The great benefit to the classical connoisseur is the advanced search facility, which enables a precise search – year of composition, genre, nationality etc. In addition there are ‘classical-friendly’ features that highlight new labels, recent releases, critics’ picks and COL exclusives. It is the Harrods of classical download sites.
Naxos Video Library (naxosvideolibrary.com)
The Naxos Video Library (NVL) is the most recent subscription-based streaming site. With a rapidly growing repertoire of more than 1,000 titles, it draws on Naxos’s involvement with DVDs over the past decade. With some thirty labels contributing to the database, it offers a wide range of videos: opera, ballet and concerts, as well as documentaries, educational programmes and travelogues. Opera is the predominant genre, with a varying selection: five productions of Macbeth, three each of Madama Butterfly and La Bohème, three of Siegfried and four of Tristan und Isolde, in addition to operas by Donizetti, Rossini, Mascagni and others; but there is also Janáek’s Jenufa, Berg’s Wozzeck, Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti and Sallinen’s The Palace. Subtitles included on the original DVD are available here and libretti are also provided in different languages, so that users are able to see subtitles in the original language with the libretto in another language, and vice versa. Ballets include multiple productions of the popular Tchaikovsky works as well as modern ballets from the Netherlands Dance Theatre and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre. Among the documentaries are some historic films of Leonard Bernstein, Karl Böhm, Sergiu Celibidache (in rehearsal and performance), Nathan Milstein and Itzhak Perlman; a master-class with Júlia Varady; and ‘Global Treasures’ – a series of travel documentaries, from Budapest to Borobudur.
The Naxos Video Library is still in its early stages but as a classical video resource it is expected to become increasingly important.
Naxos Spoken Word Library (naxosspokenwordlibrary.com)
The majority of this site consists of the 700 titles from Naxos AudioBooks. It is an outstanding resource primarily for English classic literature but it also offers many European classics in English, from Plato to Dante and Hugo to Tolstoy. The design of the site enables quick access to individual chapters of books, or individual poems, or an act in a Shakespeare play. It also contains a collection of German classics from Naxos Hörbücher, including works by Goethe, Fontane, Heine, Hoffmann and others, as well as German translations of other European classics, such as those of Chekhov, Daudet and Lewis Carroll. A limited number of French texts are available too. The playlist facility, with bookmarking, means that recordings and texts can be accessed and revisited with ease (also available on the deft NSWL app).
As with the NML, the NSWL is adopted mainly by institutions but is attracting a growing interest from individuals.
Naxos Web Radio (naxosradio.com)
Naxos Web Radio was one of the early online services of the company, offering music from the catalogue streamed at 48 kbps. Perhaps the least known of the Naxos services, it performs the straightforward task of bringing classical music into the home or workplace twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. There are more than eighty pre-programmed channels, covering all the genres of the Naxos labels (from ‘Early Music’ to ‘21st Century Classics’, ‘American Classics’ to ‘Chinese Classics’, ‘Film Music’ to ‘Melodies of Love’, ‘Piano’ to ‘Guitar & Lute’ etc.). It is free of advertising and the subscription is very low.
Seventeen
Distribution: The Growth of an Empire
Distribution has played an unexpectedly crucial role in the expansion of the company. Klaus Heymann did not plan to organise a worldwide distribution network when he started first Marco Polo and then Naxos. He was interested in the music and wanted to concentrate on developing the labels, to invest in catalogue building not in distribution. He had previously developed a network of distribution companies and licensees in Asia, which he sold to BMG in 1989, and he remained the distributor of Bose audio equipment in Hong Kong and China until 2003. Finding distributors for Marco Polo was not very difficult because it was a full-price label focusing on world-premiere recordings. Naxos was a different matter. Even though it was the first budget classical CD label to have new digital recordings, finding distribution was a challenge. Established distributors of classical labels did not want to touch ‘a classical CD budget label from Hong Kong’ (although there had been successful classical budget LP labels such as Vox-Turnabout and Vanguard). So in the beginning Heymann was forced to work with outsiders.
