Every so often I see a comment to the effect that, believe it or not, we are too nice, and give too many recordings high ratings. It doesn’t happen often: at least not as often as we receive hate mail from fans of artists that we have panned. Nevertheless I was speaking to my colleagues about how the business has changed over the past twenty-odd years, and it occurred to me that while we all know why we do what we do, we seldom take the time to speak directly to our readers about this issue. It’s a case of not seeing the forest for the trees, perhaps. Caught up in the day-to-day issues of running a magazine you simply don’t stop to think about how your mission has evolved over time. So I would like to take a moment, step back, and take stock of what makes CD reviewing different today from what it was when I first started writing criticism in the early 1980s.
Back then, there were a few reputable review magazines that basically covered all important new releases. This was possible because the actual output of the entire industry numbered only a few dozen titles per month, including the small number of independent labels whose markets were purely local. International distribution was in its infancy, and domestic importers of foreign titles, by and large, did not expect to have product reviewed at all. They used direct mail-order, occasional specialist advertising, and most importantly, word of mouth in numerous small classical music record shops staffed by knowledgeable personnel. It stands to reason that in this kind of environment, the number of recordings receiving the highest ratings would be relatively small, since the number of releases was relatively small.
Six years ago this month (May 2005), when ClassicsToday.com had its first organizational meeting with our web designers and programmers, we were operating under a mandate to “review everything,” or at all events as much as possible. The internet seemed to promise what publishers of traditional magazines would die for: unlimited potential space with none of the additional physical costs (paper, layout, mailing) associated with the print medium. We launched in October 1999 with the intention of covering, at a minimum, seven new titles per day, 365 days per year, and in the run-up to our launch we had already “banked” in the database several hundred reviews just to get started. In fact we reviewed even more than the basic seven, especially in the early days, because we wanted to make sure that major catalog staples were covered as well. So we quietly wrote many pieces for the archives that never actually appeared on the home page of the site, but which would show up in readers’ searches. We still do this from time to time.
However, we soon realized that we had taken on an impossible mission. The number of new classical releases per month, then as now, numbers in the hundreds: probably 400-500 on average. The mix has also changed. Instead of new productions on major labels, much of the monthly crop now consists of reissues, archival series, pirates, limited editions, and vanity productions of all sorts. A great deal of this stuff is, quite frankly, junk, and the situation will only become even more complicated as digital downloading, certainly the wave of the future, takes hold and everyone in the world puts their entire catalog online, willy-nilly. It will be an enormous windfall for consumers and collectors, but an unholy, confusing, chaotic mess as well, one far worse than the already insane state of this glutted marketplace.
We further concluded that the “more is better” mission was not only impossible, but undesirable. Value is a function of scarcity. We found ourselves fending off vanity labels and artists who believed that just because they made a CD they were “entitled” to be reviewed, as if the principal work of critics is to provide free publicity to the record industry without limitation, rather than suggesting to music lovers what to buy and what to avoid. We also found it impossible, given the fact that we employ and (unlike many review publications) actually pay a professional staff of well-trained writers, to maintain what we regard as basic standards of good criticism. Reviewing “everything” would have been prohibitively costly for us, and entail a serious sacrifice in quality of results. There simply aren’t enough decent critics to go around. Beyond that, most recordings issued today are at least artistically competent, and it seemed crazy to us to offer a public already drowning in product gobs of reviews basically saying the same thing: “This performance is OK, and the sound is OK, so buy it if you feel like it.”
In short, it became clear to us that instead of attempting to review as much as humanly possible come what may, one of our principal missions was to act as a first line of defense between the industry and the public: to choose product selectively, and discuss recordings unusually worthy of attention whether as a result of the artists, repertoire, or the quality (good or bad) of the results. Practically speaking, this means covering most releases by major artists and major labels (defined as the traditional big corporations plus the important independents), interesting new repertoire not otherwise available, and noteworthy reissues of classic performances. Over and above this general philosophy, we decided that it was important to make sure that we described to our readers recordings that we believed to be excellent, even if this meant that the number of favorable reviews would be relatively large as a percentage of the monthly total.
Obviously there was some risk in taking this approach. Philosophically few would quarrel with the notion that it’s a healthy thing to celebrate excellence, but our perspective in picking the best recordings is very different from that of our readers. We know that as a percentage of the total, the number of highly rated recordings is still extremely small, perhaps even less than previously. On the other hand, gone is the time when collectors can read any review magazine and know that its contents represent the substantial majority of what the industry is producing. Furthermore, few labels and distributors attempt to offer directly to the public a convenient list of new releases on a regular basis, and many simply issue (and reissue) as much new product as possible with little if any consideration of its worthiness in the first instance.
Determining this has always been our job, naturally, but it has become even more important (and difficult) now that–whether they admit or not–all review publications are in exactly the same boat: limited to covering what is effectively the tip of an iceberg. Remarkably, when we cut back the number of titles reviewed per month from about 230 to the current 110-120, readership surged. This in turn reinforced some very basic principles of the marketplace that the public and the record industry would do well to keep in mind. The most important of these is that, as noted above, value resides in scarcity. It seems–we were gratified to discover–that the majority of readers were more interested in learning what recordings out of the huge total of new releases deserved their notice, than cared about what percentage of our monthly reviews received the highest ratings.
It was certainly easier for all of us when just a small handful of recordings of a given work were in print, and the number of new releases each month was limited. We knew then that most listeners had heard what was already available, and could afford to buy the majority of new releases if they so chose (whether we liked them or not). Everyone operated within the same parameters, making a real discourse possible between critics and collectors based on our shared listening experiences. Furthermore, the issue of a magazine’s credibility when viewed in (let’s face it) such simplistic terms as “quantity of praise as a percentage of the gross bulk of new releases” seldom arose because it was easier for readers to let their ears be the judge, rather than resorting to crude statistics.
Those days are gone for good, but the fact that we face different challenges doesn’t mean that things are worse. Not at all. Our mandate has simply changed. Where once review magazines passively reflected and commented on whatever product the industry chose to release, it now falls to us to take a much more active role in separating the wheat from the chaff, selecting those recordings–both the good and the bad–that we believe deserve your attention, and giving special consideration to those we find to be excellent. We hope that you will continue to join us in this sometimes daunting, but always fascinating and rewarding exploration of what looks likely to become an infinitely expanding classical universe.
David Hurwitz
