Rattle's net gains

Like a juggernaut careering towards a motorway pile-up, Deutsche Grammophon slammed on brakes and accelerator simultaneously last week and held its breath for the impact.

By way of braking, the classical label parted company with Matthew Cosgrove, the head of artists and repertoire who has struggled since his appointment 15 months ago to get clearance from corporate bosses to sign any new artists and repertoire.

Cosgrove, a creative chap with an encyclopaedic musical brain, managed to recruit the cerebral French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard and the enterprising British violinist Daniel Hope, who has recorded an alternative score for the Mendelssohn concerto.

But media giants are no longer in the market for small musical refinements and the view in Hollywood, where DG is owned, is that one artist here or there will not make much difference to the strategic future of classical music. So Cosgrove, his hands tied, had to go - and no sooner was the ink dry on his severance deal than DG announced that it was putting "the majority of its catalogue" online, at triple the sound quality of iTunes, for as little as $1.09 (53 pence) for a seven-minute track, or $10 for an album.

So sudden was this acceleration that artists were not told in advance that their music was going to be downloadable or that the website (www. dgwebshop.com) was free of Digital Rights Management (DRM), which means downloaders are free to copy the files and play them on any format. This was a leap into the unknown, a bid to keep classical recordings alive on the majorlabel-information highway and a seminal-moment in musical transmission. If it succeeds, there is a realistic chance of rekindling classical demand, especially in new Asian markets. If it fails - well, let's not go there.

A decade into the internet revolution, the demand for classical downloads is still too soft to define. Dedicated concertgoers, conservative to a fault, have stuck to buying old-fashioned CDs. Apple runs a classical line at iTunes, but with limited scope (don't go looking for Birtwistle) and delivering a feeble 128-192 kilobits per second (kbps) - barely one-tenth of the density on CD.

Amazon set up stall against iTunes earlier this year and in the US one in seven classical albums is now sold by download. Analysts predict this figure will treble by 2010. In newer markets, such as China, high-resolution downloads may be the best protection available against rampant street-level CD piracy.

DG's Big Bang was designed to protect both its assets and its reputation for musical quality. At 320 kbps, DG downloads are as high-quality as is possible for an MP3 and, though the 2,500 albums available fall short of "a majority of the catalogue" (probably no more than a quarter), there is no doubt that DG has just changed the rules of the classical game.

It is not, however, the only player. EMI, owned by private equity investors Terra Firma, has taken a hard look at release times and decided that a year is too long to wait for a hot performance. If Sir Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic set out to storm Carnegie Hall with Mahler's Ninth Symphony, as they did last month, it seems unreasonable in this day and age that listeners should have to wait until next winter before they can compare Rattle's approach with other interpretations on their shelves.

EMI recorded a pre-tour Mahler Ninth in Berlin and put it online the day after Carnegie Hall. Without public announcement or any reviews, it sold 2,000 downloads through Amazon and other outlets - more than most symphonic CDs manage in a year. The performance itself, transparentlydetailed, is a tad detached on the emotional side for my taste and some of the dance rhythms would perplex Saturday nighters on BBC1, but the speedy release suggests that EMI is attuned to customer needs and alert to opportunity.

This week, EMI puts online the violin concerto by Thomas Adès, a surprisingly elegiac work never previously recorded. To connect with newcomers, the label is also encouraging soloists such as Natalie Clein and Alfie Boe to give free, come-as-you-are recitals at the ballroom in the Royal Festival Hall.

And it's not just the labels that are rewriting the rules. As of today, you can download concerts by London's Philharmonia Orchestra from its new online store (www.philharmonia.co.uk/ shop), the first of its kind in Europe. There are 36 works to choose from in the opening menu, topped by an epic account of the Shostakovich 15th symphony conducted by Kurt Sanderling. There is also a free taster, Nimrod from Elgar's Enigma Variations.

The outcome of these varied manoeuvrings is still far from clear. "We are competing with ourselves on iTunes, with our retailers on Amazon and with our orchestras on their own labels and web shops," wailed one label boss in the throes of his current start-ups.

He had good cause to feel bewildered, but not downcast. After a decade of stagnation, the battle has begun to establish a classical e-space - a onestop shopping centre where a century of recordings and an infinity of future performances can be easily bought and sold.