Facing down the pirates
Klaus Heymann, chairman of Naxos, the classical music publishers, answers your questions on business exclusively for The Boardroom.
(CNN) — How do you protect the work you publish from piracy, especially when so much digital content is available for download on your own site?
Classical music does not suffer from online piracy nearly as much as pop and rock.
Classical record labels mostly sell album concepts with one or two works with average playing times of around 25 to 30 minutes each.
These are more difficult to download than a rock or pop track of around five minutes or less.
At the same time, sound quality is important to classical music collectors and most are not really satisfied with heavily compressed files. Higher-quality files are much bigger and are more difficult to download.
Also, classical record collectors want the booklet texts and the attractive packaging many classical albums have to offer, including lyrics, and often prefer purchasing the physical CD to downloading files.
Having said that, we constantly monitor all relevant pirate sites and send out letters threatening legal action if the sites don’t take down our content.
I don’t think there’s much else we can do other than making our recordings as widely available and as easy to find as possible online and in stores, and producing CDs people still want to purchase.
Physical sales of classical recordings are actually quite stable whereas our revenue from legitimate digital downloads continues to grow nicely.
