Starving amidst plenty

In my last post I wrote about the power of Tido to aid discovery. In this post I want to cast the net a little wider.

It’s a truism that in the developed world, we live in an age of plenty. More music recordings, scores, and certainly video materials are available to us than ever before. But, just as in big farming, industrialisation doesn’t necessarily equate to diversity. And, just as in big farming, an emphasis on productivity, size and scale can lead to some unintended but significant distortions in both provision and consumption.

The idea of a ‘canon’ of music – indeed, the idea of ‘classical’ music altogether – is an invention of the Renaissance. Before that time, music was always contemporary, enjoyed and forgotten. The concept of a revival, the same motivation which drove the creation of a new genre called opera which would reanimate ancient Greek theatre, has been with us ever since. And, of course, when seventeenth-century Florentines hypothesised about what Greek music theatre might have been like, they projected their own, contemporary, assumptions on to that particular Platonic cave wall. You could say the same about ‘authentic’ or ‘historically informed’ performance practice. Such ideological movements have always said more about us than about the objects we act on – and in this sense, ‘authenticity’ can only be claimed for what we currently are engaged in. I can’t tell you that J. S. Bach would have recognised the style of Emmanuelle Haïm more than von Karajan, for instance.

But I’m wandering off track! To come back to Tido, the digital universe offers everything…in principle. Abundance does not equal quality, although it includes quality. The benefit becomes, more and more, about curation and selection. Unfortunately, much of the music industry is driven by the ‘if you liked that, then you will LOVE this’ paradigm. Like a decrease in crop diversity, this farming of music has some serious and distorting consequences. Female composers continue to be neglected. Why? Because…well, female composers are not generally as well-known or as powerfully promoted as male composers. And so the cycle, without correction, will continue repeating itself indefinitely.

The same is true for ‘most popular’. You could die of thirst drinking only Bollinger champagne; sometimes you want water. But the relentless promotion of ‘more of the same’ means that we are surfeited on J. S. Bach. We don’t hear nearly enough Graupner, for instance. And even within the output of J. S. Bach, we don’t hear nearly enough of the neglected works. What about if, instead of ‘if you liked that, then you will LOVE this’, a platform could steer users in wilder directions? ‘If you liked that, then THIS will come as a complete shock to you’. Algorithmic recommendations can be built in infinite variety, so we could highlight ‘least listened’ as easily as ‘most popular’.

And what would the effect of all this be? It would be pretty much the journey I have been on, developing Tido. In the past few years, as Tido has taken shape, my listening habits have become wider than ever. The discoveries I have made reinforce my realisation that I have been dancing on the head of a pin, musically speaking. There is so much more great, neglected, diverse and sometimes bizarre music out there. The world is wide, and Tido is playing its part in opening doors. Not just to the well-loved, familiar rooms we know so well, but to corners we didn’t even know existed.

I want to share an important piece by Kathryn Knight, CEO of Tido, to conclude this post. I think you’ll find it very germane to the thoughts above!

Until next time

Tido Music as a discovery tool

At Tido, we are building more than an app, a digital sheet music reader, or a website; we are building an environment. We sometimes call it a platform, but whether it’s described as an environment, platform, or ecosystem, the idea is the same – we are creating a musical world in which you can live.

One of the surprising joys of using Tido Music myself is the voyages of exploration and discovery it is taking me on. I expected that I would use it as a professional tool, to find a work and practise it, leading to a performance. But the richness of audio, video and text we provide, alongside notation, have increasingly also led me into byways and serendipitous discoveries. Finding a new work, or a composer I haven’t formerly paid attention to, is one of the really wonderful things about the Tido Music experience. Because everything is there. I can click on a person and immediately hear their music, which might lead me further to other works or persons in turn. A very happy way to lose hours! At a deeper level, this is actually the kind of journey we all aspire to as musicians; we are all lifelong learners. And in a music industry which can often seem increasingly narrowed and commodified, a tool which enables journeys of discovery is a precious thing.

In a way, I see ‘wasting’ time–following a trail of breadcrumbs–as a valuable way to expand horizons. One of my close friends has started to dedicate time each morning to simply following links of interest online, leaping from lilypad to lilypad. And he tells me he’s learning some amazing things serendipitously that way! Time is always precious, but unstructured discovery can provide a welcome relief from the highly directed, goal-driven educational system many of us grew up in. Music–its discovery, practice, and performance–can be its own goal. It doesn’t always have to be in the pursuit of something else (marks, results, success). It can be play, in the deepest sense.

Recent additions to the Tido Music environment are excellent illustrations of this dynamism. (Click on the following titles to go straight to the things in Tido Music.) I have a pretty good idea about what Handel – 20 Favourite Pieces might contain. But Kuhlau is a name I haven’t heard spoken in decades, and to look at one of his Sonatinas, in the historic Peters edition engraving, is delightful.

I conduct Ravel’s Rhapsodie Espagnole often – but Liszt’s work of the same title is a complete revelation to me. I used to pride myself on my repertoire knowledge and recall. But what Tido Music is showing me is that, in my narrow world of performance and musicology, my knowledge was barely scratching the surface. The amount of forgotten, neglected or excluded music is many times the size of the tiny, so-called ‘canon’.

Four volumes of Scriabin’s piano music. A piece by Reger. And, just as a fillip, all four of Brahms’ Symphonies in the famous arrangements by Otto Singer, who also made the piano reductions of Wagner’s operas. All added to the Tido Music platform in the last few weeks. And our collection continues to grow like topsy.

This discovery journey will be a recurring theme of my blogs. I encourage you to embark on your own Tido-led voyage!

Until next time

A classical crescendo?

There’s some excitement in the music industry about the publication, by the BPI last week, of figures indicating a more-than-10% rise in classical music UK streaming and sales.

