# How youtube and streaming services are changing classical music



## science (Oct 14, 2010)

I have two thoughts on this: 

(1) The canon is breaking down. In the past, music was expensive so people took recommendations seriously. The canons mattered - not only the canon of compositions, but the canon of "great recordings." But now essentially everything is available at no extra cost, so people pay less attention to recommendations. In fact, the more famous recordings are less likely to be available (because the owners work a little harder to protect them from piracy), so people are actually more likely to hear other music. Music that was rarely recorded or performed prior to the 1980s (Naxos, CPO, Chandos, Hyperion, etc.) is now more accessible and therefore becoming more popular than the old warhorses that DG, EMI, and Sony depended on in the LP and CD eras. 

(1a) There's good and bad to this. The good is that a lot of avant-garde 20th and 21st century music was really expensive, and now it's free. The bad is that everything else is also free, and... well, my personal opinion is that the cream isn't necessarily rising to the top.... Probably wise not to say more about that. 

(2) Recorded music cannot remain profitable much longer. Musicians will have to make their living from live performance, with recordings being essentially charity for people who can't afford live music. 

What other effects do you think free music is having or will have?


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## MatthewWeflen (Jan 24, 2019)

I tend to think that YouTube will be a net positive to classical music. People who have enough money to patronize live music won't be satisfied with a tiny screen and subpar sound. People whose budgets are better suited to purchasing recordings and whose tastes are already aligned with classical are going to be exposed to more recordings and correspondingly purchase more of them. The kind of person who would be satisfied with a YouTube viewing window probably wasn't in either of these two categories, and so no sales are lost.

As far as quality of music, I think the best will still rise to the top and the canon will remain the canon, just as it has for the century or so since the gramophone.


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## Jacck (Dec 24, 2017)

I tend to agree with MatthewWeflen. Since 30 years ago, we have been hearing how piracy will kill computer games. Actually the opposite is true
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017...acy-doesnt-hurt-game-sales-may-actually-help/
or in music, it damages the most successful, but helps the less successful
https://torrentfreak.com/piracy-can-help-music-sales-of-many-artists-research-shows-180128/
There are both positive and negative impacts of youtube. I think overall the effect is positive for classical music. It can even be saving it. Now people have access to all this wonderful music and can check it at no cost and get hooked on it. In the past, whether you become a classical fan or not was largely a function of your social milieu. Now everybody can become a fan. And it has a very positive effect for the less known and formerly obscure composers, who now can get another change at reevaluation.


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## ZJovicic (Feb 26, 2017)

These guys explained it well:


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## larold (Jul 20, 2017)

Not everything is available free, regardless of what some people may think. One of my favorite recordings, Rossini's Messe di Gloria, a choral masterpiece never before known that was recorded for the first time by Herbert Handt on a Philips LP in 1976, has still never been available on any other medium including YouTube. This is just one example of scores I can cite from my own collection of recordings going back to the 1940s.

In my opinion people that spend their time listening to free music are getting what they pay for. 
And I would agree this has damaged the recording industry, at least for classical music.

Leonard Maltin assessed this in the final version (2015) of his movie guide saying in a world where people increasingly want something for free there is no room for his and his partners' expertise.

I don't think it is necessarily the availability of free material that has destroyed taste; I think it is the idea that acquiring something free is preferable to acquiring something worthwhile. This is hardly a new idea invented digitally by the Internet or anything else. Yet I don't think zeitgeist is the sole reason for this phenomenon.

Compared to the relatively recent past we live in an era without a consensus historically great classical music conductor. No violinist today is said by critics to compare to Kreisler, Oistrakh or Heifetz. The sound of world orchestras, which once was different depending on national characteristics, is today homogenized. One orchestra pretty much sounds like another.

Perhaps the height of this flattening is there hasn't been a composer or a new composition that has set the world on its ear for four decades. Is it any wonder people want this all for free?


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## ZJovicic (Feb 26, 2017)

larold said:


> Not everything is available free, regardless of what some people may think. One of my favorite recordings, Rossini's Messe di Gloria, a choral masterpiece never before known that was recorded for the first time by Herbert Handt on a Philips LP in 1976, has still never been available on any other medium including YouTube. This is just one example of scores I can cite from my own collection of recordings going back to the 1940s.
> 
> In my opinion people that spend their time listening to free music are getting what they pay for.
> And I would agree this has damaged the recording industry, at least for classical music.
> ...


