Venerable Classical-Music Magazine Plans to Add Online Sales to Its Re

[7/4]

May 1, 2008

Venerable Classical-Music Magazine Plans to Add Online Sales to Its Reviews

By DANIEL J. WAKIN

Gramophone — the leading classical music magazine in the world, 85 years old and based in London — plans to allow readers to buy CDs and downloads from its Web site. This means that it may profit from recordings on which it is passing critical judgment.

The plans are part of a broad expansion of Gramophone’s online presence. In the first phase, expected by the end of the summer, it will make its entire archive, including some 100,000 recording reviews and articles, available free.

By early next year the magazine’s editors and owner say, readers will be able to shop from the Web site. Gramophone will collect a commission on each sale, said Michael Heseltine, the chairman of its parent company, Haymarket Media Group. Haymarket, which owns about 100 magazines, has roughly $500 million in annual revenues.

The Gramophone move joins a tossed salad of schemes for the sale of classical music recordings, with everything now up in the air. CD sales have plummeted over the last decade, and the scramble is on to figure out how to match the download sales of pop music and rock, whose buyers tend to be younger and more computer-friendly.

Classical-music buyers may be experts dissatisfied with the haphazard way download services present performances or newcomers bewildered by the array of artists and interpretations.

Few knowledgeable salespeople remain because most of their stores have closed. Complaints about download services or big online retailers are common, whether because the wealth of information associated with classical recordings is poorly presented or because of clicks that can be heard between the sections of long works.

And a bewildering array of new sources of classical recordings have emerged. Opera houses and orchestras are offering downloads of their performances or creating their own CD labels. Even composers and performers have their own Web sites, with downloads available. The venerable Deutsche Grammophon label is offering downloads directly, including those of many out-of-print recordings.

Gramophone is stepping into the fray with what it calls a vast amount of data to guide buyers, both new and old. Web visitors can read about a performance, listen to a sample, then buy the work. “We complete the food chain,” said James Jolly, Gramophone’s editor in chief.

The major record companies — Gramophone’s advertisers — have shown keen interest in the project. “We’ve been in dialogue with them for a long time,” said Costa Pilavachi, the president of EMI Classics. “We see them as a partner.”

“There are really very few places where a well-informed classical consumer can go to buy a classical recording and feel at home on the site,” Mr. Pilavachi said.

Melanne Mueller, the senior vice president of Universal Music Classical, said that details had yet to be worked out on how it would sell music on Gramophone. “We welcome the development,” she said. Her division is the American marketing arm of Deutsche Grammophon, Decca and Philips.

The plans raise ethical concerns about the propriety of such an arrangement.

“It sounds like a classic conflict of interest,” said Victor S. Navasky, the former editor of The Nation who is now the director of the Delacorte Center for Magazine Journalism at Columbia University. “However there seem to be an infinite number of conflict of interests in cyberspace, and they are just beginning to be sorted out.”

Samir Husni, a journalism professor at the University of Mississippi and an expert on magazines, said he saw no ethical problem. “You have Gramophone the magazine, and you have Gramophone the store,” he said. The greater problem lies in magazines that do not make the distinction clear, he said.

Mr. Jolly and Lord Heseltine, a former British deputy prime minister, dismissed the notion that selling CDs would have any impact on the magazine’s editorial integrity.

“You can’t maintain the reputation of a magazine like Gramophone by producing phony reviews or misguiding reviews,” Lord Heseltine said. “It would damage the product irreversibly. Our first and foremost task is to tell the truth to readers.”

Mr. Jolly called Gramophone’s reviewers, who are freelancers, “very independent-minded people.” He said there was a “huge Chinese wall” between the magazine’s business and editorial sides, adding, “I can see the wall climbing higher.”

James Inverne, Gramophone’s editor and the man directly responsible for its content, said that an outside company would handle the music sales. He said that the executives responsible for Gramophone’s e-commerce business had little contact with editorial officials. The magazine’s editorial independence has been strong enough, he added, that some record companies have pulled advertising because of negative reviews.

Gramophone, a monthly, has a print circulation of about 40,000 copies worldwide, more than a third of them in the United States. About 87,000 people are registered on its Web site, which already offers access to reviews published since 1983, the dawn of the CD era. The magazine publishes about 180 reviews a month.

The expanded site will have more than 100,000 pages, which will boost Gramophone’s Google ranking and attract more hits, so more money can be charged for advertising, Mr. Jolly said. “That’s key to our strategy,” he added.

Edited May 1, 2008 by 7/4