These figures, at first glance, look very heartening. Classical music is used to being the ugly sister in music streaming and sales, but the percentage rises–including a 6.9% rise in classical CD sales–indicate real confidence and growth. The most dramatic increase is in classical music streaming, up 42% year-on-year.

Dig a bit deeper, though, and the figures–although encouraging–must be seen in context. What the BPI doesn’t mention in its release, understandably enough, is that classical hasn’t represented even 5% of overall music consumption since the early 1990s. It managed to represent 6% of digital consumption in the early 2000s. Since then, its share of digital consumption has plummeted to 0.9% of overall digital consumption. And for reference, classical’s share of what remains of the CD market has also fallen, even though the majority of pop music is no longer released on any physical format.

If we analyse revenues on physical product, classical’s global share of physical revenues has been falling steadily since the early 90s. It is currently around 2%–and that is a generous figure. So a rise of 6.9% within that niche equates to a global increase of 0.014% in the marketplace. Not much cause to break out the champagne.

The question for all of us in the classical music industry must be:

If classical listeners are still so demanding of all the things which they are supposed to be demanding of (high audio quality, tangibility), why is classical’s physical market share falling?

And in more general terms, why and how has classical found itself in this ghetto? How has the culturally-dominant musical style of a century ago fallen so far from visibility, market share and relevance?

My life’s mission–and the driving force behind Tido’s vision–is to connect people with the richness of music in all its forms. And that certainly includes classical. I have been quoted as saying that my industry (the classical music industry) has done its best over the past century to alienate, patronise and exclude its own audience…an audience which was once its own but which it has now largely lost.

This is the elephant in the room – not noteworthy increases within a tiny ghettoised niche, but the collapse of relevance and connectedness to a larger audience.

Chaz Jenkins of Chartmetric has some trenchant observations on precisely this.

If classical wants to reach a massive new audience who are receptive and accessible, it should be focussing on marketing itself to new listeners in its established markets plus the fastest growing markets for streaming (South East Asia, LatAm).
Creating classical ghettos is simply a shortcut to irrelevance.
Chaz Jenkins, chartmetric.io

Tido views the world of music as one unified field. We don’t make hard borders between genres or styles, and our innovative search and discovery model will address the biggest perceived issue with classical streaming: its discoverability and relatedness.

Einaudi’s immense chart popularity reflects the strength of his engagement with audiences, in the way we all hope and need to. But when the BPI announces that he represents one in twelve of all classical streams, followed by film music and artists including Bocelli and Jenkins, it’s clear that the definition of ‘classical’ may be shifting from our understanding of what that has meant in the past.

And this for me is the biggest concern about the BPI’s press release. The positives it celebrates can be seen as insignificant in the much bigger global picture. What it frames as important is in danger of missing the horizon view.

Metaphors about the Titanic are overused. But in this case the classical music industry has not only lost the mother ship, its life-raft is far from shore with no immediate sign of rescuers.

Such isolation is what Tido seeks to address. The music industry has been seeing threats for so long that it can lose sight of the opportunities digital offers us. A connected world of music means more to us than product, new monetisation channels or a rescue package. It means a re-attachment to the essentials of music: a humane experience which provides life-long learning. Such learning–whether as a child, student, amateur or professional–enriches the context, usability and understanding of our musical universe. This is a universe without walls or hard borders, where the ‘lost child’ of classical music can re-connect with the audiences and interests of the larger world.

2018 in retrospect

Welcome to the Tido blog!

2018 has seen an enormous expansion on all fronts at Tido. As I start this regular blog, I want to give a special mention to our Tido content team, who power away processing content and making it available on the Tido platform.

Tido started with Piano Masterworks in 2016, releasing content from Edition Peters. This year we were delighted to welcome Bärenreiter to Tido, and we have a large and growing selection of Bärenreiter editions, including scholarly prefaces and critical commentaries. Trinity College London joined us as our first provider of vocal music; our vocal collections number more than 2500 pieces, with more added every day. Other major collaborators include Carl Fischer and Theodore Presser, the University of York Music Press, and Christopher Norton. We are populating the digital music landscape with the best quality content, always with the user and their needs in mind.

As I write this, Tido offers 6,000 pieces in a rich, rapidly-growing eco-system. We don’t want to transpose sheet music to digital; our ambition goes much further. Our purpose is to transform the experience of music, using digital tech to enable new connections. If you come to check us out, you will see how this works in practice.

Our new recording tool allows you to record and playback your own performances, as you use the sheet music within the app. Our pitch shift and pronunciation tools serve the needs of singers, enabling a faster and smoother learning journey. And our new looping tool gives you the power to analyse and repeat small blocks of audio and notation, at a speed and at a pitch you choose. If you’ve ever puzzled over the execution of an ornament, but haven’t been able to hear it slowly or clearly enough to understand it, this tool will be incredibly useful for you.

All of these tools come from one simple founding principle – that music is strongest when it is connected. Our experience of music is much richer when we experience notation, audio, vision and text as pathways into a work. Digital enables this in a way that paper never could. And to seize the potential of digital, we need to raise our sights higher than thinking about sheet music or audio in isolation. It’s only through connection that Tido achieves its purpose.

Many of those connections are human as much as technological: the expanding Tido brand is powered by ambassadorships, including Elin Manahan Thomas and VOCES8. Our newly active community of influencers, on Instagram and YouTube, are strong supporters of our mission and vision. The enthusiasm and excitement we meet in spreading the Tido word encourages us enormously.

Of course, we want to change the world. But we want to do it by standing on the shoulders of giants – the composers, performers and publishers whose traditions and urge to communicate we share.

Happy holidays! Until next time.