Probably you are not classics fun. But I am.
This is true pain in the [CENSORED] to find certain recordings, certain things performed by certain orchestra/director. Some things gets released once per say five years – go try get them on Amazon or iTMS.

How glad I was to growth of P2P networks like Napster and Gnutella. Some rare pieces I can find only there. Magnitudes more than Amazon & iTMS combined. People for example ripped ~50 years old vinils of Segovia: try to find them on Amazon. Availability varies with season, wind direction and phase of moon. Or Alirio Diaz. Or some particular works of John Williams. Try it. I have tried. And I’m still trying – but my collection of classical guitar is still far from being complete. And CD collection is at best sparse.

Business is just business. What makes no profit – creates no business. Ten people per year is not market. Releasing this tracks to public for free download ensured that years later I would be able to find this particular performances without problem. Especially when people who had payed this tracks performance and recording agree with such give-away.

P.S.

In the end, I believe that commerce in its extreme wish to monopolize everything, quite effectively dumbs society down. Culture is reflection of society development. And if culture is commercialized, owned and divided – society has few chances to develop itself further. Just compare level of culture of U.S. with Europe, Asia or even Russia. U.S. is the only who had made total business out of culture and society. But when it comes down to society as a whole, people – U.S. is total mess. I have lived in USSR, ex-USSR and now Germany. I occasionally visit my friends in U.S. – the contrast is just enormous.

And don’t think I’m picking on China here. In the southeast US this was a pretty common way for local governments to round up workers for road crews and such. That was allegedly wiped out in the fifties but now we have prisons operating corporate managed call centers and dry goods manufacturing shops. Oh sure, the prisoners can choose to do the work or not… but how much power do they have to negotiate the pay?

Also… red dot. I used to have half a shelf of’em. Decent quality recordings of less famous eurasian orchestras, available in record stores more than a decade now and usually selling for something like 3-5 bucks. As I recall, those rich kid publishers complained about that, too.

In theory I agree with this, but reality seems a little more complex than that.

The government has already interfered by creating a playground where authors could thrive. Now the publishers (hey, where did they come from?) cry that the government should not enter their playground. Fair enough. But what if the government does indeed need to enter the playground? This happens often enough. Not all creative works promise to sell enough that a publisher will want to sell them.

Unfortunately it is not always easy to predict which works need support beyond the support given through today’s extremely broad copyrights. In other words, industry and government together cannot always adequately determine the need that will define the line of separation between consumer-bought and government-funded.

Whether or not the BBC overstepped its boundaries needs to be determined on a case by case basis. However, I do taste a little hypocrisy in the indignation of the publishers, as the BBC (as I mentioned before) has been selling the concerts of its symphony orchestra for simply ages. There are two things different in the current situation: 1) BBC is giving the concerts away for free, 2) the concerts can be downloaded.

This reminds me of the whining by the overpriced useless private delivery companies (fedex etc.) that the U.S. Postal Service is hurting their business by offering cheap, efficient, reliable, easy mail to the public.

In the words of innumerable conservatives and free-marketeers: Waaaah. Waaaah. Cry me a river.

Almost any products could be made available free of charge if the govenment decided to fund their creation and distribution , but that doesn’t make it the appropriate thing for government to do in a free-market economy. And isn’t really a free-market of creative works, and not government control, that really supports the most creativity and innovation?

That statement confuses government “participation” with government “control.” Seriously, folks. It’s not as if the BBC is censoring non-public-funded music. If consumers value non-Beethoven music, they can pay the private market for them.

The BBC is not giving away performances of every symphony, they are giving away a single performance of these symphonies. Anyone who is familiar with classical music knows the “interpretation” of the conductor and the orchestra can have a very dramatic impact upon the final product. If more people are drawn into an appreciation of classical music they too will develop their own repretories of favored condutors and performance companies and will seek out their recordings.

It is very much in the interest of a government to help promote the arts in a positive fashion. It’s good for our culture and it’s good for business.