The Death of Deep Catalog

Try to find a classical CD today. Forget the massive deletions, catalog retrenchment, and much-advertised downsizing of the classical music industry. Let's focus on titles theoretically in print and generally available domestically. A few days ago, I found myself listening to a new recording of symphonies by Niels Gade. As is my habit, in preparing the review I checked availability of the two reference cycles: Schonwandt on Da Capo, and Järvi on BIS. Da Capo listed its cycle as available. BIS never deletes anything as a matter of principle. Question answered, right? Wrong.

I decided to look a little bit further, then, to see just how easy it would be to purchase these recordings, assuming I decided to recommend them. Tower, Virgin, and HMV here in New York City purport to stock them, but didn't have a majority of discs in either cycle on hand. Amazon.com listed as available only a single disc in the Da Capo series, and the BIS cycle as an "import" with two discs available in 2-3 days, one unavailable, and another a "special order". Qualiton's website, which purportedly sells the BIS recording direct, wasn't working at the time I checked (though it is now). A colleague of mine, looking for the recent Reference Recording CD of Rachmaninov's Symphonic Dances was only able to find it at the Juilliard Book Store. Amazon.com listed it as 4-6 weeks delivery.

These are not terribly "exotic" titles. After all, Chandos' Gade cycle is the third available on CD, and the composer has more than 100 discs to his credit issued thus far. Reference Recordings is a major audiophile label with a highly distinguished catalog and a strong following among collectors. It's time we stopped pointing the finger of blame at record labels large and small for their lack of release policy sanity and look at an issue arguably even more important: the complete collapse of the retail distribution chain, and the death of the so-called "deep catalog" store.

There are many reasons for this phenomenon, the most significant of which is simply the fact that the classical catalog is so large that no brick and mortar store today can afford, either in terms of inventory cost or space available, to carry "everything", especially when they can only hope to sell one or two (if that) copies of most titles per year. Independent label distributors in the USA are sitting on mountains of returns of product foolishly thrust on Borders, Best Buy, Barnes and Noble, and other chains that had no business attempting to stock such depth of repertoire in the first place. Tower's "cutout" annex swims in catalog excess, with many titles still available and selling at full price just across the street! Over the past year distributors find themselves in the odd position of spending as much time not selling product (or selling "selectively" to a few outlets only), for fear of simply getting the stuff back a few months later.

Meanwhile, Amazon.com already has given up any pretense of selling a classical deep catalog. The list of titles showing "limited availability", "import", "special order", and "4-6 week availability" grows daily. Websites often list recordings as available, take an order, then leave purchasers hanging for weeks and months as they scramble to fulfill it. I've had a title on order at "4-6 week availability" from Amazon UK since June. Even HMV Japan, one of the most reliable of online sources for imports, can't actually get many titles that it lists for sale. And yet, the Internet really represents the only hope for serious classical music collectors, for if they can't buy the discs the old fashioned way, in stores, then where will they find them?

Specialty sites like England's MDT, Musica Bona in the Czech Republic, or H&B (hbdirect.com) here in the USA are attracting more and more customers because of the simple fact that they offer a decent standard of customer service and actually can deliver what they claim to sell. What a novel idea! As usual, the classical record industry has been agonizingly slow to wake up to this reality and attempt to sell direct along similar lines. A representative of a major label told me recently that they would not advertise their ability to sell direct to consumers (despite a huge investment in developing this online capacity) for fear of "undermining" retailers. When I pointed out that most of them don't stock their catalog with any pretense to completeness anyway, the result was a shrug and a suggestion to change the subject.

Independent label distributors, for example Qualiton and Albany, are just now starting to grapple with the need to sell direct to the public online. For the independent labels themselves, though, it's another story. Few have made a serious effort. One of them that has taken the internet plunge told me recently that the mere existence of his web-based direct sales program angers his distributor. And this same distributor claims that, despite the fact that they also sell direct, they don't want to undermine their retailers by reducing prices for their web customers, all the while acknowledging that any intelligent consumer understands that there's little reason to pay retail prices when buying from a wholesaler. And so, big surprise, these same intelligent consumers don't buy as much as they should, or as often as they might. And let's not even get into the issue of labels or distributors who claim to sell online, but whose websites are so dysfunctional and unreliable that it's a miracle anyone risks a purchase through them at all.

As the flood of new releases and reissues continues unabated, labels and distributors seem unwilling to acknowledge that the death of the deep catalog store, largely a product of their own stupidity in flooding the market with rafts of discs that no one wants, has thrust onto them a new responsibility: that of dealing with the public directly in place of retailers who can't or won't any longer. The ability of chain stores to suck up new releases and let them sit around in the bins practically forever has, up to now, insulated producers and distributors from the uncomfortable reality that the audience for their productions might be vanishing, small, or even nonexistent, particularly when they refuse to support their new releases with anything as radical as (gasp!) advertising. Add to this another unassailable fact: few if any classical labels, major or independent, have any experience, ability, or understanding of how to sell what they make, let alone the desire to do it. Yet do it they must, or die trying. And the Internet is the only place left for them to learn how. Let's hope they don't blow it. Again

David Hurwitz

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