I think you're actually right... Availability of stuff for free has kind of brought a big devaluation of everything. Objectively it's better to have stuff for free. But the problem is that people are cattle (myself included). They can't properly value something that they got too easily. For example while I used analog camera, I payed much more attention that each picture on a film is meaningful. I always wrote dates on the back of the photos and I organized them meticulously. Now I have thousands of photos on my computer and cell phone, and none of them are of some special importance to me.
When I had to buy an album, I would listen to it for a whole month before acquiring something new. That allowed me to become incredibly familiar with all the songs and the songs kind of became part of me. It's much more difficult now when pretty much all the music is available to you and is just a few clicks away.

Now, it's possible to argue that the value these things had to us was artificial and only caused by their scarcity. Perhaps only when everything is free we can truly know what has real value, because we will naturally gravitate towards such things, without economic coercion.

But since people are really not disciplined, some economic coercion, even if not justified in absolute terms, might in practice bring better end results as people in general lack discipline.

It's perfectly possible now to enjoy the music, photos, etc in the same ways as in the past, but now it requires personal discipline and effort, and in the past we were controlled by external forces (economic coercion)


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## BabyGiraffe (Feb 24, 2017)

larold said:


> Not everything is available free, regardless of what some people may think. One of my favorite recordings, Rossini's Messe di Gloria ...
> 
> Perhaps the height of this flattening is there hasn't been a composer or a new composition that has set the world on its ear for four decades. Is it any wonder people want this all for free?


 Messe di Gloria can be found on youtube.If someone wants a particular recording, well, this is another story.

"Set the world on its ear" - good luck with this. "The world" public is now global, not just a few Western European countries.


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## larold (Jul 20, 2017)

_Messe di Gloria can be found on youtube.If someone wants a particular recording, well, this is another story._

I think this comment perfectly encapsulates everything I said. Thanks.


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## Strange Magic (Sep 14, 2015)

All part and parcel of the New Stasis in Music and the Arts, as explicated by Leonard Meyer in _Music, The Arts, and Ideas_ back in 1967. The succeeding decades have only confirmed and clarified Meyer's analysis. We approach White Noise, big picture, and endless Mosaics of tiny fragments, when examined closely. A difficult but rewarding study that will go down as a key document of our time.


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## ZJovicic (Feb 26, 2017)

Strange Magic said:


> All part and parcel of the New Stasis in Music and the Arts, as explicated by Leonard Meyer in _Music, The Arts, and Ideas_ back in 1967. The succeeding decades have only confirmed and clarified Meyer's analysis. We approach White Noise, big picture, and endless Mosaics of tiny fragments, when examined closely. A difficult but rewarding study that will go down as a key document of our time.


Heat death of arts?


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## science (Oct 14, 2010)

Jacck said:


> In the past, whether you become a classical fan or not was largely a function of your social milieu.


Still true. There is no music without a community, and all music belongs to communities with identities. That's why we feel so passionately about it.


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## Taggart (Feb 14, 2013)

science said:


> I have two thoughts on this:
> 
> (1) The canon is breaking down. In the past, music was expensive so people took recommendations seriously. The canons mattered - not only the canon of compositions, but the canon of "great recordings." But now essentially everything is available at no extra cost, so people pay less attention to recommendations. In fact, the more famous recordings are less likely to be available (because the owners work a little harder to protect them from piracy), so people are actually more likely to hear other music. Music that was rarely recorded or performed prior to the 1980s (Naxos, CPO, Chandos, Hyperion, etc.) is now more accessible and therefore becoming more popular than the old warhorses that DG, EMI, and Sony depended on in the LP and CD eras.


The canon is a modern invention. In the past, you had your local composer - Heinechen, Telemann whoever - they produced reams of music which was performed (usually) only once. If they got stale, they went off to Venice or Vienna or wherever to pick up new ideas. If you didn't have a local composer, you set up a music society to manage a library of scores for you and your friends to play or to listen to your friends playing.

