Only too often, however, Heymann paid the price for being at the cutting edge. He can no longer remember how many times the website and the entire, and rapidly expanding, catalogue has had to be redigitised. As Internet speeds became faster, 20 kbps was no longer acceptable and everything had to be brought in at a higher bitrate. Tracks had originally been streamed in the RealAudio format but, as Windows Media Player had started to dominate the market, the format had been converted to WMA, and was subsequently converted to Flash. Heymann decided that there was no need for DRM (digital rights management) as the risk of people recording the streams was not very great. There were also concerns within the company that the money being invested in the whole Naxos Internet activity far outweighed any likely commercial reward. Heymann pressed on. From where he was sitting, in Asia, he had personal experience of the rapid improvement of Internet service and speeds. He was actually better placed to judge than his distributors in his main markets in the USA or Europe.
At the turn of the century came a totally new venture which used this digitised sound archive. In 2001 Heymann toured his main markets with a hard drive – then the size of a box – and held it up in front of the salesmen. ‘This contains all our recordings,’ he said enthusiastically, and he explained his concept. Top hotels around the world would subscribe to the Naxos classical music catalogue, paying an annual subscription that would enable them to offer all guests a wide choice of classical music to be piped into their own rooms. He said that it would only take around 1,000 hotels paying a reasonable amount to double the income of the company, and there would not be the expense of pressing CDs. The immediate response of the salesmen in the US was to go pale at the thought of that hard drive getting into the wrong hands and being copied. Surely, they thought, if Mr Heymann is going around the world with all the Naxos recordings in his briefcase, he needs a bodyguard. Heymann exhorted his distributors to pursue subscription customers – hotels, hospitals, restaurants and numerous other avenues. In the end, this didn’t really take off; but it was the first step towards arguably the most innovative and useful Internet classical music provision, and one that has proved itself of inestimable educational value: naxosmusiclibrary.com.
The Naxos Music Library was launched in 2002. Its purpose was to provide educational and musical establishments with an unmatched classical music resource. The ‘NML’, as it is generally called, was designed as a streaming service for schools, universities and music conservatories. It was quickly adopted by others: orchestras, music societies (for preparing programmes), arts organisations, public libraries, and even commercial companies involved in the use of classical music for film and advertisements. It was also attractive to individuals wanting the freedom to access music of their choice at any hour of the day or night. Initially, because the streams used up a lot of still-expensive bandwidth, the idea was to provide the music to subscribing institutions on a hard drive so that only the search took place through the Naxos Music Library site. Very soon after the service was launched, however, the cost of bandwidth dropped dramatically and it became possible for subscribers to stream the music from the main server in Hong Kong.
The content now offered as a streamed provision is, in short, the largest and most comprehensive collection of recorded classical music available (with a foot in the door of other genres, including world and jazz). This came about because, although it is called ‘Naxos Music Library’ and at its heart is the extensive Naxos catalogue, Heymann’s idea from the start was that it should include all other classical labels. He invited and sometimes coaxed other labels to join. Those which were already distributed by Naxos were more open to it than those which still harboured a residual reserve towards the ‘budget’ label. It did mean that the labels had to place their own content into the hands of a rival, which naturally made some hesitate; but a fair revenue share, transparent reporting and clear contracts ensured that the number of labels grew month by month. What’s more, the site was designed so that no priority was given to Naxos recordings: a search for a work with multiple recordings on the NML from different labels displays the results in the order generated by the Google algorithm. Before too long the Naxos Hong Kong office was inundated with CDs (and, later, hard drives) from other labels, ready for conversion into the required formats.
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, downloading (and illegal file sharing) was all the rage. Little attention was paid to streaming but Heymann judged that in the near future, as fast broadband became more universal, streaming would be of equal or even greater importance. Access rather than ownership was the key, he felt. As a catalogue owner, however, he appreciated that the business model had to offer security above all, as well as a meaningful revenue to label owners. He did not think that the advertising path (payment by share of advertising revenue) was reliable or appropriate. In his opinion, the subscription model, aimed initially at institutions and companies, offered the best chance of a worthwhile business for all. The owners of the recordings would be paid for every microsecond their recordings were accessed.
A basic subscription model already existed in the classical music world for editorial projects such as Grove Music Online. However, it had not yet been applied to recorded music, largely because it needed an agglomeration of labels to make it viable and no one had ever achieved this before on the scale that Heymann was proposing. It certainly wasn’t an easy task. Labels were very cautious – even suspicious. Independent labels, naturally, were more flexible and gradually joined in droves, while the major labels put their collective heads in the sand and declined to join. As the years went by, the attitude of the majors became less important because of the range and depth of repertoire achievable by Naxos in combination with the independents. From a repertoire point of view, all works could be accessed, studied and appreciated. (Heymann’s initial aim was to have at least one recording of every work ever recorded.) The majors were important from a performance point of view – they had the stars; but for the needs of the institutions at which the NML was principally aimed, repertoire was more important than performance.
