Amazon Brings Bach Fans in From the Cold

By Bob Tedeschi

Classical music fans can be forgiven for feeling unwanted: Specialty retail chains and other independent music stores have been chased into oblivion by big-box retailers, which offer classical fans little other than Andrea Bocelli’s latest pop release or “Baby Einstein’s Lullaby Classics.”

According to Paco Underhill, chief executive of Envirosell, a New York-based retail consultancy, the closing of record stores like Tower Records has been “absolutely devastating for the classical music community. And the transition to online isn’t as natural as it might be for products with a younger customer base.”

So what store wants customers who can tell the difference among Beethoven’s symphonies or Bach’s chorales? Perhaps not surprisingly, Amazon.com does. The Internet’s catch-all merchant last week opened a classical music discount store – a move, analysts said, that could benefit the company handsomely, since classical fans actually buy, rather than steal, their music.

“Somebody’s got to serve this market, and this could be a great opportunity for Amazon,” said Russ Crupnick, an analyst with NPD Group, a research and consulting firm.

Amazon’s new classical music “Blowout” store complements its core classical music offering, which has been in place since 1998 and features about 100,000 titles. With 2,000 deeply discounted CDs and a small but growing number of audio tutorials, the Blowout store is meant to be an introductory service of sorts for those who wish to build classical music collections but are not willing to spend large sums on a genre they know little about.

“It’s an enticing way to try out something you might not otherwise want to take the risk to discover,” said Thomas May, Amazon.com’s senior music editor.

May said that Amazon’s classical music sales last year grew more than 22 percent, making it one of the fastest-growing music genres on the site. Amazon does not break out separate revenue figures. The Blowout store will seek to feed that trend by offering most titles at 30 percent off regular prices. The Blowout store’s tutorials are audio profiles of various artists, with examples from different CDs, lasting between five and 10 minutes. The site currently lists five profiles – studies of Handel, Vivaldi, lute music, the Nashville Symphony and violinist Julia Fischer – and May said more would appear each month.

Amazon’s initiative comes at a time when classical music sales are either advancing nicely or they are in a free fall, depending on whom you believe – and what you consider classical music.

According to Nielsen SoundScan, which uses industry data to track album sales, classical music sales jumped by 22.5 percent last year, after dropping by 15 percent in 2005. But SoundScan last year counted albums like Josh Groban’s “Awake,” Andrea Bocelli’s “Amore” and Il Divo’s “Ancora” as classical albums – classifications that would not sit well with the Wagner set. Combined, these performers’ crossover albums notched eight of the top 10 “classical” recordings last year, and 91 percent of the top 10′s sales.

Without these titles, the genre’s fortunes look much less rosy. NPD Group’s consumer survey data, which does not include albums like these in its classical music category, shows that classical sales dropped 28 percent last year, and 54 percent in the past five years.

Crupnick of NPD said Amazon’s new initiative “could at least slow down the decline.” He said that the Web site’s merchandising expertise would help it market the genre more effectively than many offline stores.

“Amazon knows that you’ve bought Shostakovich in the past, or browsed it,” he said. As a result, Crupnick said, the site could show customers messages about new releases or discounts or similar artists. (May, of Amazon, confirmed such an approach.) “Compared to other industries, the music industry is just starting to get the idea of how to bundle and cross-promote so customers feel like they’re getting something special,” Crupnick said.

Amazon will also probably suggest more mainstream music – and can do so knowing that these classical fans are much less likely than other groups to then click to a file-sharing site for illegal copies of the songs.

Amazon declined to speculate on the file-sharing proclivities of its customers, but Paul Foley, general manager of Universal Music’s Classical Group, which is among the biggest classical producers, said: “This is a definitely a demographic that retailers want. It’s just a matter of making it easy for them to shop.”

To that end, Foley said the Blowout store was a “very positive” initiative.

Foley, whose labels produce Bocelli’s records, among many others, said that Amazon was taking advantage of a soft spot in the retail market that might not exist for long. In the United States, in the wake of Tower Records’s closing last autumn, Foley said, retailers like Barnes & Noble, Borders, J&R and Virgin began building their classical music inventories, even if their selection is still weaker than Tower’s was.

Universal’s Classic Group is expanding its advertising efforts with these stores to make consumers aware that their offline shopping options did not die with Tower. But for many, Amazon is the only alternative.

Still, the online opportunity is large, Underhill said. Specifically, he said, Web sites could evolve with on-demand manufacturing capabilities. “It makes much more sense to store all the music digitally and manufacture it at the point of order than keeping it all in inventory,” Underhill said. “You could also print whatever supporting material you want, and not be limited by the liner notes of the traditional LP or CD.”

Amazon would not comment on such a prospect. Whether it is the result of Amazon or someone else, Underhill said he expected the change to happen. “Somebody will have to come up with some other model,” he said. “The appetite for this still exists.”

(c) 2007 International Herald Tribune. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.