By reaching a landmark agreement that allows American symphony orchestras to distribute live and recorded music on the Internet, 66 leading orchestras have seized control of their product — and, in a larger sense, their destinies — at a time when the ailing classical recording industry has virtually turned its back on them.
If the prospect of downloading bytes of Brahms, or catching a concert of “streaming Stravinsky,” over the Internet sounds weird right now, just wait. Given the current pace of technological evolution, that day promises to dawn a lot sooner than you may suppose.
In a rare case of an 18th Century institution sprinting ahead of the technological curve, these symphony, opera and ballet orchestras, including the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, recently struck an agreement with the musicians union that clears the way for these institutions to deliver classical music via the Internet. It is the first labor agreement that specifically governs compensation to orchestral musicians for the dissemination of their performances — audio, not video — in cyberspace.
Management and musicians are expected to vote in mid-July on the pact, which was hammered out over the past year by a committee of 28 musicians, managers, union representatives and electronic media specialists calling itself the Electronic Media Forum.
Under the tentative agreement announced June 13, orchestras would make two kinds of performances available on the Internet: live concerts of “streaming audio” — performances that cannot be stored by listeners — and prerecorded audio files listeners can download. There would be a national Internet oversight committee of musicians and managers to keep abreast of technological developments, while a local committee from each orchestra would decide what concerts to put on-line and for how long, and whether to present them as live Webcasts or as on-line recordings.
Rather than being paid upfront for their recording work, as is the case with traditional commercial recording, musicians would receive little or no payment for Internet work right away in exchange for a larger share of the revenues later on. The pact calls for orchestra musicians to receive a minimum one-time payment equal to 6 percent of their minimum weekly scale. For a player in Tampa’s Florida Orchestra, for example, that would amount to $30.63. For a musician in the CSO, whose minimum annual salary is $88,400, the payment would be roughly $102.
From the managements’ perspective, “This whole agreement was not driven by the idea that this is a major new revenue source, but how can you use this to sell tickets and raise money to keep subscribers loyal,” according to Robert Levine, principal viola of the Milwaukee Symphony, who chairs the International Conference of Symphony Orchestra Musicians.
“We want to find ways to use this new Internet technology to generate new audiences and keep our institution alive,” added Florence Nelson, director of symphonic services for the American Federation of Musicians, which negotiated on behalf of its union members.
If the pact is approved by rank-and-file members of the AFM before the July 12 deadline, the contract will be retroactive to February and run to Jan. 31, 2002. The agreement is structured to leave orchestras leeway to respond individually to rapid changes in the world of e-commerce, said Philadelphia Orchestra president Joseph Kluger, who represented the interests of orchestra managers in the talks.
“I think it is a major step,” he said. “This not only allows us to license material to commercial entities, but it actually encourages institutions to become more entrepreneurial in finding ways to distribute their music without the middleman, so that more of whatever economic value there may be is retained by the institutions and the musicians who created the product.”
Henry Fogel, president of the Chicago Symphony Association, offered a more guarded prognosis. “I don’t believe that this [agreement] is going to lead to a flood of activity in the very near future,” he said.
“What it does is give us a basis from which to explore possibilities. A good deal of research needs to be done as to the possibilities for using the Internet in this manner. What market is there now? What market can be developed? How can we develop it?”
But, in fact, orchestras like Fogel’s already are beginning to forge relationships with Internet companies. Even as negotiations for the national agreement were progressing, the CSO was huddling with Diamond Technology Partners, a Chicago consulting firm that helps businesses forge an Internet presence.
Although orchestra officials said they were not at liberty to announce whether a deal has been struck, Electronic Media Forum member Vanessa Moss, a CSO vice president of operations, has said any agreement between the orchestra and Diamond Technology would include music downloads as well as the distribution of educational materials.
The historic Internet agreement comes at a time when the classical recording industry, faced with sluggish sales and, with few exceptions, no longer willing to pay the steep freight of domestic recording, is undergoing a major retrenchment. Costly projects are being jettisoned and artists’ contracts canceled, while several leading U.S. orchestras, notably the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Philadelphia Orchestra, have been marooned without any label affiliation.
