An account of the decline and fall of classical records

A reader has sent us an editorial from Fanfare magazine, a publication that we have exposed in the past for having too close a commercial relationship between advertising and reviews. Despite our misgivings, the article below contains some significant home truths for surviving periodicals in the music industry.

Is Fanfare Now the Magazine for Serious Musicians?

An editorial by Joel Flegler

Once upon a time…

In the 1970s the two most prominent classical LP review magazines in the US were High Fidelity and Stereo Review. Not only did both depend on equipment manufacturers for most of their advertising support, but also both magazines were publishing an average of only 30 reviews in every issue. Because I was buying a lot of notable recordings that weren’t covered by those magazines, I reasoned that a classical music magazine that would cover hundreds of new releases in every issue would work if it were supported by the record industry, and I published the first issue of Fanfare in the fall of 1977. Within only a few years it got enough subscriber and ad support to enable me to quit my day job and work full time on the magazine. Six years after that first issue, CD coverage began to dominate the magazine, which was sold in hundreds of stores and which continued its upward growth. Until the …

In a word: Internet. During the first years of this century, I noticed with dismay a decline in ad support, as well as subscriptions and store sales. Now I admit I was slow to connect the dots to the Internet, but when the marketing manager at a major distributor of classical CDs told me that Fanfare had become “obsolete,” I quickly got a Web site going; and when I was given the opportunity by Peter and Celeste Stokely to add an Archive to the site, I grabbed it. However …

Store sales not only continued to plummet, but also the largest retailer of classical CD sales in the country, Tower Records, went under, and many other retail outlets followed in its quicksand, affecting Fanfare’s circulation. Plus, most of the labels and distributors that had supported Fanfare for years did a vanishing act. One executive at a top label told me that he was divorcing the magazine because readers couldn’t get “a quick fix” on his new releases. Fanfare’s lead time was – and still is – about four months, which means that it usually takes that much time for a review to appear after a CD is released. (This same executive told me recently that the average number of sales for a classical CD in the US is between 100 and 150 copies, with most of those sales coming with the first few months of its release date.) Advertising support declined so much that in 2009, the average issue of Fanfare was barely 300 pages, with fewer than 20 ads in each issue. The worst result was that I couldn’t afford to publish reviews of all the CDs I wanted to assign. But …

One day in 2009 I came up with an idea that I’d never tried before, at least in its current format. If most labels were indifferent to Fanfare’s survival, I’d offer musicians exposure in the magazine that no other publication was providing. I thus decided to bypass the labels and instead approach musicians directly and aggressively with a concept that came to be known as “the interview proposal”: an in-depth interview, a review of the artist’s CD attached to the feature, and a major ad in two consecutive issues. (If you’re shocked, keep this in mind: In the first 10 years of the magazine, I was contacted by hundreds of publicists, all of whom wanted their artists to be interviewed in Fanfare, and it was only by usually making ad support an integral part of the package that I was able to keep the publicists at bay. That, plus the fact that the support enabled me to publish more reviews!) I quickly drafted the interview proposal and sent it to dozens of musicians who had new releases, but to my disappointment nothing happened for a few weeks. Finally, I got a positive response, then another, and things started to build. But there were unanticipated repercussions, as …

I quickly realized that I couldn’t contact many artists directly, usually because they didn’t have Web sites, so instead I contacted their labels and requested their musicians’ e-mail addresses.

Most labels wouldn’t cooperate, with many ignoring my requests as soon as they realized what my “scheme” (as it was referred to by one) was; and two major labels (Avie and Hyperion), which had been supporting Fanfare for years, stopped advertising permanently as a result of the proposals. I’ll never forget the conversation I had with Mike Spring, then the marketing head of Hyperion, when he told me that the label disapproved of my directly contacting their artists and thus wouldn’t advertise in the magazine anymore. When I failed to convince him that having an artist accept the proposal could only benefit sales of his label’s CDs (which was the same thing I told Melanne Mueller at Avie), I then stated that I thought that what most of the slick magazines were doing with their pervasive awards was far more reprehensible than anything I was doing with the proposals, but Mike wasn’t moved by that argument, either. (Am I the only one who thinks that most classical magazine awards are shameful, possibly even more spurious and ludicrous than most movie awards?) Many musicians also told me off, saying that they were offended by my asking them to pay for ads, reviews, interviews, etc. But before you also hasten to prejudge, listen to this…

