We all know (or we ought to know) that classical music used to be more popular in the United States than it is now. But how can we measure that? Well, in the 1950s the big TV networks showed spectacular classical telecast. That’s one piece of evidence. Clearly, classical music must have been more popular then, or else the networks wouldn’t have bothered with it. But this isn’t statistical data. It doesn’t measure the popularity of classical music, and give us a number that we can compare with anything now.
With this in mind, I was fascinated to find a statistic on record sales, in a 1960 book by Richard Schickel, The World of Carnegie Hall. Schickel says (and I don’t know his source) that $425 million was spent annually on recordings (LPs, in those days), and that “only 85 million of it is spent on recordings of unquestionably good music,” by which I assume he means classical.
Only $85 million — only 20 percent! By our standards today, that’s miraculous. Off the top of my head, I think that maybe 3% of all recordings sold today are classical. (Though to be absolutely accurate, I don’t know what, exactly, that figure measures, which means I don’t know how comparable it is to the dollar figures Schickel gives.
Still, I think it’s clear that there’s no way to measure classical recording sales today that would make them 20% of any kind of record industry total, whether we’d talk about number of CDs sold, number of downloads, or dollar revenue.)
Schickel, by the way, goes on to write the most marvelously dismissive description of pop music I’ve seen in a long time. Subtract the classical sales from that $425 million total, he says, and “[t]he rest is spent on show tunes, the perversions of Mantovani and his imitators, popular music which seems to get worse and worse each year, and [here comes the best part] imitation folk songs put out by the hacks of Tin Pan Alley and Nashville, Tennessee.” Take that, Hank Williams and Patsy Cline!
But wait — Schickel doesn’t mention jazz, which was unquestionably riding high in 1960, with the likes of Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, and John Coltrane at or near their peaks. Does he include jazz in the $85 million sales of good music? Then, of course, the classical percentage would be smaller. But still it’s got to have been higher than it is today. There’s no way that classical and jazz together would add up to 20% of current sales.
Another analysis found jazz to be even smaller than classical as a portion of total sales. Can’t recall where I read it. Memory still generally good, though, if that counts.
If you remember the Anne Midgette Times article from a few months back, classical downloads were reported to encompass a whopping 12% of iTunes downloads. In general, 3% is the overall industry figure that I’ve always heard.
How DARE Schickle dismiss Hank Williams. What. A. Snob.
That being said, and for all the lamentation about record sales, I don’t think the lack of sales reflects a lack of interest in music. I think that the lure of “owning” a recording is just not the same as it was back in the day. Remember : just about the ONLY artistic experience one could own (apart from books) was music on vinyl or tape. You still had to watch a TV show at the time of broadcast, or go to a movie.
Today, we can own just about any artistic venture. Or, mor accurately, we have more recrational deversions at our finger tips. Who would have thought, for example, that today, kids would be spending more time in front of their computers instead of infront of the TV?
This wealth of entertainment has often been ignored as a factor when discussing the relevance of art music in today’s culture.
Does he include jazz in the $85 million sales of good music?
His dig against Tin Pan Alley suggests that he does not (since obviously those tunes were jazz standards as well).
At a time when every nine-year-old has got $20 to spend on a Britney Spears CD, the music market is horribly distorted. Furthermore, a lot of fans of “good music” are swapping bootlegs and old concert recordings instead of buying new CDs, since the record companies have abandoned the kind of music we’ve been buying all our lives. I have dozens of CDs of music conducted by Charles Munch, William Steinberg etc that these conductors never recorded commercially.
Greg–
I agree completely with your basic thesis here that classical music is less popular than it used to be (and that Schickel’s attitude toward popular music is silly) but I have a couple of thoughts about your methodology.
First, “But how can we measure that? Well, in the 1950s the big TV networks showed spectacular classical telecast. That’s one piece of evidence. Clearly, classical music must have been more popular then, or else the networks wouldn’t have bothered with it.” We do need to take into consideration the possibility that in the 50s the networks were more comitted than they are now to their “public service” obligations (which were actually imposed by the government in the grand bargain of the parceling out of the airwaves). Modern television is, I think, considerably more purely commercial than it used to be. Plus, in the 50s the attitude that classical music was more “serious” and inherently important than other musics was much more widespread than it is today. So I expect that one of the driving forces behind the more substantial classical coverage of that era was a sense of moral and social obligation — in other words, the threshold of audience interest necessary for airing classical music would have been much lower, and using the amount of media coverage as a metric of basic popularity is somewhat suspect. I do think popularity was an important factor, but it would be nice to be able to control for that variable in our estimates.
As for the amount spent on recordings of classical music, I have two additional questions/observations. First, how did the average price of a classical LP compare to the average price of a popular LP? I wasn’t around, so I have no idea. If there’s a difference, I suspect it’s that classical LPs were more expensive, but that’s just speculation. Second, we need to know more about the spending habits of the different demographic groups in question. Suppose, for instance, that classical music lovers are older and more financially well-off on average than popular music lovers — they might buy more LPs per capita, which would give the impression that classical music was more popular than it actually was. Or suppose that one of the groups was more likely than the other to spend its money on attending concerts rather than on buying records? That would skew the numbers as well.
Again, I think your conclusions are almost certainly right, but I worry that a lack of clear metrics is giving us an inaccurate sense of just how large the difference is.
It’s a little naive to assume that “classical music must have been more popular [in the ’50s], or else the networks wouldn’t have bothered with it.” Surely you’re old enough to remember that at the time, television networks were far more inclined to air material for what they perceived as the public good. They didn’t call CBS “the Tiffany Network” for nothing. It was only later that profits (and decreasing public service programming requirements) completely overwhelmed altruism.
Two thoughts:
1. I would think that a significant portion of “classical” sales today includes music (such as Il Divo, Sarah Brightman, concertos by Sting and Billy Joel, etc.) which would make Mantovani seem like high art. The definition of the genre has veered towards pop as well–“crossing over” to stay alive.
2. It’s lucky nobody mentioned the 3% when I decided to devote my life to playing jazz, or I would probably be a rich lawyer by now.*
*Who am I kidding?”
I have found “contemporary jazz” to be neither. Greg, do you still believe that our culture isn’t being “dumbed down”?
The core classical chart needs rethinking, IMO. Sting is currently at the top of that chart, which is questionable. But no way, Andre Rhieu should be there. He is definitely crossover.
Does anyone know what sales Billboard tracks these days. Is it strictly brick and mortar store sales? Because it seems that’s a very small percentage of cd sales these days. I would think most people buy online from Amazon, B&N, etc. or download from iTunes, etc.
You wrote: “those classical music shows back in the 1950s had a full complement of commercials. So now we have to assume that the sponsors — like the Big Three auto companies in Detroit — were also into public service. I think it’s just as likely that the shows made money.”
No, it’s far more likely that the Detroit motor barons just wanted to buy into a little vicarious east coast establishment refinement, so they threw some ad dollars at classical broadcasts. Both broadcasters and advertisers could indulge in such flagrant acts of ego-stroking vanity because back then, the stakes were still low enough.
I have a proposal for a metric to gain some measure of the probable waning of interest in classical music. A study could be done of the number of high schools and the number of students participating in their annual school trip to the opera. Comparative data can be obtained by asking middle aged aged people such as myself how many students from my high school were on that charter bus ride with me into Manhattan and comparing that with current figures. Some verification can be obtained by tracking down some of my fellow music lovers who I remember chatting with on those trips. It is far from ideal but if enough imperfect measures point to the same result it should give us confidence in our conclusion.