His first German distributor was a small company that parallel imported Denon hi-fi equipment into Germany. It started to import Naxos CDs because they were manufactured in the early days by Denon, and it sold them at full price. This missed the point of the enterprise, and Heymann soon changed distributor. In Australia he worked with another outsider who manufactured the label under licence; eventually the arrangement ended up in the courts and Heymann had to find a new distributor. In France the initial success in the hypermarkets made it difficult subsequently to find a distributor willing to sell Naxos to regular retail stores. In the UK the breakthrough came when Woolworths took on the label.
Eventually Heymann built a network of independent distributors, most of whom did not specialise in classical music. For various reasons most of them got into financial difficulties and had to be bailed out or taken over by the Naxos parent company in Hong Kong. Once he had established distribution subsidiaries in most major music markets, it became obvious to him that it was difficult to sustain companies that sold only his own Marco Polo and Naxos labels. He therefore decided to take on the distribution of other independent classical CD labels – and, beginning with Arthaus Musik in 2000, the distribution of independent classical DVD labels too.
As the business changed, with CD sales beginning to falter and globalisation advancing, the physical distribution of classical labels came to be concentrated in fewer hands. It made increasing economic sense to supply even individual shops across country borders from a central warehouse point, rather than for each country to maintain its own stock. Consequently Naxos of America now supplies shops in Canada, Naxos Sweden supplies shops throughout Scandinavia, and Naxos Global Logistics (NGL) in Munich supplies shops in France as well as Germany. The likelihood is that this pattern will increase. It is a model that also allows the national distributors to focus on sales, marketing and promotion rather than the maintenance of a big warehouse. The picture can appear quite complex, but Naxos now has five main regional logistics centres providing warehousing and distribution for a mixed domestic and export service: NGL, Naxos Sweden, Naxos of America, Naxos Far East and Select Music, UK.
Having been highly successful with its own distribution from the start, it was clear that the company knew how to do it. The leading independent labels chose to come to Naxos for distribution even though, at first, it must have seemed for them like entrusting their livelihood and business secrets to their greatest rival. A level of integrity was always maintained: advance knowledge of an independent’s release plans was never misused for Naxos benefit. In fact it was of general benefit for Naxos to know what an independent was releasing so that clashes were reduced by negotiation. Success even resulted in the majors acknowledging that the Naxos distribution network was better suited than their own to distributing their back catalogue.
The real challenge for Heymann in buying into new distribution companies was always finding the right person to run them. The surprise is that there was no one model, no Naxos distribution managing director clone. Some of the managing directors have a strong classical music background: this is true of the UK, Germany and Australia. The MDs in both Sweden and the US have learned about classical music on the job (their background is in other forms of music). In Japan there was classical music knowledge but initially no distribution experience whatsoever. Somehow Heymann brought these various talents together to create the world’s strongest international classical music distribution network, selling CDs and DVDs as well as
marketing the group’s subscription services and licensing its recordings.
Naxos Global Logistics
The first Naxos CDs were pressed by Denon in Japan, which was an important factor in the early success of the label because Denon had an outstanding reputation for quality. It was not very long, however, before the demand for the rapidly expanding label called for manufacturing and central warehousing to be nearer the main markets. This meant Europe. Germany, right in the centre, was the most logical location, and in 1991 Music and Video Distribution (MVD) was set up near Munich. It was a company with two purposes: to organise and coordinate all CD (and later DVD) manufacturing with European CD plants; and to provide an efficient distribution service for the Naxos distributors in countries around the world.
