Downloading. Maybe you’ve heard of it? Few music-related subjects have generated as much discussion in recent years. Most of that discussion has been about two things: declining CD sales, and thorny questions of intellectual property rights and ownership. There are lots of smaller story lines, too: the growing ubiquity of ear buds in public spaces, the increasing commoditization of music as it is leveraged to sell gadgets and services, the triumph of the “little guy,” who can now afford to distribute his/her/their music online for little or no cost, etc.

But there is less discussion about the actual use of downloaded music, or the role it plays in the lives of those who access it, largely because those things haven’t changed very much — at least not yet. Music has been portable for several generations now (someone out there still has a Sony Walkman™ or a boom box in the closet…admit it); changes on that front are largely of degree. Young people have been trading pirated, copied, mixed, and altered recordings since the advent of the tape deck (don’t tell me I’m the only one who copied his best friend’s older brother’s copy of Doug E. Fresh’s “The Show/La-di-da-di” back in the day…); and regardless of format, mainstream music consumers are still hungry primarily for the newest releases by the most popular artists — the very things served up readily by download services.

Classical music stands, at best, on the periphery of these discussions. It has very modest market clout commercially, at least in the U.S. (estimates place the European market share for classical music much higher), and its primary fan base, which is slightly older, is behind the digital revolution curve. It certainly has its devoted band of tech-savvy stalwarts, but they aren’t moving commercial mountains yet. To make matters worse, classical CD sales had already decreased to modest levels before the market as a whole began to decline rapidly, a fact which some seized upon as signaling the death of the art form.

But the nay-sayers were overlooking the obvious, which is that mainstream classical music revolves around a core repertory of only a few thousand compositions (though there are, of course, hundreds of thousands more, with more being written every day), and that any given classical music fan has interest in only some portion of that music, and that once they’ve acquired it in whatever format sounds the best, and by whatever artists they prefer, they stop buying (or at least slow down). There were explosions of interest in classical recordings after each major shift in recording technology (e.g. mono to stereo, LP to CD, etc.). In each case, classical recording fans rushed to replace their collections because the new formats sounded better, or, in the case of the LP to CD move, took up way less shelf space and were more portable.

The digital revolution presents no such improvement, and so it’s no surprise that there has been no explosion of classical buying (in fact, until one can replicate the experience of actually “being there,” there is unlikely to be such an explosion ever again). Digital file formats make music sound worse rather than better because of compression, and portability isn’t a strong selling point because classical music, with its extremes and fluctuations of volume, long time spans, and lack of rhythmic regularity, doesn’t suit the noisy environments in which that kind of listening takes place — the car, the subway, the gym, etc. And, buying classical music online isn’t currently as cheap as it could be, so even the savings aren’t spectacular. For the average classical listener, sitting at home with the CD player is still as good as it gets as far as recordings are concerned.

Or is it?

There are indeed opportunities in digitized classical music waiting to be exploited, but doing it will require taking stock of how digital delivery and formats can be useful to classical fans, rather than just offering them as an alternative to traditional recordings. The traditional approach will always work on a small scale, appealing to the segment of the classical market that consumes according to the “Big Artist X and their Big Album Y” paradigm, but it has limited potential for growth.

What if one could, right now, access every single recording Maria Callas ever made, or every recording of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 ever released, and stream them to one’s computer to compare without spending much money? Answer: one would be doing that right now instead of writing about it.

What if there were essentially no classical recordings that an interested listener couldn’t find online, easily and at low cost? And information about it, to boot.

What if live concerts, the true lifeblood of classical music (recordings are what we put up with because we can’t always be there), were routinely podcasted and made available, unedited and affordably, to everyone who couldn’t be there in person? Classical fans would clamor to keep up with their favorite artists (”how did she do last night?”), and to check out new performers and music they weren’t already familiar with. Every big debut, and every new work would be available to anyone on the planet with interest in a matter of hours or days with minimal expense. The vast majority of major concerts are recorded for archival purposes already — the progression to the global concert hall could happen, and the unavoidable compromises in sound quality would be offset by the newsworthiness of the content. The best thing is that it wouldn’t diminish the appetite for live performing at all — in fact it would likely stoke greater interest.

Anyone with doubts about the above should consider the BBC’s 2005 downloading experiment, in which they offered an entire week of Beethoven symphony concerts for free on the web. Expectations were reportedly a modest 50,000 downloads. The actual number was well over a million! (reportedly 1.2 million) That’s more than 2,000% above projections, for those keeping score at home. What caused the sensation? Was it Beethoven’s music? Somewhat — he was no slouch, after all. And certainly the “f” word (did they say “free?!?”) played a big part — everyone likes something free…or hopefully just cheap. But possibly most important was the sense of occasion — the opportunity to participate in a “happening” in the music world. The classical concert scene feeds, even depends, on a sense of occasion — why not continue to translate that to the digital experience?

In other words, making the most of classical music in cyberspace is going to take some creative thinking, and an almost complete shift away from the traditional music retail structure in which products are front and center. What we classical listeners need, first and foremost, is cheap, easy access to the things we can’t get at home (or afford to own), or can’t get out to see in person. Whoever does it first, and well, may very well strike gold.