[This is the first in a new series of essays about classical music collecting and the evolution of the compact disc.]
If you believe the internet, the compact disc is dead. And if you read a variety of other sources, classical music is somehow even more dead. So, it would seem, classical music on compact disc is as much a thing of the past as Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms put together. And, yet, there has never been a better time to collect recordings of classical music on compact disc. This is a golden age.
It seems counter-intuitive, I know. After all, CD sales are way down from even a decade ago, there isn’t even a place to buy classical music on CD in Gainesville, and the audience for classical music is graying by the day. Indeed, a night at the concert hall is hardly distinguishable from an afternoon at the retirement center. Nevertheless, classical music recordings are more accessible and more affordable than I have seen in my fifteen years of collecting. This is a relatively recent change.
Seven or eight years ago, if you’d have asked me when was the best time to collect classical music on CD, I would have told you 1993. After all, looking through my record label catalogs from that year, I can count an amazing number of new recordings by talented musicians of increasingly diverse repertoire, plus a steady stream of reissues of classic recordings first available on LP record. Complete operas, big symphony cycles, collections of piano sonatas and string quartets, early music and Baroque, Romantic and twentieth century – not a week passed without some outstanding new recording hitting the shelves. And there were plenty of shelves: music retailers, i.e., record stores, were everywhere, and many of them had enormous classical music departments. The major record labels had not yet merged and dramatically scaled back their operations. Decca, DG, Philips, EMI, RCA, Sony, etc, were all separate entities, vying for the dollars of a not-inconsequential number of collectors. It was a good time to be a classical music fan.
Today, of course, a lot of this feels like a dream to me. Shopping mall stores like Musicland and Camelot; the Blockbuster Music store on Countryside Boulevard in Clearwater, with its separate room for classical music; the dearly-missed Media Play in Gainesville with aisle upon aisle of classical music recordings, including an amazing amount of deep catalog stuff, all combined then to make classical music collecting a much more visible endeavor. It exists today at the margins. What few music stores there are carry almost no classical music. Best Buy, which in the late 1990s had some of the best prices on CDs anywhere, has long since lost its appeal to me. Barnes and Noble, which once astonished me with its massive floor-to-ceiling shelves of classical box sets, now barely carries any popular music. The major record labels seldom issue new recordings of the major operatic repertoire (or any repertoire, really), and the idea of printed catalogs just seems quaint. And yet, twenty years after 1993, classical music collectors have it made.
Much of this is due, of course, to the internet itself, which simultaneously killed brick and mortar record stores and brought classical music collecting to anyone with a mailing address. While those living in major world cities once had a tremendous advantage of access over more provincial collectors, today eBay and Amazon have leveled the playing field. It still helps to live near a good used CD store, but as in life, it is now he with the most money who has the upper hand when it comes to buying classical music recordings.
The collector has way more to collect than ever before. It’s true that the so-called “major” labels are less indispinsible than they once were, having vastly reduced the number of new recordings they issue, but the independents have moved quickly to fill the void. Most prominently, Naxos, a label which barely existed in 1992, now issues as many new recordings in a month as some of the major labels do all year. Their roster of musicians is no longer minor league, either. Hyperion, my favorite label, issues rare music with a level of scholarship and an attention to detail nobody else can approach. Bis, Opera Rara, Naïve, Pro Organo, and others record repertoire that nobody else will touch. Then there are the musician-created labels, like LSO Live, ArtistLed, and Soli Deo Gloria that exist to make available recordings by artists and ensembles in a way that cuts out the record industry altogether. When Deutsche Grammophon Archiv canceled John Eliot Gardiner’s Bach cantata project, he continued it on his own label. If it’s true that there are fewer recordings made of the big operas today, it is also true that there’s never been a better time to get to know rare operas by composers known and unknown. Baroque opera was once quite hard to find on disc, and now it is ubiquitous. And though the major labels are not as active in producing new recordings, they have done an excellent job reissuing older recordings. There is, simply, way more classical music now than there was twenty years ago.
