Radio Today reports that Classic FM in the UK has launched a new website with the claim that it will become the “world’s biggest online classical music destination.”
I went to the site here, and got a screen saying they only have rights to air in the UK.
This is not the first time I’ve heard that an online station was going to dominate the world. When NPR dropped most of its own original classical music programming and gathered a coalition of stations to contribute content to NPRmusic.org, they said it was going to be the premiere online radio station for music. Maybe it is; I’m not sure. But there’s not much classical on it. Some contributing stations note that NPR takes their content for free and then gets most of the credit for it.
WQXR on-demand and Q2 are big online destinations and they air some live content and some adventurous programming. KING-FM claims to be the first major online streamer and one of the biggest with generic content from CDs. Classical New England is trying to gain market share, with some good live content though mixed production values. Every station in the country is streaming and claiming a “global” audience.
Then there are the fantastic offerings from BBC 3 and the German and French online stations with lots of live performances — actually some of the most amazing live performances I’ve heard anywhere. And besides radio stations that are streaming, lots of musical organizations have music online. The NY Phil and Chicago Symphony have streaming radio programs on their websites.
There are more than 40,000 radio stations online. I don’t know how many of them are classical, but let’s just say you have lots and lots of choices. Color me cynical, but even if online listening picks up at 10% a year, it’s still niche listening with lots of competition. It’s too early in the game to be boasting about being the largest online classical destination in the world.
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While the number of classical radio stations streaming is very large most of these stations stream with poor sound quality. This is directly related to the stream bit rate although the method of coding (MP3, HE-AAC etc.) and the care taken in processing the audio sent to the coder will also change the sound quality. I do not understand why people will listen to the poor sound most classical stations produce. Most smart phones have CD quality electronics and when attached to good headphones the coding artifacts will be more apparent then on speakers.
Classical music creates many more artifacts than rock with the dynamic range limited to 3dB. I think the kids, who do not listen to over the air radio, may naturally move away from classical streaming because the degraded sound makes the listening experience so unpleasant.
Note the artifacts that low bit rate streaming produce are very different from what one hears from a bad recoding made before the advent of tape. Those recordings will have noise, restricted bandwidth, and distortion that is harmonically related to the music. You can hear past these degradations after a few minutes. The digital artifacts are not harmonically related and never can be ignored.
David Rich