Strange but true - Norman Lebrecht talks some sense

According to the BBC, Radio 3 broadcasts around 16,000 individual works in a given year, around half of which are live or specially recorded. What's more, the station is the largest commissioner of new classical music in the world. All, of course, paid for by our licence fees. So why isn't any of it available for download?

As Norman Lebrecht explains in his column today (and do read the whole thing for the detailed background), it's all down to vested interests. The record companies don't want the competition, the BBC don't want to make enemies. And as Norman not too cryptically puts it - and he should know -"during the downloads war, there was evidence of split loyalties within Broadcasting House."

So the BBC have ruled that classical music should be excluded from downloads. It's perhaps not as Norman thinks "the biggest capitulation to empty threats by a major power since Neville Chamberlain gave Czechoslovakia to Hitler", but it's certainly a daft and misguided ban.

For classical music aficionados, it's all about the individual performance. Amazon UK lists 320 different recordings of Brahms's symphonies. Each of them, no doubt, has their admirers. If you want the Karajan version, you're not going to settle for the Bernstein, and if you're deep-pocketed you may own both and more. Amazon's bestsellers are not even the cheapest versions. So it's hard to believe a free download from the BBC Symphony Orchestra would wipe out EMI's sales. To allay any genuine concerns about direct competition, all that is needed is to restrict downloads to BBC-generated material and exclude broadcasts of commercially-available recordings.

And what about newcomers to classical music? They're not likely to buy anything unless they've heard a version first. There's ample evidence from the distant planet of Pop that free downloads actually stimulate sales, not reduce them. They certainly stimulate interest - the BBC themselves note that a quarter of people in the UK who downloaded the BBC Philharmonic’s Beethoven performances in 2005 (after which the ban was slapped down) had never listened to Radio 3 before, whilst two-thirds had never downloaded classical music before.

Not all of us are able to listen to Radio 3 programmes at the time they're broadcast. Nor can we always stream the recordings during the following week when some of them are available online (that's if we can find them at all in the confusing muddle of Radio 3's online playlists). Downloads that can be transferred to Ipod are the ideal solution for existing fans and newcomers alike.

So let's see some return for our licence fee. And let's see a concrete commitment to spread the arts, one that amounts to more than the BBC's usual empty promises.

Norman optimistically suggests that the BBC Trust members who could vote to lift the ban are "reasonable men and women with a fine sense of public duty. They are susceptible to polite argument and responsive to opinion". Hmmm. But anyway, you can write to them at [email protected]. I shall.

Comments

[Richard Carter]

Actually, it's easy enough to download material from the BBC website in the week following a broadcast: just stream it, and use recording software (iRecordMusic for the Mac, other easily obtainable programmes for PCs) and import the result into iTunes and thence into your iPod or whatever. This process doesn't give particularly hi fi recordings, but they're perfectly listenable to. Just don't tell the BBC that that's what you're doing; me? I'd never do that....

[inter mezzo]

Thanks. That surely reinforces the argument to make downloads available legally. It demonstrates that the BBC's current policy is tempting you (and many others) into criminal activity in order to access the material which you, the licence payer, have already financed. Utterly crazy.