On Monday, Jul 30, 2007, at 07:41 America/Los_Angeles, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Purely anecdotal evidence to the contrary: All of the > upper-end stores that sell CDs in my area have removed > their "Early Music" catagories. At the same time > their "Classical Music" sections have shrunk > dramatically. > > I'm not so terribly far from Chicago, a very large > city, but even there I've had quite a bit of > difficulty finding very many Early Music recordings, > whether classed along with other EM CDs or mixed in > with the classical albums in general. I think it's a mistake to confuse the state of early music, which is good, with the state of classical music CD retailing, which is going through upheaval. The record store as we know it is dying: the large store that keeps a big, varied inventory is now a rarity. The conventional wisdom is that the internet is wiping it out, just as it is wiping out a lot of other types of retailing. It used to be that I could run over to Tower Records and find what I wanted (or needed for research) on the spur of the moment. Now I have to look it up and mail-order it. This really doesn't tell you much about what is being recorded or what people are listening to. To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
