I *do* make good money. Good enough, anyway. I also buy CDs. Lots and lots and lots of them. Usually 20 or 30 a month (lately more like 15, but SACDs cost substantially more and there are fewer issues every month anyway.)
Except that no one gets rich from classical music sales anyway. To begin with. my favorite label is one called Naxos. Naxos pays artists a flat fee ($5000) for recordings and IIRC no royalties. Because of this, Naxos is able to market an unbelievably diverse catalog filled with works that never would've made it to CD and certainly would never have been played on the radio.
In Chicago, WFMT has a strict "no opera during the working day" policy, because opera is polarizing even to classical music lovers. In fact, WFMT spends the majority of its broadcast hours on only the lightest of fare ("Oh good, another 17th century Trumpet Voluntary.")
Imagine if the whole width and bredth of your radio choice in pop music was Celine Dion and Cher. Would you wade through 16 hours of "My Heart Will Go On" on the off chance of hearing Radiohead (are these choices apropos? I don't keep up with this stuff.)?
Of course, I understand it's like that for most people who listen to music on the radio.
I also understand that all 10 of Billboard's Top 10 pop songs for this week are Hip-Hop songs by african-american artists, which makes me think that either hip-hop fans are the only ones that buy substantial numbers of recordings or that there are fans in a lot of other genres whose music has become so fractionalized that they can't even support one gold record. But I digress.
Literally the only way for me to find new music is to buy lots of CDs and hope I find something I enjoy. By sharing the things I find (let's repeat that: I'm sharing the things that I OWN. It's pointless for me to try to search for anything), I'm hoping that someone else won't have to go through the expense and might make a real discovery in the obscura buried beneath the 15,000 extant recordings of "The Goldberg Variations". I feel very strongly that what *I'm* doing is in public good - I want to make it not-pointless for the next guy.
I have no illusions that a fee-based download service would represent even a slim fraction of the library of works I've collected and enjoyed "But Merc, they have two versions of Beethoven's 6th!" you say in triumph, until I remind you that the CD used for the MP3 can be found in bargain bins for $5, and downloadlegalmp3s.com wants $3.00 per track instead of a buck to compensate for the fact that each of the five movements of the Pastoral symphony is 10 minutes long and therefore a much larger file... and that the download service only has the Solti CSO recording and the inferior 1970s Karajan recording instead of the much preferred album from the 60s, and while we're at it, that service doesn't have any classical music less than 30 years old.
Which is why I'm really happy that two people grabbed copies of Theofandis's "Rainbow Body" (composed in 2002) from me today.
Oh yeah: MP3s suck. Lately I've come to enjoy music in DVD-Audio and SACD formats, both of which offer high-bit rate surround sound audio. To me, an MP3 is a degraded copy of an inferior format. They're a bit like having a second-generation photocopy of a magazine article.
Given the choice, which would you rather have?