There were many pitfalls to be avoided. Careful stock management is crucial to the health of a label such as Naxos, and ruinous overstocks can quickly build up if individual distributors are holding a lot more than they need. Centralised CD production and centralised warehousing and distribution were the answer – most of the time. It was certainly true for the supply of territories in Europe, the Far East and Australia, where local demand only rarely warranted local pressing. It was more difficult for the US and Canada: some pressing had to take place there, especially for a title with particular regional appeal, either because of the repertoire or artist, or perhaps because of a special campaign.
The hub of manufacture and the warehousing for international distribution remained in Munich. In July 2008 a new company called Naxos Global Logistics (NGL) was set up by the Naxos Group and is headed by Mohamed El Wakil, who had worked at the previous distribution company as well as for Naxos Deutschland. The work there is complex and crucial to the welfare of the whole Naxos enterprise: NGL is able to offer a full range of services to the distributors and labels, including distribution to shops and to end consumers worldwide. Somewhere between twenty and forty new Naxos recordings are released each month and the staff at NGL check each title before shipping. Stock of the massive back catalogue must also be available in appropriate quantities: all this calls for clear management within the warehouse.
Then there is the distribution itself. In the early years, faxed orders – pages of them – came in from numerous countries around the world. Orders also came over the phone, from Hong Kong and the Far East in the morning, Europe during the day, and the US in the evening. Now most orders come in via email, and there are hundreds, large and small, every day. Container lorries packed with pallets bearing thousands of classical CDs travel to Europe and beyond, and to ports and airports. There are daily, weekly and monthly shipments to the main classical territories – to Germany, the UK, the US or Japan. Regular, even frequent, orders come from other continents too, such as South America and Australia. NGL has dealings with more than fifty main international distributors, including quite a few unexpected ones, such as Lebanon and Kenya.
Rafael Schölermann, the international customer service manager who has been in this Naxos hub for twenty years, has seen the CD format peak and begin to diminish. In its heyday some six million CDs would go through the central warehouse, though now it is down to around three million. The speed and ease of re-pressing CDs means that initial print-runs can be quite low – between 1,000 and 3,000 – but Schölermann recalls that the first pressing of the tenth-anniversary sampler in 1997 numbered 250,000.
With nearly 9,000 CD and DVD titles in the Naxos and Marco Polo catalogues, plus those of other CD and DVD labels that are distributed by the Naxos network, NGL can supply stock of 33,000 titles at very short notice and generally has around three million units under its roof. This is necessary because the decline in CDs means that NGL is more frequently distributing CDs directly to individual shops throughout Europe: centralised delivery of this kind plays an increasingly important role. Communication and transport links are so good that NGL in Munich can supply shops in Budapest, Amsterdam, Bucharest, Rome, Warsaw and much further within twenty-four hours. Not surprisingly, all shops in Germany have for some years been supplied directly by NGL.
Naxos Distribution Around the World
United Kingdom: Select Music and Video Distribution
The growth of Naxos in the UK set an example for the company’s expansion in many other territories. It reads in retrospect as such a rapid, confident upward surge on so many fronts that it could act as a prototype for other industries and illustrate a management manual. The reality was not quite as ordered and planned as the story suggests. It was a case of the right product being in the right place at the right time, but supported and driven by an enthusiasm and classical knowledge that went beyond mere corporate behaviour. There was a feeling that the classical establishment really could be challenged and bypassed – and, with the help of a few key turning points, it was.
Naxos first settled in the UK in the late 1980s as the house label of Woolworths, where each CD sold at £3.99. The low-price chain was in its final years as a prominent feature of Britain’s high streets, but Heymann had shrewdly slipped Naxos in as the store’s exclusive budget label (the CDs were clearly Naxos branded and had the white covers, which were already standard by then). Then, in 1989, Heymann read a review of some early Naxos recordings in Classical Music by David Denton, a Sheffield-based music writer. Denton described a selection of the CDs as good value for money but claimed that they were hampered by being enclosed within the doors of Woolworths; in order to expand, the label had to get out. Heymann contacted Denton and brought him on board with the purpose of giving Naxos a broader reach in the UK. He fully acknowledges the subsequent work of Denton – with his wife, Rona – as crucial to Naxos’s development.
