There's certainly lots of press surrounding the new 'high quality' classical music download site, Passionato. They even appeared on BBC Radio 4's consumer affairs programme 'You and Yours' yesterday, getting some nice free publicity courtesy of the licence fee payer! Ignoring (for the moment) all the marketing speak and exaggerations when it comes to how unique and new this service is, on the surface it sounded ok. Maybe they were just being enthusiastic when they went on about how they were trailblazing high quality downloads, neglecting to mention excellent sites like Gimell, Linn and Chandos. (to be fair to the BBC, Gramophone's James Jolly did put them right here) And perhaps they genuinely didn't know how electronic music has for a number of years been sold online in higher quality formats than the fledgling classical sites. (on this point, sadly, they weren't put right)**Edit** As Jason pointed out in a comment, I failed to mention EClassical (and, by the way, the subscription site I use, Emusic). I'll post on their site soon!
**/Edit**
But I thought 'give them a go'. The real interest was that they offered major label recordings (in contrast to the nice site eclassical, for instance). Could this turn out to be online classical music selling which, unlike iTunes and the like, didn't look like a rip-off compared to buying CDs?
Hmmm.
I thought I'd start with a CD I purchased just recently from MDT - Thomas Quasthoff and Dorothea Röschmann's fantastic recording of Bach's 'dialogue' cantatas for bass and soprano. It set me back a very reasonable £10.50 (on special offer). If you go direct to the source, Deutsche Grammophon have been offering 320 kbps MP3 downloads for a while. They've got it priced at E11.99, which works out at the moment at about £9.70. Not too bad, although for an extra 80p I would rather have the CD. But pretty good compared to the full price, which is around £13 (Europadisc).
OK, so much for the status quo. What about the all-new revolutionary Passionato? Would I find it in 'lossless' format? Would I find it cheaper? Erm, would I find it at all? No. Either it's really hidden, or they just don't have it listed. So much for the 'availability of major labels' business.
But it's early days for them - maybe they just haven't got round to listing one of the best albums from last year.
Let's try some other things. As luck would have it, I've been messing about with Squidoo over the last day or so, experimenting with a page on JS Bach's cantatas. Part of this was intended to be a 'buyer's guide' to this music - so I thought I'd put Passionato to the test as part of this. I tried them out on two areas - multi-CD boxsets (surely much cheaper to distribute electronically than all that bulky cardboard and plastic) and budget CD recordings.
The boxset: Karl Richter's 4CD collection of cantatas for Advent and Christmas.
CD: Europadisc - £21.95; MDT - £18.25 (special offer)
Established download site: Deutsche Grammophon - E43.99 (£35.50 - ouch!)
The all new download site: Passionato - £31.99 - better, but still ouch!
The verdict - get it on CD and save almost £14 on Passionato's downloads...
The budget CD: John Eliot Gardiner's CD of cantatas BWV 140 and BWV 147
CD: Europadisc - £8.45; MDT - 6.95 (special offer)
Download 1: Deutsche Grammophon - E11.99 (£9.70)
Download 2: Universal - £7.90
Download 3: Passionato - £7.99
The verdict - it's CD again, £1 cheaper than Passionato at the offer price (these major label CDs are often on offer) - or just 50p more at its normal price. Universal Classics and Jazz (which presumably provide Passionato with their tracks) are 9p cheaper.
I decided on a different tack next. I'd really like to hear the latest CD of early Bach cantatas by the Purcell Quartet on Chandos. I could dip into my Emusic monthly downloads, but it's a lot of tracks. I could go direct to the Chandos website - but they've priced each CD of the double CD, which makes it pretty pricey. Here's the CD versus downloads comparison then:
CD: Europadisc - £9.95 (on offer - pretty good!); MDT - £11.75 (not bad...)
Download: Chandos. Lossless - £16 (eek!); MP3 - £16.80 (random!)
Would Passionato come riding to the rescue? No. They didn't have it.
OK, let's try Volume 2 (previously mentioned here!)
CD: Europadisc - £9.95 (on offer); MDT - £ 11.75
Download: Chandos. Lossless - £9.99; MP3 - £8.40
Download 2: Passionato. Lossless - £9.99; MP3 - 7.99
Finally - they're the best value! By 50p over Chandos, whose MP3 pricing does seem a little random at times. But it's not very impressive, in my opinion.
Which all leaves me wondering, what's the point of Passionato? Are they banking on people's naivety when it comes to shopping around for downloads? Or an assumption that downloads will automatically be better value than CDs? I do wonder if they're more style than substance, given the big marketing blitz. Their site hardly seems set up for the expert (or even the not-quite-expert in my case!) on first impressions, with half of their front page given over to 'crossover' artists...Could do better. Much better.
