Originally posted by cookiemonster
Went over to Reading for a bit of shopping only to discover that HMV have demolished their classical listening room (walls and everything!)
Unfortunately I think HMV are doing this pretty much all over the country (there was been much wailing, rending of teeth and gnashing of garments on the R3 Classical Forum over this a month or two ago). There are a number of problems:
1) internet sales are much cheaper (I rarely pay more than £10 for full price recordings now, vs £16 or more in a store
2) there is an enormous range of recordings now available that no shop could affort to stock - particularly with hundreds of (allegedly) acceptable recordings now from the late 40s and early 50s now coming our of copyright and being dehissed and reissued in cleaned up form, and tens of new labels starting up each week!
3) internet stocks are MUCH wider-ranging
(Oh forget Amazon, unless you just have to have it yesterday. I get all my more obscure stuff from
www.mdt.co.uk or mainstream from
www.bclub.co.uk - which works out even cheaper provided you buy about 10 discs at a time)
The only decent classical music shop in Guildford went under about 3 years ago, after about 18 years of trading. I have to say I didn't buy much from them though because they rarely had the recording I wanted, even they though had a fairly good stock. They would order it specially, but for about another £2 on top. The main advantage of a real shop was that you could actually listen to the disc to see whether it was what you wanted, but with the demise of the listening booths they had in my tender years there was a limit to the amount of operatic wailing or modernist plink-plonks you could subject the rest of the shop to - and you could never play it loud enough anyway
. I buy far more now over the internet that I ever bought over the counter.
Herman - there was an interesting interview with Peter Maxwell Davies the other week. When his music was deleted en masse by Decca(?) he had the right to buy the masters - which is what he sold his house to do. He's just launched an internet service where you can either download full works, or send in a prescription to him (rather his company) of what you want to go on a 74 minute CD-ROM, and they'll then burn it for you, and mail it to you, complete with liner notes, for about £4. With broadband connections it's certainly feasible to download a CD overnight (or thereabouts). Downloading a full DVD may be more of an issue at present though.
The advantage of this kind of stuff is that it would be possible for material to be made available cheaply in whatever (OK digital) format the customer likes. Programmable processors (e.g. PCs or replacements) with decent soundcards can then render with the latest and most appropriate CODEC.
The copyrighting issue is the thorny one. It's interesting to see all the classical recording business turning into a cottage industry (seemingly hundreds of small independents springing up all the time), just at the time when Sony are forcing huge scale runs of SACD by their protected glass-mastering policy.
I certainly wouldn't be happy with just an on-line service though. Aside from the quality issue, there's availability. At least with CD/vinyl you've got something permanent - so when the company feels like ditching the symphonies of Arnold Bax or Vagn Holmboe for the latest doodling from Bond, Russell Watson (or whoever they confuse with a real musician) at least you can still play your own discs.
