BIS Records taken over by Apple

[Brian]

Perhaps the will make them available via download and/or streaming?

PD

It looks likely - I have seen a lot of Finlandia albums come up on Qobuz streaming recently and they just included some in the Paavo Berglund complete EMI/Finlandia box set. Honestly, the biggest challenge finding them on streaming now is that because the catalogue was buried for so long, people may not even know what is in it. Certainly when I see Finlandia releases in my search, they are all a surprise.

[Spotted Horses]

A promotional email I received recently from eclassical noted that they were working on a "new" web site. I also noticed that BIS recordings started appearing with Dolby Atmos, which their various models of AirPods require for spatial audio. Assimilation may be starting.

[CRCulver]

What happened there?

PD

Warner bought the Finlandia label as part of acquiring the vaster Fazer Music holdings. The lucrative part there was said to be the music-publishing side; Warner had little interest in the Finlandia record label itself. After the Warner purchase, some Finlandia recordings were reissued in Warner's budget line Apex, but otherwise the catalogue was allowed to go out of print.

With regard to BIS, I'm trying to buy the BIS SACDs that interest me as quickly as I can, since I am not optimistic that physical media will be available for long after the Apple purchase. Yet even though I do purchase the discs, I would prefer to have SACD rips, because I listen to music mainly through a media server connected to my stereo, but I don't own a hacked Playstation 3 or other player that allows ripping the surround layer of SACDs. In the past, you could count on the Russian filesharing community to rip the SACD layer and make it available, but this is no longer happening (perhaps the community there is no longer getting BIS SACDs, or the young men involved have fled Russia to avoid mobilization and are no longer involved in the scene).

[Que]

The physical disc is a dying medium anyway... And it make sense to expect a company that has no focus on it, to abandon it some point in the near future.

I'm kind of hoping for a closing "big bang" with the issue of big box sets from the back catalogue. And I'm counting on the increased availability of used discs in the decades to come.

[Roasted Swan]

A promotional email I received recently from eclassical noted that they were working on a "new" web site. I also noticed that BIS recordings started appearing with Dolby Atmos, which their various models of AirPods require for spatial audio. Assimilation may be starting.

resistance is futile......

[Madiel]

The physical disc is a dying medium anyway... And it make sense to expect a company that has no focus on it, to abandon it some point in the near future.

I'm kind of hoping for a closing "big bang" with the issue of big box sets from the back catalogue. And I'm counting on the increased availability of used discs in the decades to come.

Right, the physical disc is a dying medium... unless it's made of vinyl in which case every pop star issues several collectors editions.

Remember when vinyl died? I do. So watching it reappear has been kind of amusing.

[Roy Bland]

The physical disc is a dying medium anyway... And it make sense to expect a company that has no focus on it, to abandon it some point in the near future.

I'm kind of hoping for a closing "big bang" with the issue of big box sets from the back catalogue. And I'm counting on the increased availability of used discs in the decades to come.

[Maestro267]

Right, the physical disc is a dying medium... unless it's made of vinyl in which case every pop star issues several collectors editions.

Remember when vinyl died? I do. So watching it reappear has been kind of amusing.

Even more so the cassette revival. So the CD revival IS coming. And I'll be here waiting like "I never left, baby!"

[Todd]

And straight from the RIAA: U.S. MUSIC REVENUE DATABASE

Physical media are for hipsters and nostalgists and deluded audiophiles and niche market customers. 

[71 dB]

The physical disc is a dying medium anyway...

This is nonsense. Physical media has simply become a semi-niche product. There will always be a minority wanting physical media and therefore there will always be market for it, just not mass market like in the past.

[Maestro267]

Exactly. It's been dying for about 15 years at this point, but not actually dead by simple virtue of them still releasing CDs now.

[Brian]

The most amazing part of Todd's chart is that people paid money for ringtones.

I still haven't fully figured out my plan with the choice between CD, streaming, and hi-res download. I love the flexibility of streaming, but don't control when they remove albums or change business models. I love the portability of downloads, but the other day remembered a whole series of Chandos hi-res albums I purchased but never put on my phone. Both CDs and downloads also have the storage issue - physical space in the house or on a hard drive.

Now that streaming services like Qobuz include a temporary right to download an album for offline listening, I'm not sure there's any point at all to purchasing MP3 or FLAC. Before hopping on a plane, I just "rent" stuff from Qobuz.

[Pohjolas Daughter]

Warner bought the Finlandia label as part of acquiring the vaster Fazer Music holdings. The lucrative part there was said to be the music-publishing side; Warner had little interest in the Finlandia record label itself. After the Warner purchase, some Finlandia recordings were reissued in Warner's budget line Apex, but otherwise the catalogue was allowed to go out of print.

Thanks for the info!

PD

[DavidW]

Right, the physical disc is a dying medium... unless it's made of vinyl in which case every pop star issues several collectors editions.