A new enterprise was launched by David and Rona Denton called Naxos Promotions, whose first task was to negotiate the label’s exit from Woolworths’ exclusivity. This was made relatively easy because Naxos was beginning to produce multi-CD sets which had to go into bigger cases, and Woolworths did not have the racking for them. Furthermore, there was repertoire coming through that Woolworths did not wish even to try to sell, such as Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra coupled with Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta. So, a move beyond Woolworths was timely and appropriate. Denton signed a UK distribution deal with Harmonia Mundi, the French label that offered UK distribution to smaller classical labels from its London warehouse. The managing director was Graham Haysom. In 1990 Naxos began to appear in classical record shops up and down the country at the increased price of £4.99, which was still perceived as inexpensive. (It was to stay at that price level for fifteen years, until 2005.) It became a famous price point for the label and contributed substantially to its profile and its success: for years CD buyers were amazed that new digital recordings of decent quality could be so cheap.
Denton continued to proselytise with untiring enthusiasm at all levels – in shops, record clubs and the press – and found the response to be generally positive. The recordings had the tag of Eastern European orchestras but they were digital, sounded good, and few could deny that the music was reliably played at the very least. The word was getting around, and bulk orders started to come to Harmonia Mundi from retailers. David Blake, then sales manager at Harmonia Mundi UK and later sales manager at Select Music, remembers that after Harmonia Mundi had taken over, shops would ring up and ask for a few of each new title, and soon they were ordering ‘ten of all the new titles’. Naxos was distributed by Harmonia Mundi for some eighteen months, and by the end many shops were buying a box (twenty-five CDs) of each new title. Some were ordering even higher numbers, and adding more boxes of back-catalogue titles. This was unheard of for a classical label. The fax machines could scarcely keep up as the rolls thundered round, page after page of orders spilling onto the parquet floor of the warehouse. The Harmonia Mundi staff struggled to cope. On the new-release mail-out day, the floor space was completely covered in boxes. ‘Sometimes we couldn’t help stepping on them,’ remembered Blake. It was crazy. It was exciting.
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p; The interest in Naxos was sparked by savvy marketing and a growing awareness that classical CDs did not have to be expensive to be good. From the Dentons’ house in Sheffield, and later a small office, simple advertisements were designed and placed, press releases were written, and a review service was maintained. Denton and his wife visited record clubs up and down the country, promoting the Naxos message. There were interviews with Heymann in newspapers.
It was difficult to breach the wall of superiority maintained by the classical establishment, but chinks appeared as certain writers simply couldn’t ignore public demand. People were keen to replace their basic classical LP collection with the new CDs, and felt that Naxos would more than serve. Soon Naxos exited from Woolworths and entered the main shops, including HMV, Our Price and Tower Records. Then came the affirmation from one of the UK’s most respected music critics: Edward Greenfield, the classical reviewer for the Guardian, decided it was time to write a piece. Denton sent a box of Naxos releases to him at very short notice, and the resultant article, a large and well-displayed commendation of the label, its recordings and its price, gave Naxos the imprimatur necessary to raise its status. After all, Greenfield also wrote for Gramophone, the most respected review magazine, and The Penguin Guide to Classical Music: if he said the Naxos CDs were good, there was no question about it. Greenfield remembers his discovery: ‘Originally, Naxos discs were sold exclusively in Woolworths, which meant that no critic took them seriously, and they were not sent out for review. Happily, my cousin bought a number from a cycle of the Beethoven piano sonatas played by a Hungarian pianist of whom few had heard, Jen Jandó. I quickly realised that these recordings were remarkably fine, offering performances that were refreshingly direct and straightforward. I then used my record column in the Guardian to write about Naxos, and I am flattered that Klaus Heymann attributes something of the early expansion of the company to what I wrote!’
The Story of Naxos Page 36