-
About
-
-
Visitors map
Aug
22
Classical music lovers may be leading the way in what I am starting call the long tail for producers.
A pair of classical music enthusiasts has spent half a decade combing archives and obsessively re-creating hundreds of obscure pieces by Ludwig van Beethoven for download as MIDI files.
Their hope is to rekindle mainstream interest in the great German composer, and so far they’ve done all right: The National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D.C., performed their reconstruction of an overture originally intended to be part of an opera based on Shakespeare’s "Macbeth."
The two enthusiasts are part of a growing community of amateurs and semi-professionals who are using the internet and other digital tools to bring classical music out of concert halls and academies, hoping to popularize it with the force of the Internet. Classical music sales are about 3 percent of the market. The energy from this classical ’sub-culture’ is emanating from the blogosphere consisting of music fans, the New Yorker magazine’s music critic, Live365 programmes run by home disc jockeys and the eager amateur criticism accompanying this spring’s Webcast of the Van Cliburn piano competitions.
When the BBC offered versions of Beethoven symphonies on its site, in conjunction with a series of features on the composer, there were more than 1 million downloads in just a few weeks. That’s some demand, which had the time and opportunity to aggregate, without the pressure of audience, distribution and immediate impact.
The New York Times for strange reason labeled the performance "a sham and a shame and some scholars, such as University of Manchester professor Barry Cooper, a Beethoven scholar who has reconstructed an unfinished Tenth Symphony, are not impressed either:
Merely playing previously unplayed works, digitally, is not going to create a significant base for scholarly advance. Its main advantage for scholars may be in drawing attention to works they might previously have overlooked.
To me, this shows another crack in the traditional producer-distribution-audience models. It is obvious that scholars and professionals were not the audience. The two Beethoven enthusiasts were first doing what they wanted to enjoy and couldn’t find and now they are hoping to reach the mainstream in a way academicians and virtuosos can’t. As Doc Searls points out, this is the demand side supplying itself. Sure, enthusiasts and amateurs have achieved feats that impressed the official experts and professionals but now, thanks to an unparalled distribution system that the internet has become, they can go directly to the audience. Some consumer-generated content that is scaring those who grew comfortable with the model and the control it gave them…
The idea is to promote listeners getting familiar with unfamiliar music. Scholars have had access to this stuff for well over a hundred years, and haven’t done anything with it.
Comments
3 Responses to “Music of the long tail”
Leave a Reply
-
London VRM meetings
“The demand side supplies itself”
Adriana Cronin-Lukas writes on Media Influencer about two guys that are promoting classical music by searching out rare Beethoven compositions and putting them up for download. Link: Media Influencer: Music of the long tailTo me, this shows another cra…
Adriana Cronin-Lukas writes on Media Influencer about two guys that are promoting classical music by searching out rare Beethoven compositions and putting them up for download. Link: Media Influencer: Music of the long tailTo me
Posted by Chinatronic.com
I have been a frequent visitor of this blog for some time now, so I thought it would be a good idea to leave you with my thanks.
Regards,
Jim Mirkalami