Norman Lebrecht announces the death of the classical musice business [thanks to ArtsJournal.com for the link]:
A Columbia boss signing himself “God”' (his name was Goddard Lieberson) gave Leonard Bernstein carte blanche to record anything he liked. God also got Stravinsky to preside over the recording of every note he ever wrote - 20 volumes of it. Herbert von Karajan convinced two labels to let him record the Beethoven symphonies five times over. Beethoven was a brand. Buy him in a box. By the 1980, the record business was making more boxes than the match industry. I recently cleared my Brahms shelf, unsentimentally throwing out sets by Böhm, Haitink, Solti, Bernstein, Karajan (two boxes) and Sawallisch - and that still left me with three indispensable cycles (Furtwängler, Abbado, Jansons) plus six working copies of every single symphony. Madness. It had to end. At the start of 2004 I predicted that this would be the industry's last year. Well, I was over-cautious. No need to wait for Christmas: it's over now.
