BSO launches its own music download service
After waiting on the sidelines as other orchestras leapt online, the Boston Symphony Orchestra launched a download service yesterday that will allow customers to buy new and historical recordings through the organization's website, www.bso.org.
The service made immediately available 179 previously released tracks by the BSO, Boston Pops, Boston Symphony Chamber Players, and the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra. But listeners must wait until February for a recording created under the baton of music director James Levine. Four albums of Levine-led material will be available, two on CD, two digitally, though this week the BSO would only reveal one of the pieces to be included, the 2007 performance of Ravel's "Daphnis and Chloe."
"I'm certainly very excited to hear these recordings," said Alex Ross, The New Yorker's classical music critic. "It's one of the great, notable music directorships in the business. There are certainly much lesser partnerships that have been documented. This has been a missing piece of the puzzle."
Like all orchestras, the BSO has struggled to find a suitable solution to the collapse of the traditional record industry. Its most recent recording deal expired five years ago. In recent years, the BSO has not released new CDs, the lone exception being a one-off deal with Nonesuch to put out 2006's "Neruda Songs," a collaboration with Peter Lieberson and Lorraine Hunt Lieberson.
Other orchestras have moved faster to create download options. The New York Philharmonic, for example, launched its own service in 2006, and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra followed suit early in 2007. The BSO said it needed more time because it wanted to create a system that could operate without signing on with an outside distributor. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra, for example, uses an outside company to place downloads on iTunes, Amazon.com, and Rhapsody.
Deborah F. Rutter, president of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, said the orchestra still sells far more self-produced CDs than downloads. A recording of Mahler's Symphony No. 3, for example, has sold 14,000 discs and 1,600 full downloads since its release in early 2007.
Kim Noltemy, the BSO's marketing director, said the organization has been disappointed with its experience making downloads available through other sites. She predicted it could do better allowing customers to buy direct.
"We've been on iTunes and all of the other sites for ages, and we hardly realize any revenue from that," she said. "This is an opportunity to get more of the revenue share. And the customer can actually connect the concert experience with what we have available for digital downloads."
The BSO noted it is the first orchestra to offer downloads in both MP3, the most commonly used online format, and in HD Surround, a higher quality format compatible only with PCs. The first compresses music so that it does not sound as full as a CD; the other is meant to create a fuller, richer sound. MP3 downloads will cost $8.99 an album and HD Surround albums will be $12.99 each. The BSO will also sell individual tracks as downloads, with varying prices.
Rich Bradway, the BSO's associate director of e-commerce and new media, imagines a time, not far off, when a concert-goer could attend a performance and then, within 48 hours, download it from a home computer.
"We still do things with record companies - 'Neruda Songs' is a good example - but the thing is, if we want to try and start putting out recordings of live performances, we have all the technology in-house now," said Bradway. "Now that we have the e-commerce side of it, it completes the circle."
The BSO's format choices did leave one audiophile scratching his head.
Andrew Rose, the sound engineer whose French company Pristine Audio specializes in old classical records, said he would have preferred the orchestra make it possible to download recordings in a quality that's better than MP3 and not as hard to use as HD Surround. Pristine Audio, for example, uses the FLAC format, which can easily be converted to CDs and for iPods.
"They're at the two extremes of the spectrum for downloads," said Rose. "It's a bit like going into a car show and being offered a steam train or a space shuttle when you want to buy a car."
Geoff Edgers can be reached at gedgers@globe.com. 