A mid-year Nielsen report on record sales revealed a rise in the first half of 2011 – the first since 2004. The reason? Downloads are finally making their presence felt on the bottom line: an 11 per cent increase in digital downloads was the major contributing factor. If you look at the major players in the digital market – based on the sales of Naxos recordings (the best-selling classical label) – the stand-out digital store remains iTunes, launched in 2003 and regularly visited by 225 million people worldwide. It sells more Naxos recordings than all other DSPs (Digital Service Providers, aka online stores) put together. Chart that 
on a graph, and iTunes’ dominant position is jaw-dropping. Combine it with Apple’s staggering iPhone and iPad success and it’s little surprise that, in July, the company had more cash to spend that the US government!

Second position in the online classical music market belongs, not surprisingly, to the Naxos Music Library, a streaming service that has, cleverly, tapped deep into the musical education world (quite how deep came home to me when I visited one of Tokyo’s major music colleges and saw three terminals in its library all logged onto the Naxos Music Library). For an annual subscription you can listen to a staggering amount of music from 
a vast number of labels.

The next positions are occupied by Amazon’s digital store, and by Naxos’s downloading site Classicsonline (which also offers a streaming service for a monthly fee). The site that nipped at iTunes’ heels for many years comes next: emusic has changed its model slightly since its launch and for a monthly subscription you can download as much as your allowance permits. Then two further streaming sites: Rhapsody and Napster, neither particularly focused on classical music, but both offering a pretty head-spinning selection for your monthly sub.

Next, Spotify, a site that I’ll wager will feature much higher in the list when next year’s survey is taken. It’s another streaming site, but its style, ease of use and hugely impressive catalogue have made it very popular in Europe (it has just launched in the US and I’m sure will take off in spectacular style). It’s a great way to sample music but it’s also becoming the default way to listen: most major companies are represented as well as plenty of indies, so there isn’t much you won’t find. A thread of the Forum on the Gramophone website recently revealed that Spotify has become a central part of the lives of a number of diehard classical music fans – much to their surprise.

Mention of emusic demands a quick update of the site since I’ve not mentioned it for a while. Things have changed – the subscription allowing you a certain number of tracks has been replaced by a simple monthly allowance (packages range from £5.99, to £9.99, £13.99, £17.99 and £24.99 – and the more you spend, the larger the bonus. So buy the £24.99 package and you’ll be given £27.99 to spend). A word of warning: your subscription doesn’t roll over from month to month, so be sure to use your allowance or you’ll be throwing money away.

One regrettable “innovation” on the site has been borrowed from iTunes, namely making certain tracks within a set “album only”. An example is the Gramophone Award-winning Chandos set of the Bax symphonies from the BBC Philharmonic under Vernon Handley: you can buy the entire set, but can’t access individual works, and only three tracks can be extracted. It’s really rather unhelpful. That said, the entire set – seven symphonies plus a detailed interview between Handley and Andrew McGregor – will set you back £13.86 (compared with Amazon’s £13.98, Chandos’s own £23.97 in the classicalshop.net, or iTunes’ £39.99). And when it comes to out-of-copyright material such as the Karajan Philharmonia Beethoven symphonies (ex-EMI) – which are pretty widely available – it does seem absurd to shut off certain symphonies (you can buy the whole set for £15.54 but only Nos 1, 5 and 8 individually, which seems rather arbitrary).

The great strength of emusic is the wonderfully eclectic offering from independent companies big and small – and that fuels feelings of serendipity as you scroll through the newly ripped recordings. Recent delights, for me, have included the Ernest Ansermet set of Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortilèges (84p!), a vivid album of Gossec symphonies played by Concerto Köln (£5.80), the Zemlinsky Lyric Symphony conducted by Christoph Eschenbach with Matthias Goerne and Christine Schäfer (£2.94) and an ear-opening collection of rarely encountered works by Ernest Bloch – the Poems of the Sea, the Violin Concerto and Voice in the Wilderness (a cello concerto in all but name, £5.04). The day I was exploring the site there was a vast influx of recordings from the German Capriccio label – and for lovers of the unusual, it’s splendidly rewarding.

Glyndebourne has had a strong season this year, so as things limber up for the touring season, I’ve devoted my download list to some famous Glyndebourne productions. Included are Pavarotti’s Idamante (to Richard Lewis’s Idomeneo and Gundula Janowitz’s Ilia), the famous Kathleen Ferrier Orfeo, Janet Baker’s glorious Calisto and a clutch of discs celebrating the art of Vittorio Gui. And I’ve added the EMI “Very Best” set which contains other gems.

The Essential Download Playlist No 38: Glyndebourne
   
Cavalli La calisto Leppard (Decca) iT, Am, S

Dvořák Rusalka Bĕlohlávek (Glyndebourne) iT, Am

Mozart Le nozze di Figaro Gui (EMI) iT, Am, S

Mozart Don Giovanni F Busch (Naxos) iT, Am

Mozart Così fan tutte Haitink (EMI) iT, CS, CO, Am, S

Gluck Orfeo ed Euridice Stiedry (Dutton) iT, Am, CS, CO, S

Mozart Idomeneo Pritchard (Glyndebourne) iT, Am

Rossini Le comte Ory Gui (Walhall) iT, Am, Ar, CS, CO, S

Rossini La cenerentola Gui (EMI) iT, Am, Ar, em, S

The Very Best of Glyndebourne on Record Various (EMI) iT, Am, S

A = Ariama Am = Amazon CO = Classicsonline CS = Classicalshop em = emusic iT = iTunes S = Spotify (not available in all territories)

James Jolly