From: sesquipedality	Date: May 23rd, 2008 12:53 pm (UTC)		(Link)

The nice thing about this is that they're paying professional artists to do the recordings, so it's effective creating work for professional musicians that wasn't there previously.

Consider the analogy with the software industry. The emergence of Linux hasn't stopped Microsoft and Adobe and Sun from being able to make money out of selling software. Obviously the two aren't directly comparable, but music is our cultural heritage. I'm uncomfortable with restricting that.

Recording quality has been fantastic since the mid to late 80s. If the availability of cheaper recordings was going to adversely affect sales of classical music, everyone would already be buying Naxos, and no new music would be being recorded. I see this as being about bringing classical music to a wider audience, some of whom will be a potential market for your future professional recordings, and some of whom, you'd never have reached anyway. On the whole, I think that such things are a positive influence for performers, who are by and large exploited by the record labels anyway. By changing the models by which we monetarise music, we are putting the power back in the hands of the creators.

Of course, inskauldrak and I have this argument from time to time. He works for the Musicians' Union and has very different opinions from me on it.