Certainly this was the attitude taken by universities and music academies, which began to join and then renew their subscriptions on a regular basis. The Naxos sales teams around the world had to learn to work within academic environments, which were very different from retail circles. It was quickly seen by universities and others that subscribing to the NML was economically more sound than investing in one CD copy of each work: the CD could be used by only one student at a time and could be lost or damaged; but, with just ten or twenty subscriptions, music students throughout the university could access the NML and study any of the works at their leisure.
It was not just about the music itself. Musicologists around the world – in Hong Kong, Manila, the US and the UK – were engaged in providing further background information about the works, instead of purely creating metadata. It was a momentous task. Heymann wanted students and musicians to be able, at a mouse-click, to find out the performers, the length of the work, the history of the work and the composer, the recording details, and even the instrumentation and information on the publisher. The goal was, in Heymann’s words, to make it an unrivalled total music resource.
Within five years it was already by far the global market leader in this kind of provision, having overtaken other attempts to create something similar. Daily updates to the content indicate the sustained pace of growth. By the end of 2010 the NML contained 50,000 albums with 750,000 tracks. By the end of 2012 this is expected to rise to 70,000 albums with one million tracks.
The growing success of the NML prompted Heymann to develop a spoken-word sister site. He had a successful and growing series of classic literature recordings on Naxos AudioBooks which gave him the content he needed. The Naxos Spoken Word Library (NSWL) was another unique enterprise: from the very beginning it offered, where possible, the texts as well as the recordings, enabling the user to listen and read simultaneously. This has bee
n particularly useful for English language and literary studies.
In 2005 a new Naxos office was opened in Manila: it was to concentrate on Internet activity, and much of the work in Hong Kong was relocated there. It used to its advantage an English-speaking IT workforce and available musicologists. For the next five years it was the hub of Naxos’s Internet presence until another change of personnel and direction divided the work again. Much of the back-office updating of the websites continued to take place in Manila, with other IT work in Hong Kong; but in 2010 the principal IT development projects were shifted to Naxos of America in Nashville, nearer the world’s biggest online music market.
With the NML happily underway, Heymann turned his attention to downloads. By 2007 the situation regarding classical downloads was steadying into a pattern. The MP3 format was becoming largely accepted; iTunes was the dominant player in classical music downloads, with eMusic and Amazon following. There were others but they were not significant. With the growing NML content, it seemed that it would be relatively easy to provide a top-quality classical music download store with a sophisticated search engine, specially developed for classical music. It was clear that subscribers to both naxos.com and the NML wanted the facility to buy the digital files, and this made a download store an obvious development.
In 2007 ClassicsOnline (COL) was launched. It was decided to adopt a neutral name rather than stamp it with the Naxos provenance, not least because the Naxos label would be just one among many. Downloadable tracks were first sold at a bit rate of 128 kbps (the NML was streaming at the same rate) but subsequently the rate was increased to 320 kbps, producing a quality of sound more in line with the expectations of classical music enthusiasts. COL started steadily and attracted a regular custom, but by 2010 it mirrored the situation of downloads worldwide: sales had begun to plateau rather than expand. Nevertheless it was another revenue stream for the participating labels.
The growing significance of classical DVDs in the market was a clear indication that a classical specialist online video platform was needed. Once again, Heymann put his faith in the streaming medium and in 2009 launched the Naxos Video Library (NVL). The spread of fast broadband worldwide made this viable and the subscription model had proved its worth. Having become the dominant distributor of classical DVDs, Naxos had the relevant expertise to move into this area; and considerable growth in the field generally – opera and ballet companies, orchestras and concert promoters were becoming increasingly keen to film their events for TV and DVD sales – meant that an Internet presence was timely.
The Platforms
Naxos Website (naxos.com)
For the Naxos labels, naxos.com is the main marketing window on the world. It has evolved considerably over the years and is now a comprehensive source of information regarding Naxos that is updated on a daily basis. An international platform, it is managed by an international team: news and new-release information flows in from all the Naxos centres and is coordinated in Hong Kong, web updates are handled in Manila by a team of three, and advertising and reviews are organised in Hong Kong. Until relatively recently the revolving banners were all approved by Heymann himself, who set the tone and the design. It has some 300,000 non-paying subscribers who can stream 25 per cent of each track, and a smaller number of paying subscribers who can access all complete tracks. Membership is truly global.
It is a large site that also acts as an information base for those working within the company. It takes some diligent investigation to journey into the many different corners of the business and there are several surprises along the way. First and foremost it has information on the existing catalogues of the audio and video labels owned or distributed by Naxos. Then there are the various series within Naxos that are carefully documented. This ‘Sets/Series’ section helps to highlight corners of the label that would otherwise be in danger of getting lost in the main catalogue.
