When I was at university, I took a job at a Sam Goody record shop in New Jersey. Sam Goody, a retail brand that is on life support today, was a thriving chain of mall-based music shops in the early 1990s when I was on the payroll. They charged anywhere from $12-$15 for a CD and paid us unmotivated college kids about $6 an hour. Needless to say, the customer experience was dreadful.

We would scheme collectively to avoid any contact whatsoever with the customer. Often, this meant picking up an official looking piece of paper from the till and ducking into the cramped back office when things got busy, leaving customers to navigate solo the aisles of carelessly-tended alphabetised racks. The most confounding aisle of all – and, perhaps anywhere in the modern retail experience – was the classical music rack. Nobody could agree on how to organise it. By composer? By artist? By period?

The neglect was evident.

Try asking a shaggy-haired teenager whether we had in stock a particular Seattle Philharmonic Orchestra performance of Chopin. Any one of us could have told you something intelligent about the emerging Seattle grunge scene, but not one of us knew whether Chopin could be found under “C” or “S”.

If there’s one thing I learned from my 5-month career in the music business, it’s this: pop music can be sold by even the most uncooperative dolt. Classical music, meanwhile, should be the domain of experts. Mercifully, the internet is eradicating from the planet this unique retail model in which the vendor, knowing insultingly little about the product, dictates the terms of the transaction.

A recent case in point is the launch last week of DG Web Shop, a download store operated by Universal Music’s renowned 110-year-old classical music label Deutsche Grammophon.

The shop, which operates in 42 countries, far more than iTunes, and includes virgin territories such as China, India, Russia, Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe, is unique on several levels. Firstly, track downloads come in the form of a high-fidelity MP3, completely stripped of DRM. Also, the audio quality is a near CD-quality 320 kilobits-per-second, packing more than twice the fidelity of a typical 128 kbps iTunes track. With the tracks varying in length from a few minutes to a half-hour and more, pricing is variable (the minimum is $/€1.09 per track), encouraging customers to mix and match, a rarity in the album-only world of classical music. And, because they are sold without a layer of digital rights management protection, the tracks can be played on any device, and burned to a compact disc.

To borrow an expression from my Pearl Jam-impassioned ex-colleagues at Sam Goody, “Woooah, dude!”

Universal saw the need to open up an online shop after noticing a quarter of a million classical music fans each month visiting the Deutsche Grammophon site from around the world, primarily finding their way there to research a purchase.

“Classical music customers are demanding. They know precisely what they want and want to find it in the highest quality available,” says Jonathan Gruber, vice president of new media Classics & Jazz, Universal Music Group International. “That customer has not been well served.”

“They’re a different breed of customer. They need a different breed of shop,” he added.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that one of the more enlightened online music retail models -- one that emphasises music quality, choice and expert advice – emerges in the classical music genre. As evidenced by all the newsgroups and niche sites catering to this market segment, these consumers are fervent followers of the genre. They have long been neglected on the high street, where shrinking shelf space and a slacker sales staff conspire to frustrate even the most straightforward sales query.

For their years of suffering, a high-fidelity, DRM-free, multi-national download store is a just reward. Of course, the same could be said of fans of jazz and blues, R&B, rap, and pop as well.

---

Bernhard Warner, a freelance journalist and media consultant, writes about technology, the internet and media industries. He can be reached at techscribe@gmail.com

Times recommends

• Tech world prepares for cut-price Apple laptops
• Google takes sober look at drunken e-mails
• BlackBerry Storm joins the touchscreen scrum