Washington Post Interview with Klaus Heymann (NAXOS)

[NorseHorse]

Interesting read:

The Classical Beat - The future of the recording industry: is there one?

[boojum]

Thanks for the link. When I was a kid classical and jazz accounted for 3% each of record sales. I suppose that is still about it. But the support of the majors for these two areas as prestige lines is gone. Comes the revolution, MBA's, cost accountants, and marketing types are going up against the wall. LOL I do think that tight cost containment has hastened the decline of jazz and classical music sales. But Naxos is showing that a good catalog can pay the rent. It is harder but not yet impossible to sell these two art forms.

[oudplayer]

Q: ALM Oh, is SACD going?

A: This year worldwide sales were about 20,000 units. More and more indies are giving up.

I would have assumed even esoteric niche audiophile markets would have slightly more sales than that...

"Classical" is an interesting beast, I made a living doing classical engineering/mixing/hypermanicediting work for a few years. Better productions with higher budgets always seemed to have some sort of sponsor, either a government/foundation grant, or corporate sponsoring of some sort. But then again, art music has always relied on sponsorship or patronage systems...

[David Spearritt]

I think it's good that SACD has failed. It shows there is common sense in the marketplace. Disrespectful companies have learnt that they cannot market the public into a stupor over something that provides such a minuscule improvement over what they had and what was good enough. The constantly applied pressures of fear, uncertainty and doubt in marketing, particularly about technical issues, is a scourge starting to show its age as the public wises up.

But the old adage, "where there's mystery, there's margin" is still the basic secret of marketing.

[Teddy Ray]

Originally Posted by David Spearritt

I think it's good that SACD has failed. It shows there is common sense in the marketplace.

How dare someone care about fidelity in the recording business?

it hasn't failed. Apparently you havent checked the SACD.net site?

It is a niche market, for sure.. .all the "commercial failure" shows is that joe public cant hear, that they do not care about things such as fidelity. No suprise there. Properly done SACD is much, much better sounding than redbook. (and ill take a blind test any day of the week with anyone here) The marketing push in the beginning started it...but it is sheer taste that keeps people buying. Some people want more, David.


Some of the labels are still using the format, and these are the ones that get my money(and the DVD-Audio and the Vinyl).. because it shows that they care about sound, that the status quo/spinning wheels is not good enough. and of course there are amazing sounding CDs as well, such as the one Plush is behind(and he is obviously passionate about sound)

[TonyF]

The audiophile market for classical recordings is small, especially as soon as the repertoire moves away from compilations and the mundane into more interesting and challenging musical territory. There is a lot of commentary in letters columns, in articles and in blogs. A lot of high expectations, but in my experience the whole business model for products for audiophiles is simply incompatible most of the time with how new recordings get funded and why they get funded. These days most new classical recordings get made either to fill repertoire gaps in the catalogue (fewer now than say ten years ago), or to build/maintain profile of artists and ensembles. A nice review in a hifi magazine always goes down well, but in the end either these recordings are intended to make performers famous, or better off than they might otherwise be. Audiophiles are fashion conscious and one month they might buy a couple of SACDs and rave about a Mozart piano concerto, next month it is an esoteric mains cable, the next month some Elvis on vinyl.

It is relatively easy to set up, say, a high-end audiophile loudspeaker company based on selling even a few dozen pairs of high priced products. The same does not apply to recording. For example I have just been in Russia recording Rachmaninov piano concertos and that must have cost of the order of USD200000 by the time all the costs have been added up to do the job properly. Where would sales of a few hundred 'audiophile version' sales fit in? Divide USD200000 by 350 and you end up with a cost price of USD571.43 each, ignoring sales tax, copyright payments, distribution margins and retail margins. How many audiophiles would pay USD1000 for a two CD set of Rachmaninov? My guess is not many, and each of them would have different expectations of whether it was made with tube gear, analogue or digital mixdown, sampling rate, DSD or PCM.

My Company did a solo piano audiophile production a few years ago and we nearly broke even despite great reviews. The biggest problem was not only the small quantities but getting paid by audiophile distributors - the only distributor who was a prompt payer was the US team in Acoustic Sounds who were fantastic. We are still owed hundreds if not thousands by our UK distributor, and our Italian distributor never even paid for the first delivery.

Best to leave audiophiles to their letter-writing and budgets of thousands for interconnect cables. They buy music, but many really prefer vinyl anyway.

[boojum]

^^^^^^ From the horse's mouth. Thanks, Tony.

[RobAnderson]

For those interested, I recommend The Life and Death of Classical Music by Norman LeBrecht. It is a thoroughly entertaining read about the rise and fall of the classical record industry.

It is full of all kinds of great anecdotes, and maybe it is not the the most objective view of events, but certainly eye-opening - especially the record-sales charts in the last chapter.

[Mazo Audio]

It's always great to hear Mr. Faulkner's informative perspective here.

What bothers me is the the mentality (even from the Naxos guy) that, unless you can sell millions of units, then it's not worthwhile. I mean, if SACD sold 20,000 units (while being labeled as dead and dropped from Sony support) then there is money to be made there! They are going for big bucks on ebay and selling like crazy. Hello!

Let the masses of people have their lousy sounding MP3's, but why should that limit everyone else choices?

[RobAnderson]

I think the point is that there is way more cost involved in producing the CD (or SACD) than is sustainable by record sales alone. Here in the U.S., a union orchestra will cost you thousands of dollars per hour to record. You will not recoup that cost from record sales.

