A NY Times Magazine article on Charlotte Church revealed this tangential bit of information on the classical recordings industry: “When CD’s became available in the 80’s, classical music aficionados began going through their records and replacing them, album by album, with digital versions. The result was a decade of vigorous sales, during which labels merely repackaged the same music into ever more expensive collections and sat back to count the revenues. But now the changeover to disc is largely complete, and sales are down by nearly half, according to some estimates.” The result of this trend is the use of pop music marketing tactics. To me this means selling the fluff instead of the substance, which often also means appealing to the masses. But it also seems to take more money to push the fluff, leaving even less to spread around to those who aren’t a flavor of the moment. Anyway, classical music sales were probably saved by the release of CDs and would have dived sooner without them. Perhaps it will take a new technology to spike it up again (and that won’t be Napster). But if the fluff gets more people interested in the classics, more power to the ’em!