All of Naxos's catalog is now on eMusic
Naxos Records has joined with the digital music service eMusic to make its entire catalog available for downloading by eMusic subscribers -- about 4,500 CDs and 75,000 tracks of classical music. Selected Naxos titles have already been available for download on other services, including iTunes, and will remain available there. The new agreement with eMusic also supplements Naxos's two prior electronic distribution systems, whichthe label runs itself: the Naxos Music Library and Naxos Web Radio.
From the Music Library, subscribing institutions can stream any Naxos title, and the company hopes to make this service available to individual subscribers in the future. Naxos Web Radio streams 72 channels of music programmed by genre for an annual fee of $9.99 (FM quality) or $29.95 (near-CD quality).
Founded 18 years ago as a modest budget label, Naxos has grown into a dominating presence in the classical marketplace. Several Naxos artists have sold millions of records, far more than some celebrity artists on other labels.
According to NaxosUSA's chief operating officer, Jim Selby, ''The bulk of our activity is still on the production and sale of CDs, but the company is also placing a huge global emphasis on the digital delivery of music. When a new site is launched, we want to be there with Naxos." Apparently the only other major classical label that has made its entire catalog available for download so far is Chandos, in England.
Subscribers to eMusic pay $9.99 a month, for which they are entitled to download 40 tracks of their choosing. Novice classical customers need to be wary, however. A popular piece such as Bach's ''Goldberg" Variations, for example, runs to 32 tracks, using up most of a month's allowance. On the other hand, symphonies by Bruckner or Mahler become a bargain, because a 30-minute track costs the same as a track that lasts less than two minutes.
The eMusic search functions are sometimes peculiar (composers are alphabetized by their first names, for example) and can turn up strange or incomplete results. For example, Naxos's brand-new version of John Adams's pop-song opera ''I was looking at the ceiling and then I saw the sky," the first complete recording of this genre-hopping stage work, is available on eMusic. But if you want to know who's in the cast, you will have to look elsewhere. The conductor's name is supplied, but it is reversed; Klaus Simon is listed as Simon Klaus.
Selby is not particularly worried about glitches of this kind. ''We are still in the early days," he says. ''Most of the digital music services were developed for pop and rock music, and it is difficult to jam the different requirements of classical music into their browsers and search functions. These things can be fixed. . . . What is great about this development is that eMusic has taken a serious interest in the presentation of this kind of music."
Like Chandos, Naxos may launch its own downloading service. ''But we don't want to be proprietary and fool ourselves into believing that ours is the only mode of delivery," Selby says. ''We want to work with all the new venues for getting the music out. We don't know what is going to stick -- nobody does -- but presenting classical music in a meaningful way to classical consumers in the digital market is coming. It's actually happening now."