4 comments:
Sandy made some great points about Passionato. There's one other major player in the download classical music space that deserves mention: ClassicsOnline, the main online store for Naxos. In fact, on Monday we (I, in fact, do PR for ClassicsOnline), issued a news release announcing that ClassicsOnline had just launched its entire DRM-free catalog at 320 kbps. At 22,000 albums, this is the largest online collection at this high quality/speed. Here's a link to the release: http://www.classicsonline.com/Pressroom.aspx. Anyone registering before Dec. 31, 2008 (no credit card required) gets three free downloads, too. ClassicsOnline first launched in May 2007 and is a solid resource/performer.
Guilty as charged, Jason - the Naxos site did rather slip my mind! Maybe I should do a similar test of ClassicsOnline. ;-)
I have struggled a bit with the site in the past, in terms of its speed and being able to find things.
However, a quick glance just now looks more promising. Not least because I see that Saydisc has turned up there - I blogged about some of their great Christmas records last year and if I didn't have it already York Waits' fabby Old Christmas Return'd would be a snip at £7.99.
A proper post will follow on this in due course - if I can bear to see the moths flying out when I open my wallet!
Hello Sandy,
Thanks for checking out Passionato. We really appreciate feedback, positive and negative, which is why I wanted to drop you a line.
At Passionato we want to promote the widest possible range of content, covering a large number of major and independent labels, and as you rightly say, it's this that marks us out from the handful of other excellent sites offering 320kbps and lossless FLAC downloads. This is an exciting challenge, as I'm sure you can appreciate! At the moment, our repertoire covers a total of 36 labels, so we,re already - 2 months after launch - giving visitors an excellent chance to find a wide range of what they're looking for.
That said, we're continuing to expand and grow the range rapidly. We realise we're not there yet, which is why the 1st recording you mentioned (Quasthoff and Röschmann's Bach cantatas) isn't currently available. It is also worth mentioning though, that the 2nd recording you specified (early Bach cantatas by the Purcell Quartet) is available on Passionato, in both high-quality MP3 for £7.99 and lossless for £9.99 - Here - which again makes Passionato the best value out of the 4 places you reviewed against.
We're constantly improving the site and in the last 2 weeks we've added new much more detailed search functionality that makes it easier for people to find the exact recordings that they're looking for.
We're also constantly working to offer increased value for money, in addition to the on-demand convenience that downloads provide, compared with CDs. This includes a great offer we're already featuring on Naxos of 5 MP3 albums for £20, with over 3,000 titles to choose from. There'll be more offers over Christmas and you'll also find our daily deal offers excellent value for money and we invite anyone to take advantage of that. At the time of writing, it's a critically acclaimed Los Angeles Philharmonic recording for just £2.99.
Our team of dedicated classical experts update our home page every day to promote a mix of new releases, highly rated albums, specialist releases and well-known back catalogue.
If you haven't already seen it, we've also developed a dedicated classical music Player, a piece of free software that we've tailor made for classical music, which you can download on to your PC (for free) and use to manage all of your classical tracks (whether you've imported them from your existing CD collections, or downloaded them online). We've put a lot of effort into ensuring that our 'metadata' - ie the information that is stored for each track (such as artist name, work name, record label, producer, recording venue, date etc) - is the best around.
Finally, for everyone that registers for a free Passionato account, we are giving away 10 free downloads - no commitment and no credit card required.
I'd encourage you to keep checking the site for improvements.
We value your thoughts!
Thanks,
Rob Gotlieb
Director of Marketing & Business Development at Passionato
Thanks for your comments, Rob, although they are a little advert-y.
I'd be interested (if you're checking back here) to hear what you'd have to say on the whole boxset issue, where CDs can be obtained significantly cheaper than downloads. It seems strange to me that major label boxsets regularly turn up on CD at a very low price and on download at a relatively high price. I can't see how that adds up - but that's probably more a question for the major labels than the people selling their stuff.
One correction to what you said: if you look at the original post, I did point out you were the best value on Vol. 2 of the Purcell Quartet cantatas (by 50p over Chandos - although it has to be said, exactly the same as Classicsonline). It's the same for Vol. 1 - which is the release you linked to. I still can't find Vol. 3 on your site. :-)
My main disappointment with Passionato was really the comparison of back catalogue download material with the same recordings on CD, where there is quite a differential. But that seems more symptomatic of the marketplace than any one site. In that sense I'd have to say that Passionato is 'more of the same', rather than anything really new.
But I will check back - I'm always looking at all the different options for buying music, whether that's physical media or downloads.
All the best
Sandy
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