The majority, the vast majority, of CDs that are produced are funded by the musicians and not by their labels. That’s right: Odds are that the CD you just bought wouldn’t exist if the main artist on the CD hadn’t paid for it to be made at a cost of several thousands of dollars to him or her personally. And are you also aware that the majority of the labels that release classical CDs do absolutely nothing to promote them? Check the ads not only at Fanfare but also at all of the other magazines, and you’ll see that hardly any advertising is being done for hundreds of new CDs that are released monthly.

In 2006 OC Register publicly ran a private message that I had sent a musician about advertising his CD and being interviewed and reviewed. I urge readers to read the various posts that were published there, and then to go to Norman Lebrecht’s Slipped Disc site and read the numerous posts about the magazine’s interview proposal, which Lebrecht exposed in 2011. Most of the posts were antagonistic and written by people who had never been Fanfare subscribers, and many displayed a total ignorance of the classical record and publishing businesses, too, but, thankfully, there were also several posts in my defense. Some who were offended by the non-separation of editorial and advertising concluded that the reviews here weren’t honest or objective, but apparently none of those irate commentators were aware that many musicians accept proposals after reviews have been submitted by the reviewers. In other words, when a critic submits a review of a CD that impresses him, I often attach it to the proposal when I send the details to the artist. As for the proposals that are sent prior to the CDs being assigned, I think that the least I can do that’s fair to an artist who accepts the interview proposal is to try to get a critic who appreciates his music. After all, would I dream of sending a new Bruckner CD to a critic who dislikes Bruckner? No, but this same policy also applies to artists who want to work with the magazine, especially if they’re composers.

Recently I added something significant to the proposal: a mini of the artist’s CD or, occasionally, another medium on the cover of the issue in which he’s interviewed. This costs nothing extra, but it’s definitely an incentive toward accepting the proposal. But, you may wonder, why should musicians support the proposals when they know that the sales of their CDs might not significantly increase, not to mention the fact that in many cases the sales go directly to their labels and not the musicians? There are actually many reasons for the exposure: e.g., publicity for their sites, concerts, etc.; recognition (that’s one of the big ones); resumes (especially if they’re college professors); and the possibility that the reviews and interviews will lead to commissions.

If, after you’ve read everything, including all those posts at OC Register and, especially, Slipped Disc, you appreciate the fact that the proposals accepted by musicians and authors in the past five years have enabled me to publish issues with far more reviews than were published in the previous five years, there’s one and only one thing that I would like you to do now and in the future: Take the time to read the interviews and their attached reviews in every issue, and, if you have any interest at all in the CDs or books or DVDs or whatever’s being covered, consider buying them. While I’ll always be grateful to the labels that are still supporting Fanfare, some of which have been loyal to the magazine for decades, and while I’m confident that you look at the ads and reviews of their CDs and that they influence your decisions as to what to buy, I hope that you’ll now make it a specific point to peruse the many articles that are being published in every issue. The treasures that you’re looking for in every issue’s reviews can also be found in its features, which not only often highlight special recordings but also provide information about the artists that you won’t find in liner notes, that will enhance your enjoyment of their recordings.

And finally …

Although Fanfare will always be the magazine for serious collectors, it also has now become the magazine for serious musicians. What this publication is providing for musicians and vice versa is unparalleled in the history of publishing, certainly from the standpoint of quantity, but this two-way street would never have succeeded were it not for the unusually high quality of the literate and perceptive interviews and accompanying reviews. And although performers and composers will never get an award at Fanfare, the rewards they get might be more valuable in the long playing….