Meanwhile, in the past two decades, not only have those recordings become more plentiful, but in the past five years especially, they have become astonishingly inexpensive. I’ll explain how, but first, let us look back to 1993. Browsing your local CD store that year you might have noticed a few substantial classical box sets. Philips, marking the two hundredth anniversary of Mozart’s death, had recently issued their Complete Mozart Edition: 180 discs in forty-five volumes, containing nearly every note of music Mozart composed. Cost: nearly $2,000. Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Gustav Leonhardt had recently completed their decades-long project to record the complete cantatas of Bach. These were initially released by Teldec on LP as they were recorded, but in the early 1990s they appeared together on compact disc in a sixty-disc box set at a cost of many hundreds of dollars. In 1992, RCA issued their Toscanini Edition: eighty-two compact discs containing the complete recorded legacy of Arturo Toscanini for that label. The discs were available separately, or in a set which included a specially-designed shelf. Cost: $1,200. While the labels were producing and releasing many new recordings, and reissuing many more, prices were actually quite high. Whether an opera recording was brand new, or thirty-years-old, it still cost about $15 per disc. I remember paying $52 for Solti’s Decca Tannhäuser on three CDs, and nearly $75 for Chailly’s Guglielmo Tell on four. Those bigger boxes seemed impossibly unaffordable to me.
That has changed. Last year, RCA reissued their 1992 Toscanini Edition in different packaging, adding two extra compact discs. The cost today: less than $125 for eighty-four CDs. It is an astonishing bargain. But there are many more. I recently bought nine discs of Artur Rubinstein playing Brahms for barely $20. If I wanted all of Rubinstein’s recorded output, I could buy the “Complete Album Collection” on 144 discs for $228. You can buy all of Murray Perahia’s recordings in a fancy seventy-three-disc box set for less than $140, and all of Gould’s Bach for less than $100. Van Cliburn’s complete output can be had for less than $60, and Byron Janis‘s for under $50. This is the age of the mega-box. The labels call them “Collector’s Editions”, and for good reason.
Essentially, the major record labels—having issued, reissued, and re-reissued their recorded legacy in a variety of packaging at different, and generally declining prices—have now seemingly hit bottom, and are are releasing massive collections dedicated to individual composers, conductors, soloists, orchestras, and even, in one prominent case, to a specific piece of music. EMI calls their series “Icon”. Sony calls theirs “Masters”. You can also find “Complete Album Collections” and “Original Jackets” collections, in which the discs are packaged in CD-sized reproductions of the original LP records. Contrary to standard practice decades ago, in which large collections of discs were packaged in a way that sought to emphasize their apparent value to the consumer by, simply, being big, the new generation of mega-boxes is deliberately scaled down.
Packaging CDs in “cap boxes” is nothing new. I purchased the seventeen-disc Peter Hurford Bach organ music set for just under $100 in 1998, and even then Decca had already released a series of these boxes, including the thirty-three-disc Dorati Haydn cycle, which, like the Bach, had previously appeared in separate volumes packaged in thick plastic jewel cases. But those were cohesive sets. These new mega-boxes assemble recordings that no one before ever thought to bundle together. So, for instance, one can now purchase all of Giuseppe Verdi’s operas in one box. Or all of Eugen Jochum’s recordings for EMI in one box. Or all the symphonies that the Vienna Philharmonic recorded for Deutsche Grammophon. Or all the recordings issued on the Mercury label. For relatively little money, a classical music fan can now build a fairly substantial collection, with excellent repertoire coverage. [I will get into the significance of repertoire coverage in a future post about the stages of classical music collecting.]
It is a new golden age. So what’s the problem?
Labels have nowhere to go from here. They cannot make recordings any cheaper, and after the mega-box it’s hard to imagine them going back to single-disc reissues of deep catalog stuff. These boxes may be the labels’ attempt to clear the decks, so to speak. By assembling all of their recordings in big boxes for dirt cheap, they are signaling that they see little financial reward in charging $15 per disc for music that appeals to a dwindling segment of the music-buying public. And while I will enjoy this bonanza while it lasts, I don’t think it can go on like this forever. Once nobody buys the massive boxes, those disappear – to be replaced with what? A new format? Possibly. But it won’t be MP3; classical collectors aren’t having that. Cloud-based subscription services? Maybe, but remember that were talking about an aging audience.
My genuine fear is that the mega-box will be replaced by nothing. The major record labels will simply cease issuing classical music recordings in any meaningful way. They may license or sell-off their catalogs to independent specialty labels. (This is already happening to some extent.) It would be up to those labels to figure out how to turn a profit off recordings that have already been issued and reissued over and over again.
The good news for the classical music collector is that, for now, mega-boxes appear to be selling well. Several prominent ones have already sold out their initial pressings and now fetch big money on the second-hand market. There are still many more mega-boxes to be made, too. They could go on like this for quite a while. Meanwhile, smaller labels will continue to record new artists and unusual repertoire. And, as more casual listeners jettison their CD collections for iPods, it becomes more affordable to buy out-of-print recordings on eBay and Amazon. [I will describe these trends in a future essay.]
So, for now, I will enjoy this golden age and try not to worry about what lies ahead. Whatever it may be, I will keep working to build a better music library.