Whether or not it is a worthy undertaking is beside the point. Unfortunately, if people still want to make these sort of recordings, there needs to be a reality check on the part of those involved. Budgets cannot be unlimited, unless you want to lose money (in some cases A LOT of money) - Solti's Ring would be impossible today. I think the expectations of those involved need to be adjusted to reflect the reality of the situation. Solo and small-ensemble records have a much better chance of being profitable for obvious reasons, but even that profit will not be a massive windfall. If profit is not the aim and you have massive subsidies, then no worries, but I believe grants are getting harder to come by, and are becoming more competitive; however, this is not usually the domain of a record label.

Even in the heyday of classical recording, the popular music sales could (and did) subsidize the money lost making the classics. If it was already that way 40 years ago, it's far worse now: the market is now over-saturated with past and present releases. How can a new, unknown artist hope to compete with Rubenstein? How many copies of the Rachmaninov 2nd Piano Concerto can one possibly own? If you already have the same pieces of Bach recorded by Gould and Tureck, who today can top them to the point where you will run out and buy yet another recording of the same works?

Even today, there are many great things going on in the field of classical music - wonderful performances, breathtaking interpretations, and new works that are absolutely mind blowing - but they are easily missed in the massive sea of things available on the market, some of which are mediocre at best.

And the definition of mediocre has shifted: there are so many amazing classical performers that the market cannot hold them all, and our conservatories continue to crank them out in massive numbers. There is another side-effect of this: audiences are no longer amazed by talent and virtuousity, but begin to expect exceptional as the norm. The pie gets sliced into smaller and smaller slices. People become scared and stop taking chances (both artists and audiences) and as a result, a lack of imagination and creativity sets in and begins a vicious cycle.

Hard as it is for me to say, when something becomes common it becomes disposable, and what once would have been "exceptional" classical records are now very common. How does one make money with a disposable commodity? There are ways, but we need a new model and new expectations.

Sorry for the rant...

[aracu]

"The audiophile market for classical recordings is small, especially as soon as the repertoire moves away from compilations and the mundane into more interesting and challenging musical territory. "

Possibly the most meaningful listening experience is in contemporary classical
music, which at it's best is a non-commercial reflection of the present day which connects to a meaningful historical tradition. This is the same music which has the least amount of commercial value.

An exaggerated emphasis on the technological audio quality of recordings is a special way of avoiding having to think about music itself.

[Teddy Ray]

Originally Posted by aracu

An exaggerated emphasis on the technological audio quality of recordings is a special way of avoiding having to think about music itself.

the two arent mutually exclusive. If you don't care about recording quality, if that is not a goal, why even be involved in the business? your statement sounds like making excuses. "we care about the music, man"

I have a hard time understanding the "good enough for joe public" sort of mentality.

[Teddy Ray]

Someone must be buying the records from Blue Coast, Opus 3, Yarlung, MA, Mapleshade, etc... because they continue doing records.

anyway, the painted picture here is very grim. It tells me that I would never in a million years want to try to make money from classical recording(or recording period, at least not trying to make a living from it). What I want to do is the niche stuff, financing my own recordings, not depending on label money.. and shoot for the moon sonically. (Like Kavi or Jan Eric Persson)

[Plush]

An interesting interview from someone who once told me that if he didn't make recordings, he would make widgets. The prime directive was that it must sell on a mass basis and make a lot of money. Make no mistake here. Money is what motivates Klaus Heymann.

For my part I do not believe his claim that Naxos does not make money on most of its releases. I believe that they do make money on almost all of their releases.

After all, payments to artistes, orchestras and for the producer/engineer from Naxos are well below market fees. And they DO NOT set and cannot be allowed to set market prices for production people.

Some of the other stories that I know firsthand about this fellow make me retch. I will not repeat them here. However, I was there to experience them.

[aracu]

Criticizing an exaggerated emphasis on technological audio quality does not imply not caring about audio quality.

[Mazo Audio]

Originally Posted by Plush

An interesting interview from someone who once told me that if he didn't make recordings, he would make widgets. The prime directive was that it must sell on a mass basis and make a lot of money. Make no mistake here. Money is what motivates Klaus Heymann.

Well, that is what I interpreted out of that interview. It has to be a large part of the problem facing us these days, that the public face of the music business always seems to be some snarky, venture-capitalist type CEO guy (Guy Hands anyone?) It's no wonder young folks don't mind stealing music from people like this.

[mixedupsteve]

Originally Posted by Teddy Ray

Someone must be buying the records from Blue Coast, Opus 3, Yarlung, MA, Mapleshade, etc... because they continue doing records.

anyway, the painted picture here is very grim. It tells me that I would never in a million years want to try to make money from classical recording(or recording period, at least not trying to make a living from it). What I want to do is the niche stuff, financing my own recordings, not depending on label money.. and shoot for the moon sonically. (Like Kavi or Jan Eric Persson)

Pierre Sprey of Mapleshade was on CSPAN last night with 2 other panelists. They were tearing up the pentagon and politicians for the US defense acquisition program. The reason he was on the panel was he was the creator of the A10 "Warthog" and F22 fighter planes. The A10 is considered to be one of the most effective (and ugly) fighters ever. In his spare time he used to record groups is clubs in DC and eventually opened his label in his house in MD.
Interesting guy.