Beethoven bargain download shows his market might

It seems the price point may make a difference after all in classical music.

This week's Billboard 200 had a curious new entry at No. 29: Beethoven. That in itself is not strange. Beethoven is still one of classical music's big sellers. But this debut was a special case, a download-only grouping of 99 of his most famous movements. Consumers saw this as a deal at $7.99 (which is where it stands now), but the real push up the charts came when Amazon offered the "The 99 Most Essential Beethoven Masterpieces (X5 Music Group)" downloads for just $1.99 last week, leading to around 21,000 copies being sold.

It was "the only album to bow inside the top 50 of The Billboard 200," wrote Katie Hasty on Billboard's Web site.

The musicians are largely legit. There are some unknowns, but the downloads include the likes of Alfred Brendel, the Fine Arts Quartet and the London Symphony Orchestra. There's also a Mozart "99" and presumably there will be more, because of the success of the Beethoven set at either price.

The biggest complaint, culled from the reader reviews on Amazon.com, appears to be a toss-up between downloading problems with such a big file and the fact that there are only individual movements, not full works (with the exception of his Ninth Symphony, but that is even spread out rather than presented consecutively).

I will second the concern of the latter. While it is great to get all this music for bargain rate, it's a mistake to listen to classical music piecemeal. It's akin to ripping out a chapter of a novel or seeing only a part of a film -- the movements are out of context and you miss so much by jumping in late or leaving early. If down-loaders only hear this music as isolated bits and melodies, they are not getting the full impact, the fully story of each greater piece. This is not like ripping a song off of most pop CDs.

But if this kind of discount download leads people to try this music on seriously for the first time, perhaps they will get hooked (I believe Beethoven still has that sort of power) and then can go to listening to the complete works. And if that happens, these bytes of Beethoven are a very good thing.