Now we have access to more music just as Mendelssohn rediscovered Bach, we have (in England) our own 3 Bs - Byrd, Blow and Boyce.



science said:


> (1a) There's good and bad to this. The good is that a lot of avant-garde 20th and 21st century music was really expensive, and now it's free. The bad is that everything else is also free, and... well, my personal opinion is that the cream isn't necessarily rising to the top.... Probably wise not to say more about that.


Just as the canon is breaking down, we no longer have a definitive source of new ideas.



science said:


> (2) Recorded music cannot remain profitable much longer. Musicians will have to make their living from live performance, with recordings being essentially charity for people who can't afford live music.
> 
> What other effects do you think free music is having or will have?


Recorded music makes money for the record companies. Groups like La Serenissima are going in for crowd-funding to push their recordings. Musicians, apart from the top rank virtuosi, have never made much money out of recording. Some groups even run their own You Tube channel to publicise their music. There's a small group of dedicated free lancers making money by performing and teaching just as there always was.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

My thinking is similar to Taggart's in that the decline of the current system can open up possibilities on a smaller scale. I see signs of it happening but its too early to equate it to a revolution. Perhaps music is just going back to where it started, somewhat like a glue which has connected people and communities since humanity existed. This can help counter the negative effect of instant access which encourages isolation with us all listening with earbuds at home, en route to somewhere or at work or school.

Recordings in a physical format will probably still be around, albeit also produced in smaller runs. It can be a lucrative niche market. In gentrified parts of town I inevitably see hipsters, young professionals - often working in IT - carrying a paper bag with fresh vinyl in it. Like their trimmed beards, cafes fitted out with industrial decor and quriky clothing, its kind of cool to be retro and part of a subculture that's going against the grain of music on youtube and ipods. Perhaps the CD will go the same way?


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## Guest (Feb 18, 2019)

Most of my life I have listened to music on the radio or live; purchasing recordings has always been something more rare for me as I tend to be very picky about what I buy, and to be honest I don't really have much support for the recording labels that make a huge profit for themselves. YouTube and Spotify are, to me, like listening to music on the radio except that I have some more choice over what pieces to listen to, and I think that's pretty neat.

Personally, I love the live music scene; in my city there's plenty of stuff to see every week, however I do plan on moving somewhere with more frequent opera productions. The only drawback about opera in other places I've been to is that it can sell out _very fast_, meaning I have to be quick if I want to get tickets on multiple evenings.


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## Guest (Feb 18, 2019)

Taggart is pretty woke; I agree with him.


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## Strange Magic (Sep 14, 2015)

ZJovicic said:


> Heat death of arts?


Not at all. It's just that the previous regime whereby the arts were divided up into large and recognizable blocks that remained intact for centuries, then decades, is over. Technology and the resultant rapid spread of ideas no longer allows "schools" to fully mature, as does the increasing population and the increasing influx of influences from freshly-born sources or sources never before previously tapped. Not only has the pie enormously grown but it is now cut into innumerable slices. Part of that phenomenon is that the past reservoir of art never is lost, but constantly accumulates, along with the wholly new, as time passes. Meyer likened the New Stasis to Brownian motion. White noise could also be a good analogy.

Let's quote Leonard Meyer: "...change and variety are not incompatible with stasis. For stasis, as I intend the term, is not an absence of novelty and change--a total quiescence--but rather the absence of ordered sequential change. Like molecules rushing about haphazardly in a Brownian movement, a culture bustling with activity and change may nevertheless be static. Indeed, insofar as an active, conscious search for new techniques, new forms and materials, and new modes of sensibility (such as have marked our time) precludes the gradual accumulation of changes capable of producing a trend or series of connected mutations, it tends to create a steady-state, though perhaps one that is both vigorous and variegated. In short......a multiplicity of styles in each of the arts, coexisting in a balanced, yet competitive, cultural environment is producing a fluctuating stasis in contemporary culture."

Music is no longer evolving, or, alternately, it is evolving in every conceivable direction simultaneously, constantly. Not only is every niche occupied but new niches are being created all the time. What's old is still right here, rubbing shoulders with the eternal new. The universe is expanding. Dark Energy. The New Stasis.


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## Enthusiast (Mar 5, 2016)

Taggart said:


> The canon is a modern invention. In the past, you had your local composer - Heinechen, Telemann whoever - they produced reams of music which was performed (usually) only once. If they got stale, they went off to Venice or Vienna or wherever to pick up new ideas. If you didn't have a local composer, you set up a music society to manage a library of scores for you and your friends to play or to listen to your friends playing.
> 
> Now we have access to more music just as Mendelssohn rediscovered Bach, we have (in England) our own 3 Bs - Byrd, Blow and Boyce.
> 
> ...