The proposed agreement represents, in part, the first-ever concerted move by American orchestras to free themselves from economic dependence on big European-based recording conglomerates, whose only allegiance now is to the bottom line.
Although the agreement would not replace currently held contracts, such as the CSO’s ongoing relationships with the Teldec and DG labels, it could dramatically change the ways in which orchestras approach recording and the audio image they convey to the public.
Instead of licensing their music exclusively to record companies, orchestras and musicians would retain the right to distribute it through the Internet. In recent years, the St. Louis Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra and New York Philharmonic have taken to making their own recordings and selling them by mail or over the Web. The new national agreement enables them to carry that kind of initiative one step further.
It also will mean these orchestras eventually could release performances of more adventuresome repertory and more unusual artistic collaborations than are possible under the fierce constraints of commercial recording. And consumers likely would be able to download these recordings for a fee significantly lower than the $17.98 or $18.98 it costs to buy a full-price classical CD in stores like Tower or Virgin Megastore.
Still, there are technological hurdles to be overcome if orchestras are to deliver their aural product to on-line listeners with anything close to the speed and efficiency with which an Internet music company like Napster can deliver a hit song by ‘N Sync to millions of freeloading on-line users.
Nobody has conducted any major demographic studies to determine how large a public there is for classical music on the Internet; most estimates put the figure at a modest 3 or 4 percent of Web crawlers. Of that number, relatively few are equipped with the high-speed Internet access that would enable them to download an entire Puccini opera or a Beethoven symphony.
At present, a user equipped with a standard 56K modem on a conventional phone line must wait a frustrating eight hours to download an hour of music encoded as MP3 files; at that rate, it would require a whole day to download an opera. And most computer loudspeakers deliver a puny sound compared to the high-end stereo equipment most serious classical fans own.
That’s why many administrators predict that most orchestras at first will offer their music for streaming, free to the consumer, perhaps charging advertisers to run spots on the orchestras’ Web sites or on other sites that offer their performances.
A Luddite would say that the sweeping Internet agreement is another station of the cross in our mad rush to embrace a Glenn Gouldian future of live classical music as electronic “property.” The late, eccentric Canadian pianist, you will recall, gave up concertizing in the mid-’60s because he was convinced that the advance of recording technology had rendered the recital and concert medium an anachronism.
Gould, who died in 1982, surely would have been eager to explore the brave new world of possibilities for musical dissemination that technology can and will bring us. Indeed, I suspect nothing would have pleased him more than being given the honor of playing the first global-Webcast piano recital — spliced together beforehand in a recording studio, to be sure.
Further, those with a taste for irony might wonder if, by making it easier for classical fans to download live or recorded orchestral music, orchestras are simply hastening the decline of attendance in the very concert halls where that music originates. Are they running the risk of slighting a loyal existing public in their attempts to woo an as-yet-conjectural public on the Web?
An optimist would answer such questions with the reminder that the Internet has handed U.S. orchestras an invaluable blueprint for survival in the 21st Century. Not a moment too soon, either, given the ticklish problems many orchestras are facing at the moment, such as replacing graying, shrinking audiences and shoring up eroded support bases.
Many orchestras have had to take up the slack now that music education has been eliminated or cut back in public schools. Thanks to the Net, these institutions now have the means to take center stage as a force for music appreciation among the young people who will become tomorrow’s classical music public, providing teachers and students with live performances and other learning tools.
Techno-sociologists keep talking of “convergence” — that time in the not-so-distant electronic future when the Internet, television and other media will merge into one big communications/entertainment machine. When that day arrives, symphony orchestras will be on board.
Said Tom Morris, executive director of the Cleveland Orchestra and a member of the committee that drafted the first-ever national agreement, “We believe the Internet is going to be the means of classical music distribution in the future, and we want to be at the front of the train.”
