I am 21, a classical music lover and have been for about 6 years now. I can still remember the first ever classical CD I bought; it was Shostakovich's Symphony no. 5 with Festive Overture on it, too. It's recorded by the Philharmonia Orchestra with Vladimir Ashkenazy holding the baton. It has always remained as one of my favourite ever recordings, perhaps purely because it was the first I bought. For the couple of years after this, I continued to buy a few CD's, namely a number of box sets that were extremely good value on Amazon. Obviously as I was only 16-17, I didn't have a great deal of money so these purchases were very limited.
For the past 4 years, though, I have almost only used online streaming to listen to classical music. I currently use Spotify, and pay £9.99/month. I chose this particular deal because it offers me unlimited use of their entire catalogue of music; this consists of over 30 million songs, with 20,000 new songs added each day. An extremely impressive catalogue, I'm sure you will agree, which was one of the reasons for choosing this service over others.
There is a wide array of different recordings of classical pieces, which makes finding something very easy. The difficulty, however, is finding a specific recording; this provides a bit of a problem when looking for a recording by a certain conductor, for example. An issue with having so many different recordings, though, is the difference in quality between some. With Spotify not being a dedicated classical music service, some recordings that creep on to their catalogue are slightly below par. Although search results are listed in popularity, it is sometimes difficult to find a really good recording without having previous knowledge of the orchestra or conductor to look for.
The overriding factor that becomes clear when describing streaming services is the simplicity of the system. At the click of a button I could have thousands of recordings of Bach's toccata and fugue in D minor at my fingertips. This, I feel, is what really sets it apart from the diminishing collection of CDs available. A sad moment for classical CD collections in shops was the closure of HMV's Oxford Street store. There, one could go into a large, dedicated room full of classical CDs, away from the other genres; Although something of the past, this was quite unique. Not only is there such a huge selection of recordings available online, there are now services such as Qobuz which offer recordings at better quality than a CD can offer. It is unsurprising, therefore, that more and more people are moving into the online cloud.
With this in mind, are we seeing the start of a long road to the end of CDs? In the classical genre, many people have there own personal favourite recordings, all extremely specific and sometimes very rare; will there ever be a time when an online catalogue has every recording in existence? A very high number of classical music lovers still have huge collections of CDs, which may spark memories of past performances or concerts; it is not clear whether an online collection could offer the same. I will still continue to use an online streaming service, but will also buy CDs. The satisfaction of a box set of the entire collection of Tchaikovsky's orchestral works is still too much to resist.
Happy New Year from everyone at Southern Sinfonia, you can find out what we have planned for 2015 by visiting our website. You can also contact us through Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
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