Legal music downloads

Legal music downloads

Fancy carrying around the equivalent of 1,600 copies of Beethoven's ninth in your pocket? How about listening to Mahler's mammoth third symphony (at 95 minutes, the longest in the general repertoire) without having to change the CD part way through? Then digital music is your answer.

Thankfully, the days when a complete symphony took several hours to download are coming to an end. Broadband connections are already more common than dial-ups, and Ofcom predicts that by the end of 2005, 99.6 per cent of UK homes will have a high-speed option.

Moreover, the classical music audiophile's common complaint that music loses sound quality when transferred to MP3s is becoming increasingly unfounded. Half a dozen digital formats are now lossless, and many services offer CD-quality downloads as standard.

The reaction to all this has been a tenfold increase in legal downloads in the last year and, with classical music typically accounting for a healthy five per cent of these downloads, we have never been so eager to buy our music online.

Digital music may introduce new virtual problems (corrupt hard disk, for one) but means an end to scratched, misplaced or untidy CDs. With this centralised, organised system for your music collection in mind, we thought we'd try out some of the subscription and one-off-charge services currently available.

Virgin Digital

Price: £0.79 per track; between £6.00 and £9.00 per album. Subscriptions are
£9.99 a month for unlimited downloads, but rise to £14.99 if you wish to use a
portable device

Format: Virgin's own 128kbps format

Comments: Offering a free 30-second
sample of every track is helpful, but Virgin Digital requires not just a 4MB software download but also Windows XP to work at all. What's more, the 15MB iTunes-alike player only offers a Virgin-exclusive file format. The Music Insurance feature allows users to re-access music they have already purchased. Better than HMV for classical
music but still a long way to go in spite of the snazzy branding.
www.virgindigital.com

Napster

Price: £0.79 per track; albums from £7.95. Subscriptions £9.99 a month for unlimited downloads or £14.95 if you wish to use a portable device

Format: Rights-protected WMA (128kbps)

Comments: Formerly the bane of the music industry, Napster has now become its overpriced puppet. Annoyingly, subscribers can only listen to music while they are members, although Napster Light allows tracks to be purchased outright for an extra fee. Napster is only compatible with Windows 2000 and XP and offers a similar library to HMV and Virgin.
www.napster.co.uk

iTunes

Price: £0.79 per track, dropping to around £0.40 per track when purchasing a collection

Format: AAC (lossless - will only play on Apple software and portable devices)

Comments: Apple's trend-setting music shop offers an Amazon-style browser within its own music player. Featured artists, new releases, charts and regional composers complement iTunes' excellent Power Search, which is vital when searching the broad classical selection on offer. To listen to music from this store you have to use iTunes software, which gives Apple a cheeky exclusivity - although a Windows version is now available. Downloads are only portable on iPods.
www.itunes.co.uk

Magnatune

Price: Voluntary (£4.00 recommended for an album; 50 per cent goes directly to the artist)

Format: WAV, MP3, OGG, FLAC, AAC all available

Comments: Magnatune is an impressive contribution-based service prioritising classical music. Under a reassuring 'we are not evil' tagline, the site offers mainly pre-1800s works, though later works are also available. It includes detailed artist biography pages, and high quality artwork is available. Other great services include the option of having CD copies posted to you, in-depth download statistics and the opportunity to re-download something you've already paid for.
www.magnatune.com

MaxOpus

Price: £1.25 per track

Format: WMA (96kbps), MP3 (128kbps and 192kbps), AAC and M4A (150kbps)
or VBR (192kbps)

Comments: Is Sir Peter Maxwell Davies' direct approach to distribution a sign of things to come? Making a wide selection of his recordings available to purchase through his own site means the originator has complete control over what's available to the public. Downloads are offered in a variety of formats and a CD builder allows users to create their perfect mix of Max's music. An innovative and forward-thinking service.
music.maxopus.com

Wippit

Price: £0.99 per track or £50 per year for unlimited downloads

Format: WMA mainly, with around 10 per cent offered on MP3

Comments: Professional-looking Wippit has around a million tracks available, with
all classical artists listed on a single page. Search is accurate and displays results by track, album, artist or title. An advanced search offers useful year and label options
as well. Best Sellers lists the top five classical downloads but the site offers no extended charts.
www.wippit.com

HMV

Price: £0.79 per track; around £7.99 per album

Format: WMA only

Comments: HMV's recently-launched service suffers from the same incompatibility issues as Virgin Digital, ignoring a significant proportion of its potential market before it even gets going. The software itself is a slow and relatively unstable iTunes clone. Despite promising over a million potential downloads, HMV is not renowned for its classical section - the genre is the last to be listed.
www.hmv.co.uk/digital

Classical Archives

Price: $25 (£14.52) a year for up to 1,000 files per month

Format: Mostly MP3 (128kbps) but some WMA

Comments: Clearly not having invested much time or money in the site's design
and layout, Classical Archives prefers to rely instead on the sheer volume of
classical music it offers, as well as providing useful artist biographies.
Classical Archives' search and browse functions, primitive as they might be,
are also up to the job.
www.classicalarchives.com

eClassical

Price: $0.79 (46p) per track; $5.99 (£3.48) per album

Format: MP3 (192kbps)

Comments: Declaring itself the 'world's largest classical MP3 music store', Sweden's eClassical is one of the cheapest and best specialists around. Browse by title, composer, performer, conductor, instrument and orchestra or try out the site's search function.
A no-questions money back guarantee and weekly newsletter add value to the service.
www.eclassical.com

TOP TIPS

In the first half of 2005, UK, US, French and German citizens legally downloaded 180m tracks

The number of approved digital music download services has grown from 100 to 300 in the last year

Larger digital retailers such as iTunes, Napster, HMV and Virgin each offer between one and two million tracks for download

Compared to three per cent of physical music purchases, digital classical music downloads typically account for around five per cent of the market


British Phonographic Industry - www.bpi.co.uk
International Federation of the Phonographic Industry - www.ifpi.org
Promusic - www.pro-music.org/musiconline.htm

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