[Nereffid]

I see no evidence from the release schedules of the many record labels I buy from that there's been a significant change in recent times. I still can't keep up with the new releases I want.

What are you basing your idea on?

 

[Nereffid]

The classical music recording industry is certainly on its last legs, for some quite obvious reasons. Here's a recent article that suggests why new recordings may be rare.

http://slippedisc.com/2015/04/classical-record-sales-just-keep-on-falling/

The industry is also being hurt by the ongoing change in the way people listen to music. CM accounted for 2.8% of albums and album downloads in 2013, but only 0.5% of digital streams.

Something to bear in mind is that we have two independent pieces of information here. First, the best-selling classical album in the US has less than 400 sales in a week. Second, 2.8% of album sales are classical.
Of course we can't just combine the two facts and conclude that fewer than 15,000 albums of all genres are sold in the US each week! The figure is in fact closer to 4 million. So divide that by 2.8% and you get over 100,000 classical albums per week, which implies an extremely long tail to classical sales.

 

[Nereffid]

Agree. Still, the difficulty of selling an economical quantity of any one album would tend to make publishing in the classical sector an unattractive prospect. Maybe my active catalog has 1,000 albums, but if I'm losing money on most then I'm not a happy capitalist.

Yes... though when you look at the more successful labels these days (independents, mostly), it's clear they're doing it more for love than money. Plus they're in it for the long haul. I can't imagine projects like Hyperion's Romantic piano concerto series, or BIS's Sibelius edition, were ever conceived as instant money-spinners but as legacy projects. I guess that in general the labels are confident that over time things make their money back (or at worst, the successes compensate for the failures).

 

[Nereffid]

This has always, until the past year or so, been my opinion too. But most of the interesting independent labels have seemed lately to devote an ever greater share of their production to re-releases and to new releases of the more mainstream "tried and true" repertoire.

I'm not sure you're right on the re-releases, but I think the independents are probably doing more mainstream repertoire all right.

But it's a question of interpretation. It could be regarded as a sign that the independents are increasingly confident that their recordings of mainstream repertoire have nothing to fear from comparison with long-established rivals on the majors.

Or a question of personal perspective. You might feel disappointed in this change, but for my own part, I'm quite pleased to see top-notch mainstream material from my favourite labels right now, because I like buying new recordings but also want to ensure I stay in touch with the standards.