Tomorrow Deutsche Grammophon will launch an online Web Shop containing high-quality MP3s of 2400 albums in its catalogue, including six hundred out-of-print items. The bit rate is 320 kb/second, much higher than the standard 128 kb/s. I was given a quick preview of the site and was impressed by what I saw. Modern masters such as Ligeti, Nono, and Reich are well represented, as
far as DG's catalogue allows, alongside the canonical greats. Test case: Stele. On the occasion of the Berlin Philharmonic's recent performance, a number of us wrote ecstatically of György Kurtág's orchestral masterwork, which has recently been available only on an import-only Claudio Abbado CD costing upwards of forty dollars. [Update: It's also on a Haenssler Classic Mahler set, Christopher Culver notes.] Now you can obtain the piece for $3.87 ($1.29 per movement). The design is smooth and the operation quick; I bought, downloaded, and was listening to a new Stele in under three minutes. These are definitely hefty files; the 12-minute work takes up 31 MB. But the quality is superb. I was actually kind of shocked to hear such rich sounds coming out of my iPod. Times are changing....
AC Douglas highlights the odd final paragraph of a Tech Crunch story about DG's site: "It may be worth noting that classical music receives less legal protection than contemporary music because only its recorded performances, not its compositions, are still under copyright." The writer seems to forget about the existence of twentieth- and twenty-first-century classical music. Hey, there's a hot new book on the subject!
Update 11/28: After some opening-day glitches, the Web Shop seems to be running well. As another test case, I bought Myung Whun-Chung's Des Canyons aux étoiles, which sounds lovely. I should mention that each download includes a pdf version of the liner notes.
