Those old enough to remember the days of the major high-street music retailers will recall that the classical and jazz section used to be housed in their own special room, deep inside the belly of the store. Now, it seems, classical releases are being tucked away in their own hermetically sealed bubble on streaming services.
Violinist Maxim Vengerov will be making his new releases exclusive to classical streaming specialist service Idagio. As part of the deal he has also been named as an Idagio Ambassador.
The first release under the new exclusive deal is Vengerov’s performance of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France and conducted by Myung-Whun Chung. A second exclusive album (a performance from Carnegie Hall) landed on 4th February while a recording of his performance at the Albert Hall in London will follow in June.
Idagio is promising to put its full promotional weight behind the albums and says that more ambassadors will be signed up this year (although it is not clear if they will also be trading exclusives as part of the deal).
It is interesting that the streaming exclusive should resurface now within a genre that has a number of specialist DSPs – not just Idagio but also Primephonic and Naxos Music Library. For genres like pop, rock and hip-hop, the DSP exclusive for new studio albums was a short-lived thing, especially when streaming data started to count towards the charts and the DSPs felt that live performances, sessions and video content were more workable on an exclusive level.
Despite a general decline in the market, classical is still a genre that skews towards the physical. Indeed, CDs made up 59.8% of the classical album market in the UK in 2018 according to BPI numbers. As such, streaming was only 25.2% of the market that year and perhaps the feeling is that, for now, confining an album to one DSP won’t upset the chart apple cart too much. When streaming eventually holds the balance, we’ll see just how keen classical labels and acts are to play the exclusive game.
