Naxos nixes CDs ‘to reduce carbon’
UncategorizedUK critics have been receiving personal variants on the following notice from Naxos:
Dear
Many thanks for your interest in the new Haydn series on Naxos. As a company, we have made the tough decision to move to digital only promo copies (unless they are of course, audiovisual products). We are very sorry if this impacts you; we very much value your reviews and efforts to listen to the new releases distributed by Naxos Music UK. However, the company is trying to reduce their carbon footprint and this change will make a significant difference to that.
It’s not about carbon, it’s about costs. Reviewers review more than just the music, but the packaging, the artwork, the booklet, etc. NAXOS is just being cheap as usual.
Either way, for the promo copies to make a sufficient proportion of the pressing for this to make a difference is in itself depressing.
I think it’s a bit more complex than Naxos “just being cheap.” For most classical releases, the number of physical CDs that are purchased has plummeted in recent years. A decade ago, selling 5,000 physical copies of a release wasn’t that hard to do, but today most classical titles sell fewer than 2,000 physical copies — often far fewer.
The “carbon footprint” nonsense is just an excuse, of course, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable for Naxos to drop promo distribution of several hundred CDs on releases that could easily end up selling just 1,000 copies (or even fewer). Some Naxos recordings are already being released as “download/streaming-only” products.
Naxos CDs sell in far greater quantities averaging over 10,000. It has a much larger distribution network and their price makes them more attractive to the average buyer. No doubt total sales per CD have dropped but the label always had much higher sales figures than the average on other labels.
The 10,000 average sales quantity figure you cite is years out of date.
All of them? I have no doubt Naxos’ Chopin recordings, their Mozarts, their Beethovens sell by the thousands. But their obscure, premiere recordings of forgotten composers and pieces? They sell over 10 000 too?
These obscure recordings are essential, and Naxos is doing valuable work in recording them. But I don’t think we should presume they become bestsellers just because Naxos has a good distribution network.
Please note my use of “average” and “averaging”. Is Albinoni obscure? The first Anthony Camden recording of six oboe concerti had sales of well over 200,000! Not recorded recently, for sure, but Naxos sales figures regularly AVERAGE vastly more than most releases by other companies.
What took them so long? Most other labels have long since moved away from giving out comp CDs to industry people and press. Usually, you can download a PDF of the booklet and even download the audio files (and burn a CD if you prefer the old technology).
I have found recently that new CDs from DG, Decca, and Sony are selling for lower princes than I I can remember. This includes high-profile releases (some double disc) from the classical superstars. The low prices may be a bad sign, but I’m buying while buying is good.
There are also a notable number of new and ‘classic’ classical releases on vinyl–not cheap, but they must be selling.
“… the company is trying to reduce their carbon footprint and this change will make a significant difference to that.”
Either their critic list is absurdly bloated or their sales-for-real-money results are absurdly shrunken.
Back when I was a busy CD reviewer (dinosaurs roamed the earth) the CDs received for review were often not the same as what would be sold to the public: a paper sleeve rather than a jewel box, a blank disc with Sharpie writing on it, and now and then, not even the liner notes. In one memorable case it was just a disc with no information as to the music (I knew what it was) or the artists or even the record label name! As a rule if what I received was the same as the full commercial release it was defaced in some way to discourage further sale or return (a hole drilled into the packaging for example).
Once when I mentioned to my editor that the amount paid for a review was pitifully tiny, he said he suspected most reviewers sold their review copies. I said any reviewer who did that should, according to the IRS, claim the value of the disc as income and I was not about to do that! There was actually a case of a book reviewer who gave the books he received to review to charity but then foolishly claimed a tax deduction for the value of the books. The IRS came down on him hard. I have saved, or given away to friends, or in just a few cases thrown into the trash, all the review copies I ever received and that was about 1000 discs at last count. So many Bruch Concerto No. 1s!
If it is only review and promotional copies that Naxos is no longer providing in physical form I suspect that saving the planet is the noble sounding explanation, but the real reason is to take those review copies out of the secondary market that cuts down on sales.
When CDs were new one thing we reviewers would sometimes have to comment on was the physical production — were there problems queing it up, were tracks not separated correctly, did it feature indexing (Denon was famous for that). Maybe those days are over and Naxos no longer feels the reviewer is put at a disadvantage by receiving a “virtual” review copy. In theory the sound could differ.
You’d have thought the IRS had much bigger fish to fry than said Book Reviewer. Then again, bigger fish are harder to fry, so they go for the lower hanging fruit.
The only surprise here is that it has taken so long for this change to take place.
Pfff…with all the internet servers glowing away world wide, the “hot air” produced by global human-migration madness, the net contribution to climate-change mitigation is simply not measurable.
I’d better buy up the remaining copies of my recordings for Naxos!
Naxos stopped sending physical copies to radio stations in the States some years ago, offering them downloads instead. For stations not playing music digitally, this is problematic. Artists and promotional folks with Naxos releases have taken to sending the CDs themselves. This is nothing new. It’s just Naxos putting lipstick on a pig.
The real question is: Why is such a notice to the media partners published here in this blog? When a record company decides to cut down costs and to switch over to a more efficient way to promote music, why should this be of any concern for readers/listeners? Could it be that an old-fashioned critic is offended by excluding him (or his colleagues) from a rather convenient food chain? It’s easy to pillory “the evil/greedy/stingy label”, it’s much more complex to understand, that the times in the music business have changed. A closer look at the sales numbers vs. digital numbers in the US and UK would (maybe) enlighten Mr. Lebrecht.
“You will own nothing and be happy”
– the World Economic Forum