Just in: DG teams up with Idagio streaming
mainpress release:
Deutsche Grammophon, the world’s oldest classical music label, and IDAGIO, a leading classical music streaming service available in over 70 countries, have today announced an extensive partnership agreement.
The IDAGIO catalogue, which already comprises more than half a million tracks, will now include the complete catalogues of Deutsche Grammophon, Decca, Philips Classics and all classical music productions released by the acclaimed Munich-based ECM label. Currently 15,000 tracks in lossless audio quality are being added to IDAGIO every week.
IDAGIO will feature custom created playlists curated by Deutsche Grammophon and its artists, and will be supported by additional marketing and promotional initiatives as part of the partnership.
So, when will this service be made available in the USA?
Hi! It’s Chiara from the IDAGIO team. We are planning a launch in the USA already this year. If you would like to be kept up to date about the progress in this matter, please click here (http://bit.ly/2BDtoTw) to add your email address to our contact list. We will let you know as soon as we have good news to share! We will also be posting updates also on our Facebook and Twitter pages.
https://www.facebook.com/idagioofficial/
https://twitter.com/idagio_official
Please don’t forget Canada. This new development sounds exciting to have access to the complete catalog. Looking forward to hearing good news for North America.
Great news. Thank you.
Hi! It’s Lukas from the IDAGIO team and we have pretty exciting news: IDAGIO is now available in the US and Canada! You can download our iOS, Android and Desktop applications on https://www.idagio.com/download or simply stream IDAGIO in your browser. Happy listening!
The charge: “€9.99, but may vary slightly depending on country and currency.” They don’t say whether you have to sign up for extended periods. Two week trial with CC.
Their spiel about supporting musicians, in its entirely:
“Our payments to artists and labels reflect your own listening activity down to the second. IDAGIO provides musicians with a platform tailor-made for classical music to connect with their fans and grow their audience.”
This vague and ungrammatical language suggests (to me anyway) low remittances and extensive data harvesting, plus it will be run through either iTunes or GooglePlay who’ll thus be in on it too, if you care about such things, for more better spam and targeted ads.
Hi! Chiara from IDAGIO again 🙂 IDAGIO is available as a monthly subscription. After your sign-up, you can enter a free 14-day trial which requires your payment details. If you cancel during this time, you won’t be charged – if you like the service and continue to use it, you will be billed on a monthly basis.
IDAGIO offers user-centric payouts. This is important because major streaming services pool their money and only offer payouts per play. This structure puts classical music at a disadvantage since classical pieces are mostly much longer than pop songs. By offering user-centric payment we can thus ensure to fairly pay artists and rights holders based on individual listening behaviour.
P.S: of course you can also use IDAGIO on the web via http://www.idagio.com or our desktop app for Mac!
I can’t make any sense of your 2nd paragraph. What does “user-centric” mean exactly? That the orchestra, say has access to the listener’s identity and email, either directly or through some intermediary? This other point — are you trying to say to say payment is based on listening time?
Why are your explanations so unclear? And just what exactly do you pay?
Chiara?
The price you pay as a user for your monthly subscription is constant, e.g. in Germany currently 9.99 EUR per month.
Happy to explain what our user centric payment model means. Normal streaming services count all the plays that users accumulated during a month, pool all the subscription money, and then distribute payments to artists and rightsholders.
Let’s imagine a service with two users. Jane and Rick. Rick listens only to 2 tracks by 2 artists during a month. Jane listens to 198 tracks by different artists. Their plays get pooled, their 20 euros gets pooled, and will be distributed to all the different artists.
This is unfair for two reasons:
1) We feel when a user listens to only one or two artists, their share of money should go towards those artists.
2) Classical music tends to have longer runtimes. The per-play payouts mean that short songs, more common in pop, benefit a lot more from that economy since they rack up more plays. We pay per second: if someone listens to music for an hour, artists get paid accordingly – whether that’s 3 tracks or 30.
I hope this clarifies everything.
We do not pass on payment information or information about listeners’ identities to our music partners. For more information on how we handle data, you may find our complete Privacy Policy here: https://about.idagio.com/privacy. We are also happy to assist with questions via contact@idagio.com
Not everything.
The FAQ mentions downloading for use off-line — does this subscription service work by streaming also or just downloading? How to you collect the off-line listening data? Does some app of yours call home when a subscriber goes on line? Does it require periodic on-line connection to keep functioning, like Adobe CS? Or does it require logging in to your site also?
And what percentage of a user’s fee is remitted to all providers?
Hi, this is Jess from Idagio. When we say “Our payments to artists and labels reflect your own listening activity down to the second,” we only mean that our payments are based on the amount of time users listen to music, as opposed to the number of times each track is played. “User-centric” only refers to our methods of calculating fees, not the data we collect. You can find our privacy policy here: http://about.idagio.com/privacy
Buxtehude – are you perhaps being a bit of a knob?
It’s a great service, one that should be welcomed by classical music lovers. It would be lovely if you could drop the sneering, patronising tone and show some support.
Oh, and since I believe Idagio originates from outside of the UK, could it be that English is not Chiara’s first language? Just a thought.
Many thanks, PB! My sentiments, exactly! And thank you Chiara & Jeff for your angelic patience and good replies! I subscribed to Idagio a few hours ago and find it wonderful! And I’m extremely picky with music and sound quality.
How does this work if one already pays apple’ iTunes Music? I read IDAGIO costs $9.99 per month however on the last paragraph it says <>
So.. as an already Apple iTunes subscriber I would only pay $.99 per month?
Please advise
I have sent two emails asking on this matter to your contact support I hope I’m not ignored through here
Thank You
Hi Melina, this is Lukas from the IDAGIO team. Thank you for your report and your emails, I have replied to them earlier. The monthly costs for IDAGIO are $9.99 no matter if you are already subscribed to another service like Apple Music.
Feel free to get in touch with us anytime on our support email address if you have any further questions or feedback.