NEW YORK: Google teamed up with five leading orchestras Monday in a bid to draw more classical music lovers to digital music as the streaming sector booms.
Dubbed Classical Live, the initiative will offer exclusive recordings through the Internet giant's Google Play service from orchestras including the New York Philharmonic and London Symphony Orchestra.
Also involved are the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Cleveland Orchestra and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam, with Google hoping eventually to invite further participants.
The classical audience is smaller and older than the fan base for pop music but also skews wealthier, offering a potentially lucrative demographic.
In turn, orchestras seek to rejuvenate their audiences by embracing new technology.
Classical Live is "hoping to broaden and grow the audience for classical music, which is exactly synonymous with our ambitions, making great music available to the widest group of people," said Kathryn McDowell, the managing director of the London Symphony Orchestra.
McDowell noticed that previous digital works have often been downloaded track by track rather than as a whole -- evidence, she said, that the audience consists of newcomers exploring classical music.
"If you look at what the average student has on their playlist, it will include all sorts of things, because I think young people's tastes are much more eclectic than we might give them credit for," she told AFP.
"So we want to get out there in all the possible new platforms with the chance that they encounter the LSO."
Comments
Comments are closed.