Whenever I buy CDs (a rarity nowadays), they are almost always classical or jazz. I was in the city and visited my usual haunts for finding classical discs.

One of the largest stores with its own classical music lounge has been all but decimated. It is now 'sharing' with jazz, country, and a few other 'minority' genres (their words, not mine!).

I went across the road to a major bookshop which also has a classical lounge. There was a sign on the door to the lounge that said it was currently closed, so I asked an employee when it would be open.

'It won't be. It's closed for good', they said.

I tried other places but wherever I went, I found the same sad story. Closed down, or vastly reduced to near oblivion. I went to the city's only specialist classical store, only to find that one entire wall was dedicated to opera (a genre of classical music I don't much care for) whereas chamber music (my favourite!) was down to one rack. There was hardly anything of interest, so I asked what could be ordered in. Practically every disc I made a mental 'must get' note of earlier on had been deleted and was unavailable.

Yesterday I visited one of the specialty stores in the suburbs and they confirmed that much of what I was after - which was previously available - had been deleted from the range and could no longer be ordered.

What's going on here? Has there been a takeover? Is this related to the issues underlined in the 'big five' thread that Dave Williams started? Aren't the major labels interested in classical music anymore?

Have others noticed this sudden 'trend'?

EDIT: I just looked on CDNOW.com, and I was unable to find listings of several recordings I was able to find on there just several months ago. Something SERIOUS must be up...

...but then you would be a no-good, digital-downloader, pirate, file-sharing, bootlegger that will bring the record companies to complete financial ruin. So in their eyes, you are out of luck.

Seriously, though, if you can't find what you are looking for on CD-NOW or Amazon.com, I honestly don't know of any other options. My brother used to be an avid collector of classical music and usually ordered the hard-to-find stuff from specialty catalogs.

=TMP=
 

The root of the problem is that really, there is a set repertoire and once people have built up a collection of that then they're really not going to buy anything new. I recently read that orchestral/choral/instrumental music composed in the last 30 years accounts for something like 0.5% of CD sales categorised as 'classical.'

There is then a finite amount of what's left. That same article pointed out that there are now 91 different performances of Mahler's first symphony on the market. Even a complete Mahler nut is unlikely to buy more than 4 or 5 of those. So the range of product is inherently limited. The industry had a slight reprieve when CDs replaced LPs, because people were buying to replace their old collections. But now the sums just don't add up. When the classical recording industry established itself with the invention of LPs in the 1950s, they worked on the basis of the investment in a recording being paid back over several decades.

A new 'mainstream' recording will make most of its income within a month or two of release. A classical recording (especially orchestral or opera - think about all those musicians who need to be paid up front) will shift far fewer copies over a far longer timescale. Go into the classical department of any record shop today (if you can find one) and you'll see CD rereleases of recordings made in the '50s and '60s. Added to those are the ones which have been made since (of the same music), and the end result is that you have too many recordings chasing too few customers.

Compare the situation with, say, publishing: no-one will make any money by releasing new editions of Shakespeare. The companies which do that subsidise it through sales of shit lit novels. Most classical labels are also owned by the big conglomerates (e.g. RCA/BMG, the classical imprints of Virgin and EMI), but unlike in publishing, it seems (judging by the rapidly decreasing number of releases) that the music industry is willing to let this part of its operations sink. I guess this could be due to the economic crisis in the mainstream music industry.

Most of the music I get is either on LP from second-hand shops or recorded from the radio (in Britain we have BBC Radio 3 which specialises in classical, jazz and other arts programming) from my digital tuner directly onto CD - which, as long as I don't make multiple copies, isn't even illegal. It must be at least a year since I bought a CD, and that's the problem which the classical music industry is facing.

I have 13 recordings of Mahler 5!
But otherwise what you say is true. The market is saturated with alternative readings of the same pieces. The introduction of the CD and new recording technologies gave the classical market a big boost, as did the period performance movement which gave the traditional classical music scene even a few firsts ("the first complete recording of Schumann symphonies on period instruments!").
There are other factors too. Less and less people come into contact with classical music just as many young people today don`t know classic films either. Probably more people listen to classical music now than 20 years ago, but most of them listen only to "Light Classics" because it is so relaxing to listen to flute concertos in the car on the way to work.
There are not so many profiled artists today. Before you had Karajan and Bernstein and Solti and Giulini and their readings were really different. Today we are stranded with Muti and Barenboim and other crap. It is good for Berlin that Simon Rattle is now principal conductor of the Philharmic because he is an interesting artist and he tries to introduce new repertoire.
I have also found that even big classical publishers such as Deutsche Grammophon have deleted many items from their catalogue so even "mainstream" classical recordings are sometimes hard to find.
Michael
 

I heard (from a friend who is a viola in the BBC Northern Symphony Orchestra) that there were some nasty copyright issues that emerged when Deutsche Grammophon demerged from Polygram, which could explain why a lot of its back catalogue has gone out of circulation.

Of course, if I knew the discs on my 'must have' list were going to be deleted I would have purchased them earlier. I never suspected that this would happen.

I agree that the CD format and the 'period instrument' phase helped to sell classical discs. In that case, do you think the introduction of SACD/DVD-A might create a 'renaissance' in classical music sales?

Perhaps the majors will reissue their deleted discs fully remastered. Either this, or the super CD formats will never succeed (I don't think for one moment that the high-res CD formats will succeed with more mainstream music since the 'audiophile' market has ALWAYS been about classical and jazz - think Telarc, Chesky, Dorian, Reference Recordings, etc).

There are some amazing performances out there and it would be a real shame not to make them available one way or another.

Some of the CD rereleases of RCA 'Living Stereo' LPs from the '50s and '60s really sound their age. For example, my disc of Fritz Reiner conducting Also Sprach Zarathustra has blunted HF and clearly audible tape hiss (I don't mind a bit of tape hiss but good HF on an orchestral recording is a must). Plus most of these recordings were only ever intended to be played as two channels, whereas the new formats can support many more.

If such a conversion would mean massive investment in new recordings, I have my doubts as to whether it is going to happen anytime soon, given the state of the mainstream music industry, which traditionally has subsidised up-front investment in classical. Plus there was a 30 year-gap between LPs and CDs becoming the dominant consumer format: CD audio has now only really been with us for 10-15, raising the question of whether consumers are willing to sink large amounts of money in new software this soon.

And the Tower Records chain recently asked the labels for better terms on Classical releases. I forget the exact details, but I believe Tower wants up to a year to pay for Classical product, apparently because it moves so slowly. They have also threatened to reduce the amount of Classical music in stock, but it doesn't look to me like this has happened as yet.

Unfortunately, as our society is "dumbed down," there is less of a market for Classical (and Jazz) recordings. According to the RIAA Customer Profile Study, Classical music comprises only 3.2% of music sales. Jazz does only slightly better with 3.4%. (Note that this is a survey and not compiled on the basis of actual sales.) There are only a few full-time Classical or Jazz radio stations left in the US and most are on non-commercial public radio. WQXR in New York is a notable exception -- a commercial station (owned by the New York Times) that still plays Classical music full-time.

As far as the possiblities for DVD-Audio and SACD, remember that DVD-Audio is a 5.1 channel format. Whether the rear channels are used for ambience and hall reflections or to place the listener in the center of an orchestra, remixes of material originally recorded multitrack could be quite interesting.