The year 2023 will really not have been ordinary in classical music and, by broadening perspectives, in music. Three new online listening platforms have radically changed the choice and habits in this mode of consumption for music lovers. In addition, two of the largest independent publishers, Hyperion and Bis, have been sold. This is just the tip of a complex iceberg.
The big breakthrough for classical music in 2023 was to be the arrival of a dedicated online listening service from Apple, Apple Classical, launched at the end of March. This launch followed the acquisition, in August 2021, of Primephonic, one of the two services of streaming created around the idea that the databases feeding the most common services (Spotify, Amazon, Tidal, etc.), designed for pop music around the musician-song-album articulation, were unsuitable to effectively contain the necessary information regarding composers, multiple performers and movements within a symphony, leading to limitations in referencing and searching.
Three actors
Idagio, launched in 2015, and Primephonic, born in the fold of Pentatone, were promoted on their interface and their database “classic” reliable. Idagio survived. Primephonic was acquired by Apple, which took almost two years to reformat a service included in the Apple Music ecosystem, available only through applications for phones and tablets.
The surprise of 2023, especially here in Quebec, was that in a few weeks, the entire landscape changed, since the long-awaited arrival of Qobuz, the high sound quality listening platform, suddenly materialized in mid- April, while Presto, the UK online music seller specializing in classical and jazz, launched its listening service in March, also in high resolution.
Two scenarios here. Qobuz took the place and customer file of QUB musique, which ceased its activities in February, and it remains fed by the “traditional” database. Presto already had the perfect database, since by selling records and sound files, all it took was a gateway to play them.
What Presto adds is, just like Idagio, a “user centric” remuneration of artists, paid according to what people actually consume and the time they spend there, whereas in the “market centric” logic » used elsewhere, an hour-long symphony occupying 100 musicians is “worth” a 2-minute song.
Individual experiences
What lessons can be learned after more than six months of monitoring these new players? The main lesson is that no journalist can make a definitive or general judgment, because listening modes are now individual.
In the past, a sound reproduction product was judged against music lovers sitting on a sofa facing two speakers. The challenge was the “high fidelity” of this reproduction. It’s not at all the same thing today, depending on whether you stream by your hi-fi system (Apple is useless and Qobuz, linked to the Audirvana program, a treat), by an amplifier which imposes an integrated service on you, that you control the music by your telephone (Apple regains points) or that you consume ambient music via a Bluesound, Roon or Sonos type system. For example, Presto has just integrated the “BluOS” universe of Bluesound and is at least on par with Qobuz, for those who are thus equipped.
The plague in classics is when the reading is not done gapless, that is, when artificial whites are instilled between the ranges. Impossible to listen to a Rite of Spring or a Alpine Symphony in these conditions. Disillusionment targeted Apple at the beginning, and even Qobuz again recently, in certain listening conditions on this point. It is important that this type of information related to the experience goes back to journalists, because no one can anymore verify or manage all the listening configurations.
The bottom line is that the arrival of Qobuz came at the perfect time, while Tidal was losing its feathers and its supposed sound advantages (MQA system) and Presto seems to be adopting an eloquent maxim read on a bottle of wine: “Done with grapes, love and no bullshit “.
Almost a contrario, because made above all with a lot of money and a lot of bla-bla, classic Apple remains effective for those who need to be guided in their choices. But Apple had to stand out through partnerships and exclusivity. And there, apart from a few initial sparks, we saw nothing coming, apart from high-sounding but hollow press releases. Thus the “partnership with the Salzburg Festival” did not materialize by the provision of concerts, but by the creation of a playlist of back catalog records made in Salzburg, available for a long time and everywhere else .
Acquisitions
Apple reserved another surprise for the classical world by acquiring Bis, a label which had just celebrated its 50th anniversary. Interestingly, the giant that owns a label, Platoon, has not communicated on this subject and we therefore know neither the why nor the how of this acquisition.
This is not the first mystery. There are, in this universe, a number of unknowns. This is the role of billionaire patron Gordon P. Getty, composer and son of an oil tycoon. Getty had financed the Primephonic adventure. His name is mentioned in all press releases related to the launch of Apple Classic. But no question of Duty as to his role received no response.
The same silence was met with when we sought to know who is at the helm of the University of San Francisco’s surprising post-pandemic control of artist agencies and other musical players. It will be noted, however, that the goals declared by David Stull, president of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, at Duty are the same as those who conclude an article in honor of Getty, great patron of the University, published on December 15, 2023 on the usfca website.edu.
Will the pieces of the puzzle — and which puzzle, composed by which entity — come together in 2024, 2025 or 2026? The American west coast will face Universal, which has acquired Hyperion and is taking a position at Pias (owner of Harmonia Mundi). The absorption of Hyperion by Universal quickly enabled accessibility in streaming titles from this catalog, including recordings by Marc-André Hamelin and Angela Hewitt.
Artists or shareholders?
But the universe of streaming undergoes a nagging upheaval which threatens musicians in general and classical music in turn. A change in remuneration was decided by Spotify at the end of November. The leader in on-demand listening, whose shares have soared 148% this year, under the guise of tackling “artificial listening”, is establishing a minimum number of listenings giving the right to remuneration (1000, initially time). The platform has put in place various systems that will generate “around a billion dollars in additional revenue” over the next five years that the platform claims to target “emerging and professional artists”.
This design convinces financiers more than artists. On December 18, in his excellent professional blog @music_zone, Philippe Astor reported a study by the company Duetti, specialized in the repurchase of musical rights from independent artists and in the optimization of their monetization on music platforms. streaming and social networks.
The conclusion, in this study carried out on independent Anglo-American artists, writes Astor, is that “despite the increase in subscription prices (by Apple and Amazon in 2022; Spotify and YouTube in 2023), their average income per “listening is displayed downwards”. On average, all platforms and territories combined, 1000 plays generated $2.95 in royalties in 2023, compared to $3.00 in 2022 and $3.27 in 2021.
$2.95
“Spotify, which accounts for 55% of the income of independent English and American artists from the streaming, according to Duetti — compared to 21% for Apple Music, 16% for YouTube Music and 4% for Amazon — is due to its weight the main responsible for this decline,” we read. At Apple Music, 1000 plays today bring in $6.4 (compared to $6 in 2021). Spotify, at $2.4 (compared to $3 in 2021), now pays as little as YouTube (stable at $2.3).
If we were looking, classically, for the usefulness and legitimacy of having Idagio, Presto, Apple or Qobuz in the ecosystem, the answer is obvious.