process
of change,” bravely concludes McCann, of the Classical Brits, while Heymann
looks ahead to the day when Naxos becomes market leader. If it does, will it
be the final proof of suicide? No, it will be a sign that the industry is
under more diverse, but more dedicated, management. The doomsayers have
spoken prematurely. The Classical Brits, May 3, Royal Albert Hall (020-7589
8212), and on ITV1 on Sunday May 13; Naxos Live, Wigmore Hall, May 22
(020-7935 2141, www.naxos.com)
