I meant to blog about this before: it turns out classical music downloads represent a much higher percentage of iTunes sales* than internet downloads generally or record sales. This should be fantastic news for classical music enthusiasts, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if Tyler Cowen is right that "many people don't want classical music to succeed on the Internet." There is, after all, this weird elitist bunker mentality, this feeling of impending gloom that has professionals self-consciously parodying themselves and their audiences.
A friend once told me that music always lags behind the other arts. She was referring to the careers of various modern and postmodern -isms, but with any luck it will apply to the ability to adapt to new technological contexts as well. Fixating on one's musical place seems a bit silly when society's whole media orientation and structure is transforming around us.
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*I can think of two likely confounding effects here. The first is that it's much harder to find a selection of classical music (as opposed to any popular music) in the world of illegal downloads. Trust me, it is. The second is that classical music listeners may be disproportionately iPod/iTunes/Macintosh users. My guess is that neither of these effects would change the numbers that much, but who knows? Of course, it's a good thing if classical listeners are more honest, if only because it makes them easier to track (and respond to).
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