Remember when vinyl died? I do. So watching it reappear has been kind of amusing.

Yes, but it has been overhyped with misleading figures.  Vinyl has commanded surprisingly high marketshare... but that is not based upon volume but upon the absurdly high price of lps.  By unit sales, cds and digital downloads just completely overwhelm vinyl.  The news that they were outselling cds was just highly misleading.  And of course streaming mops the floor with all three formats combined for overall marketshare.

But yeah it is weird to see lps in stores again.

[Spotted Horses]

Vinyl is a pretty small niche market, and I think it remains pretty close to dead. Yes, the most popular artists can release a vinyl version of their albums. What fraction of the catalog is available on vinyl?

The vinyl revival is made possible by the fact that it is a 1950 technology. You have to spin a disk on an axle at constant rate. You need to suspend a pickup cartridge on a rod with low friction bearings. You need to make a cantilever with a diamond chip on one end and a tiny magnet on the other end, and put a pair of pickup coils near the magnet. LPs have very poor performance, so you don't have to do any of that very well to duplicate the experience of listening to your old Szell records back in the day.

The CD player has very fast, very high resolution servo systems so that an optical pickup tracks cylindrical strings of little pits in an aluminum film on a jiggling, wobbling disc with scratches, fingerprints and schmutz. It transforms the morse-code-like sequence of blips to audio data, including error correction. It is cheap because it has all been condenses into integrated chip-sets, there is a lot of technical infrastructure behind it. It will be hard for hipsters to duplicate that technology after it is gone. And if you do all that it sounds utterly indistinguishable from streaming a FLAC file.

How about I make a device where you go to the store, buy a silver disc for $50, and when you put it in my special player it reads 10 bytes of meta data and streams the file from Apple Music?

[DavidW]

Now that streaming services like Qobuz include a temporary right to download an album for offline listening, I'm not sure there's any point at all to purchasing MP3 or FLAC. Before hopping on a plane, I just "rent" stuff from Qobuz.

Wait?  What do you mean now?  I remember downloading from streaming services on my ipod touch in the late 00s.

Of course there is a point: which is owning what you love.  If you depend on the album being on Qobuz you will REGRET IT.  Just yesterday we were talking about how the famous, classic Fitzwilliam set of Shostakovich SQs, which is just not available to stream in its entirety.

And if you stop paying for Qobuz, you would lose access to your rentals.  If the internet goes out, and all you did was stream you would not be able to listen to music.  But if you had cds and digital downloads, it would not be a problem.  If you owned that Fitzwilliam set, then if Qobuz, Spotify etc. took it out of their catalog (well really the publisher) you would still be able to listen to it.

[DavidW]

How about I make a device where you go to the store, buy a silver disc for $50, and when you put it in my special player it reads 10 bytes of meta data and streams the file from Apple Music?

Well that is actually what happened to video games.  It used to be you could buy a cd/dvd/bd of the game and it would install the whole thing or play it off the disc.  But now it usually is the case that there is only a small amount of data on the disc, and the rest is downloaded... or they just provide a code.  It really hurts people with slow internet because games these days are usually 100+ GB in size.  And also there is no posterity.  If it is yanked off the server, you can't play the game even if you have that physical copy (since it was incomplete).  And that has happened to people before.

[Brian]

Wait?  What do you mean now?  I remember downloading from streaming services on my ipod touch in the late 00s.

Uh...now that I know about it?    (For many years I used Naxos Music Library, which doesn't offer that.)

Of course there is a point: which is owning what you love.  If you depend on the album being on Qobuz you will REGRET IT.  Just yesterday we were talking about how the famous, classic Fitzwilliam set of Shostakovich SQs, which is just not available to stream in its entirety.

Yup, exactly. The Barshai Shostakovich isn't on streaming either (at least the ones I use) and I've been wondering if I sold my box copy or not...because if I sold it I'll regret it!

[DavidW]

Uh...now that I know about it?    (For many years I used Naxos Music Library, which doesn't offer that.)
Yup, exactly. The Barshai Shostakovich isn't on streaming either (at least the ones I use) and I've been wondering if I sold my box copy or not...because if I sold it I'll regret it!

Oh yeah sad!  I think that was why I rebought Suitner's Dvorak symphony set.  That brilliant box set was just not available to stream.  Maybe now.  For most people not having a specific recording is a big nothing burger.  But for us insane, obsessed, collectors IT IS THE WORLD!

[Brian]

Oh yeah sad!  I think that was why I rebought Suitner's Dvorak symphony set.  That brilliant box set was just not available to stream.  Maybe now.  For most people not having a specific recording is a big nothing burger.  But for us insane, obsessed, collectors IT IS THE WORLD!

I only want what I can't have. All those millions of other albums? Eh. The one that's missing? That's the only thing for me!