A really good little post by Digital Audio Insider put me onto an article in the Washington Post about a new website seeking to open up the online digital download classical music market. The Classical Archives was born out of the frustration the founder experienced trying to buy classical music on sites like iTunes that have been built using the language of modern pop music. Modern music in the online age is filtered into genres, performed by artists and titled with a song and album title but this system doesn’t allow for the language of classical music which likes to include information on composers, arrangers, soloists, orchestras, conductors, keys and even historical periods when categorizing music. As the reporter explains…

“When online shoppers type “Beethoven” into iTunes, the top results they get back include a rock medley by the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, an uncredited recording of “Für Elise” and individual movements culled from greatest hits collections. It’s not that the music seller is skimping on the composer — customers can find complete works by browsing deeper in the iTunes classical section — it’s just that his oeuvre doesn’t fit neatly on the virtual shelves with that of Miley Cyrus and the Black Eyed Peas.”

The solution for Technology entrepreneur Pierre Schwob was to work with a team of eight musicologists to vet and categorize all of the music contained on the store. The result is a hugely detailed catalog of classical music with a highly effective search engine that helps recommend and select music for you based on your tastes and search criteria. The site’s main selling point seems to be not only it’s vast collection of music but the sheer about of knowledge and love that has gone into curating it. The feeling that seems to emulate from the experience is like going into one of those old fashioned specialist classical music shops with the various quirky old men behind the counter where you know the place is built solely for classical music and merely humming anything else is considered blasphemous.

iTunes will continue to dominate until the likes of Amazon start to catch up but these are the huge big supermarkets of selling music. They are the HMV, Virgin Megastore and Woolworths of the online music world which may well have a copy of the music you want but will have it tucked away in a corner of the shop behind all the latest chart releases. While people are still morning the slow death of the specialist independent record shop where you could go and pick up the latest obscure record release or just sit on the listening station for an hour and discover something new and crazy they are slowly being replaced by new online equivalents. One of my favorite online stores for independent music is Amie Street who not only deliver me some great free music to my inbox every week but also give the artists a great deal on the sales.

Trying to survive against the size and might of an industry leader like iTunes is tough as its fast becoming the first place people go to find and buy music but various websites are carving themselves out a niche by focusing on a genre and doing it better than everybody else. It’ll be interesting to see if every genre has it’s own ‘classical archive’ style site in the future or if they’ll all just get swallowed up by the ever expanding iRevolution.