It’s that time of year again. The Grammy Awards are all the talk of the business, and once again there is the yearly bellyaching about how the Classical Grammy awards aren’t shown on TV. Well……. who cares?
Here’s the rub – as I’m sure everyone noticed the sales of Classical CDs are down by a whopping 9.8% AGAIN last year. In case you missed it there’s an article in the Washington Post putting the whole thing into perspective. Essentially if you manage to sell 1,000 units of a Classical CD these days you’re going to be on the Billboard top 10 list. Why, then, should the Grammy Awards waste valuable TV time to focus on a whole genre who, between all the nominated CDs in the “Best of” category, probably sold less than 20,000 copies TOTAL?!
I lived in L.A. for three years and knew several people who voted for the Grammy Awards. The dirty little secret was that in the genres that they knew very little about these people generally voted for the names they recognized. So, yes, there’s a reason behind the incredible total that Sir Georg Solti racked up. Yes, many of those recordings are pretty darn amazing, and there are some incredibly worthy winners on that list. But there’s that dirty little secret – there were a lot of people who voted for Solti’s recordings simply because they recognized his name. The Recording Academy claims that voters are directed to vote only in their field of expertise but I believe that as much as I believe that there wasn’t a steroid problem in Major League Baseball in the ’90s.
Numerous other issues conspire to make the Classical Grammy Award essentially impotent. The insistence that people should pay attention to yet another cycle of Beethoven Symphonies, or yet another recording of Mahler 8, or the umpteenth recording of the Goldberg Variations doesn’t make sense. They all might be fantastic recordings but there are plenty of other fantastic recordings of the same music out there already. Technology has also become an issue. The Grammys nowadays are all about video content. Think of Beyoncé, the Black Eyed Peas, Eminem, Lady Gaga – it’s all about the visual and the video and there’s precious little that’s about music. Try to get an orchestra to do video, I dare you. Even if you manage to get the money, the union approval, and whatever else you need to get it done, how is it going to compete with Lady Gaga?
An interesting comparison can be made between the winner list of 1975 and this year. In ’75 Solti picked up 3 awards, two for a terrific recording of Symphonie Fantastique and one for a recording of Boheme that I don’t know. Alicia de Larrocha won for her recording of Iberia. All in all a banner year, but what really stands out is that the Classical recordings account for a full 15% of all the awards passed out that year. This year? Goodness, the Latin section alone is almost as big as the Classical section. Best Banda Album? Really? Best Tejano Album? You betcha. We now have Rap, World, Spoken, whatever you want. I’d be willing to bet good money that in every single one of those categories the winning album has sold more than the Classical Album of the year did.
Last but not least, all these award shows are basically irrelevant now because of the internet. The internet is the ultimate democratizing element and it has generally rendered the opinions of experts extraneous. Now there are blogs, Facebook, Wikipedia and related sites, etc. Anyone can, and does, have an instant worldwide audience for their opinion. That simply didn’t happen 35 years ago. People now vote with their wallets on iTunes, and I haven’t looked at a Grammy list for interesting new music in years. I can just surf the net or ask my Facebook friends.
I’m sure there are a host of other reasons I haven’t thought of for Grammy irrelevance but these are enough. Suffice it to say it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better. But before everyone starts another round of bellyaching about the Classical Grammy Awards not being on TV I suggest that we focus on getting music appreciation and music lessons back in the schools. If we do that there’s an off chance that, 20 years from now, there might possibly be enough interest in the Classical Grammy Awards for them to warrant a brief 2 minutes of TV time.
BREAKING UPDATE:
How irrelevant is music to the “music” industry? I have just learned that MTV has dropped the word “music” from their logo. Now the logo shows the various cast members of their reality shows. Goodbye music, hello “reality.”
We are currently waiting for determination of a funding grant for the string chamber music of a fine composer[1909-79], we [his students, and all who have actually performed his work]] feel that a wonderfully performed CD, well distributed to conservatories/ libraries will be optimal to ensure preservation of his legacy. Are we mistaken? The music has not been in print[ then by ACA] since the 60’s.
We have been advised not to even think about recording his most interesting orchestral music. We note the east europeans record most all contemporary work. Where is America?
What is the consensus about internet [pdf/mp3]publishing -long term? Would a MIDI be helpful or a hindrance?
SIR