I think this is a really interesting dialogue - your comments and the OP - as so much has changed in the ways music has been made available over the past 300+ years. These things will keep changing I guess. But perhaps many of us in the classical music camp - the ones who should be more historically aware - are likely to resist the changes that will come?


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## ksargent (Feb 8, 2012)

I think one has to take the long view. Before the era of recorded music, a listener might only hear his or her favorite pieces a few times during their lifetime. And then only if they lived in a large city and had the financial resources to attend concerts. With recorded music, opportunities increased in frequency, but there were still limitations: Records or CDs were expensive and classical radio was not widely available. The era of streaming changes all of that; I pay $30 US/month for the two streaming services I subscribe to. Twenty years ago, that would have bought two CDs. Now I have the ability to hear just about anything I want to hear - when I want to hear it - and as many times as I wish. I completely understand the complaint about younger people expecting everything to be free; I happily pay my monthly subscription costs. But it is foolish to think we can somehow go back to the way things were. More people are able to hear music than at any time in human history. I am thankful to have lived to see a world in which everyone can enjoy the arts. No doubt there are problems which will have to be solved - but I would never want to go back.


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## Larkenfield (Jun 5, 2017)

Streaming is turning the music into wallpaper that can be freely heard or ignored. It’s fine to listen to but it cheapens the music because the musicians go largely criminally unrewarded with suitable royalties. Many businesses use it as upholstered wallpaper to entertain their clientele without having to think too much about it or pay what it’s worth. It’s become even more of a commodity just like everything else rather than an art. IMO, it no longer supports the art of music at even less than a penny in royalties on the dollar.


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## Bkeske (Feb 27, 2019)

I can honestly say I have never listened to any classical music on YouTube.

Just for kicks last evening, I listened to some ‘free’ classical selections on Spotify, and the same on my paid Tidal lossless streaming service. The difference is stark. I could not listen to the same selection on Spotify, it was horrid. I can only imagine how much I would cringe watching selections on YouTube (a service I quite enjoy for other things, and recently switched over to YouTube as one of my streaming TV services). Perhaps to watch a soloist perform...maybe...but I have a Digital Concert Hall subscription for that and usually the sound is very acceptable. 

Thus, if I’m going to use streaming to check out works I am unfamiliar, I use Tidal because of its quality.

Perhaps I’m too much an audiophile, in addition to a classical (and other) music fan. The quality of the music played on my system is important to me.

For others? I have no idea, but I know many are just fine with listening to mpeg files as their only music. Not me, except, perhaps, in my car where it matters a lot less.


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## Schoenberg (Oct 15, 2018)

One of the greatest effects youtube has had on classical music is the making of score videos—which allow anyone to follow the score of the music without having to have a physical copy or scroll through a pdf.


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## Larkenfield (Jun 5, 2017)

I would rather not equate YouTube and streaming services as being one and the same. I think they’re quite different. You can get concerts on YouTube in HD sound that are simply tremendous and watch some of the finest orchestras in the world in recorded concerts. It’s like having your own concert hall on demand, not to mention, countless vintage recordings, documentaries, biographies, interviews, and even out-of-print box sets... all of which can be played through one’s primary sound system in high-quality sound. I consider these advantages highly different from streaming services that are not nearly as much fun, educational, or entertaining. I see YouTube gradually moving in the direction of paid subscriptions.


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## Schoenberg (Oct 15, 2018)

Larkenfield said:


> I would rather not equate YouTube and streaming services as being one and the same. I think they're quite different. You can get concerts on YouTube in HD sound that are simply tremendous and watch some of the finest orchestras in the world in recorded concerts. It's like having your own concert hall on demand, not to mention, countless vintage recordings, documentaries, biographies, interviews, and even out-of-print box sets... all of which can be played through one's primary sound system in high-quality sound. I consider these advantages highly different from streaming services that are not nearly as much fun, educational, or entertaining. I see YouTube gradually moving in the direction of paid subscriptions.


Youtube still caps sound at 192kbs, so you can't get true lossless level quality.


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