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G Roald Smeets Classical Streaming’s Fitful Baby Steps

Posted by groaldsmeets on
Spotify Logo

Spotify Logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

¶ FOR innumerable music lovers in America, the world changed on July 14. That was the day that Spotify, a Swedish Internet music-streaming service founded in 2008 and eagerly adopted by millions of registered users in Europe, began operating in the United States after years of arduous negotiations with the big four major recording companies: Universal Music, Sony, Warner Brothers and EMI.

¶ The attraction of Spotify — and of other services like it, including Rdio, MOG and the rehabilitated Napster — is obvious. Imagine a well-designed, stable and legal resource that instantly makes available practically all the music you might ever hope to hear, and all you need to tap into it is a high-speed connection. Fire up the Spotify player, type in the name of an artist, album or song, and presto. Select a track and hit play: the music streams instantly. No downloading required.

¶ Sound quality, though not equivalent to a CD’s, is acceptable for casual listening if you use the company’s ad-supported free service, and considerably better if you opt for a premium subscription, which also enables you to use Spotify on smartphones. Assembling custom playlists and sharing them via social-media platforms like Facebook and Twitter is a breeze.

¶ But what if those bulging CD shelves and closets full of LPs from which you yearn to be unshackled are filled with symphonies, sonatas and operas? Will Spotify fulfill an aficionado’s fondest desires?

¶ Classical-music lovers have been conspicuously absent from the general hullaballoo that has greeted Spotify’s arrival on these shores — this despite an uncontestable cornucopia of classical recordings available through the service. I remember reading a post on Twitter from one Spotify visitor who called it quits almost immediately, declaring the company’s classical selection “Wal-Mart quality.”

¶ Untrue as that perception is, I can understand the frustration that must have sparked it. Finding classical music on Spotify is easy; finding a specific recording, on the other hand, can feel like anything but. As always seems to be the case, classical buffs have to work harder than pop-music fans to build and organize the virtual library of their dreams.

¶ The problem, as usual, comes down to data, specifically, metadata, the information that tells a computerized player what content the files on a compact disc contain and how to organize tracks you’ve downloaded from the Internet. When you pop a CD into your computer, your music player displays metadata associated with the files on the disc: usually the artist, the album title, the track titles, the date of issue and not much else.

¶ That’s straightforward enough when you’re dealing with pop music, where songs are the lingua franca. But as anyone who has ever browsed through classical recordings on the iTunes Music Store knows, it can be daunting to locate and compare specific recordings of common works like Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony or Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons.” And the results can be muddled; is the “artist” Beethoven, the orchestra, the conductor or some combination? As yet, no standard for classical metadata exists.

¶ Anyone can customize metadata; for those with no taste for the task, several companies have sprung up that offer to scrub and organize your personal collection of downloads for a fee. Some Internet retailers that specialize in classical music, like Ariama, a Web store owned and operated by Sony, have put a premium on refining metadata for their wares, making it blissfully easy to shop for recordings by searching for a composer, a soloist, an orchestra, a conductor, a musical style or a historical period.

¶ But like most of the business models that have arisen since music first started migrating to the Internet, Spotify and its competitors work from a pop-music mind-set, as do most of the record companies and distributors that provide it with music and metadata. The results are baffling searches and chaotic returns.

¶ When I was recently assigned to review a weekend of concerts at the Bard Music Festival, I decided to compile a Spotify playlist of pieces that I would be hearing that weekend. A search for “Sibelius,” the composer central to this year’s programming, brought up 10 recommended artists, two of whom appeared to be the composer in question. Others included “Sibelius Finlandia (Best Of),” the Jean Sibelius Quartet and Orval Carlos Sibelius, a quirky French alt-pop artist I’m glad to have discovered inadvertently. (Accidental discoveries are part of Spotify’s charm.)

¶ Clicking on “Jean Sibelius” yielded dozens of results. There were classic accounts of works conducted by Thomas Beecham and Eugene Ormandy; newer renditions featuring the conductors Osmo Vanska and Okko Kamu; copious anthologies with names like “100 Best Classical Masterpieces” and “Classical Love Collection”; and even a vintage recording of Leoncavallo’s opera “Pagliacci” featuring the tenor Jussi Bjorling, which included a couple of Sibelius songs as bonus tracks.

¶ Still, I was perplexed. Where were the great Sibelius recordings by Colin Davis? Surely so basic a staple of the recorded repertory couldn’t be absent from Spotify’s bounty. On a whim, I adjusted my search: “Sibelius Colin Davis.” Suddenly, Mr. Davis’s venerated Boston Symphony Orchestra cycle popped up, along with a few volumes from his later London Symphony Orchestra studio cycle.

¶ If you can resign yourself to the effort involved in rooting out the recordings you want — which isn’t so different from scouring through secondhand record stores looking for specific gems and finding unexpected treasures along the way — then Spotify quickly becomes addictive.

¶ One consistent source of fascination, at least for now, stems from Spotify’s being based in Europe, which means some recordings unavailable in America are readily accessible. A daring new Deutsche Grammophon CD of keyboard works by Bach and John Cage played by the young pianist Francesco Tristano Schlimé, as yet unscheduled for release here, is available for streaming. So is the conductor Myung-Whun Chung’s lovely new disc of Debussy and Ravel works performed by the Seoul Philharmonic for the same label.

¶ The social aspects of Spotify and similar services further enrich the user experience. Seeking diversion from work one recent evening, I quickly assembled a playlist featuring my favorite recordings of music by the English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, then sent out a link on Twitter. Within a few days, six other Spotify users had subscribed to my list, meaning that they clicked on a button to make my list part of their own virtual libraries. Not a large number, but it was enough to persuade me that a Michael Tippett playlist might also be welcome. (No takers so far.)

¶ Likewise, playlists assembled by other users have made me aware of recordings I didn’t even know existed. The day Spotify arrived in America, Tim Rutherford-Johnson, an English copy editor and new-music blogger, welcomed newcomers with a brilliant playlist devoted to contemporary-classical riches gleaned from Spotify, including an album of works by the Italian composer Fausto Romitelli promptly added to my to-purchase list.

¶ Wait, to purchase — as in, buying a CD? Well, yes. Along with the clear benefits of Spotify come a number of inescapable drawbacks. The biggest, and the one likeliest to cause ire among classical-music listeners, is Spotify’s lack of seamless playback, resulting in brief but audible gaps between tracks meant to flow together smoothly.

¶ Listening one recent afternoon to a riveting account of Wagner’s “Walküre” with the great tenor Jon Vickers, which I’d synced to my iPhone for offline listening in less than five minutes, those tiny gaps between the tracks repeatedly jolted me out of the unfolding drama. Until complete operas can stream without stuttering, cognoscenti likely will shun the service.

¶ A still greater drawback is the threat of an artist or record company withdrawing from Spotify altogether, as Brian Brandt, the owner of the contemporary-classical label Mode Records, mused about doing in an essay posted on the Webzine NewMusicBox. The royalty Mr. Brandt receives for each stream of a Mode recording — about one-third of a cent per stream, by his estimation — was insufficient compensation for the potential loss of CD sales that might result from having those recordings available for unlimited streaming.

¶ While artists and other labels have expressed the view that increased visibility on platforms like Spotify will bolster careers by promoting awareness, Mr. Brandt is not alone in voicing serious reservations. As owners of George Orwell’s novels on Kindle discovered one morning when those books disappeared because of a rights dispute, or as viewers who streamed the television series “Dexter” on Netflix learned when Showtime withdrew the series, there remains just one sure way to retain complete control over your personal collection: own it.

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