Artists and composers also have their own sections. There are extraordinary details here that can be teased out of their digital corners. The ‘Composers’ section, which includes birth and death dates for each composer, takes you from Aagaard, Thorvald (1877–1937) to Zyman, Samuel (b. 1956), and a huge amount of content is available. For each composer there is a biography, information on the main works by genre, and a discography. For example, the J.S. Bach discography contains some 1,800 titles. Click on any one of those titles and the full, recorded information appears: the works, the performers, the track times, the release date, and often the notes and much more. There are even quick links to the biographies of key composers and general essays on genres and periods. There is a newsletter archive, a news archive, a reviews archive, information about distributors around the world, information on how to buy the CDs, and the essential keyword search to take you directly to the object. The amount of information on the site is breathtaking.
Naxos Music Library (naxosmusiclibrary.com)
Most music students around the world will know and speak highly of the Naxos Music Library. Many will have used it for research or just for listening throughout their student years. It is a well-functioning music library that is always at one’s fingertips. This has literally been the case since 2010, when the introduction of the NML app enabled the subscriber to access the library’s music from a coffee shop. It is in using the app that one really appreciates the capabilities and growing flexibility of the streaming technology.
The NML has close to 400 labels in its database, encompassing classical and folk music, jazz, blues, nostalgia, spoken word and even relaxation music. New albums are added daily – almost too many for the listener to keep up with. EMI was the first major to join, bringing 6,500 classical and jazz titles in 2011. It was followed by Warner Classics. The rich character of the NML and the wide variety of repertoire is underpinned by many independent labels, large and small.
Every monthly update on naxos.com is automatically reflected in the NML, but in addition there are all the monthly updates from the independent labels. There is a ‘Recent Additions’ button that provides a weekly or monthly overview, but even this is often a long list in itself.
The ‘Playlists’ function has become indispensable for many subscribers. Professors and individual students can create playlists within the library so that works being studied can be conveniently accessed again. They can be bookmarked, and even accessed and altered via the NML app.
The whole site is searchable by composer, by work, by label or by genre and there is a huge amount of information accessible about each individual recording. For example, the website entry for Bach’s Cantata Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen!, BWV 51 includes the tracks themselves, the performer details, biographies and discographies for each individual performer, as well as details of the work itself: composer, lyricist, instrumentation, publisher, duration, period and genre. The listing also includes an electronic reproduction of the notes that appear in the CD booklet and a list of all the available recordings of the work in the NML.
There is also an ‘Advanced Search’ function that allows searching of the database by many different criteria, including playing time. This is very useful for professional musicians and anybody involved in programming. For example, a conductor can search for a fifteen-minute piece of nineteenth-century Spanish orchestral music by entering ‘14’ and ‘16’ into the ‘Duration’ fields, ‘Spain’ into the ‘Country’ field, ‘1800’ and ‘1899’ into the ‘Year Composed’ fields, and ‘Orchestral’ into the ‘Genre and Music Categories’ field, and will get the results instantly together with details on the instrumentation and publishers of all the works.
There are other useful sections to the NML. The ‘Study Area’ offers specially commissioned texts on music history and theory that are presented according to the specific requirements of the education systems in North America, the UK, Australia and other countries. ‘Resources’ includes a section cross-referencing all the pieces listed on the UK’s ABRSM syllabus for the upper grades of violin, piano, cello, guit
ar and flute (and some for Trinity Guildhall too). The ‘Pronunciation Guide’ covers the majority of composers’ names, spoken by native speakers. ‘Glossary’ and ‘Fundamental Terms’ give definitions of a wide range of musical words and phrases. There are many opera libretti, such as Carmen, Il barbiere di Siviglia and all the operas of Richard Wagner. Copyright issues restrict these libretti to public-domain texts, but it is still an impressive selection.
The NML has proved a ground-breaking resource and it continues to expand as more content and new features are added. There is also Naxos Music Library Jazz, which has a growing number of labels and currently consists of 5,000 albums and 50,000 tracks.
ClassicsOnline (classicsonline.com)
With the download site ClassicsOnline, Naxos was entering an Internet area already served by some established sites (the world leader iTunes, but also eMusic.com and others). Nevertheless Heymann felt that Naxos, with its outstanding reputation for web services, should have its own download facility, and he set about creating one specifically for classical music. Drawing on the resources in the Naxos Music Library, he had the technical advantage of not having to start a classical website from scratch.
ClassicsOnline was intended from the start to cater for all classical buyers, including the dedicated collector. Its selection, of course, was key to this and expanded rapidly; to date, the site contains one million tracks from some 50,000 CDs and represents almost 400 labels. Each track can be sampled and the music is offered DRM-free.
The Story of Naxos Page 35