THIS WEBSITE IS IN THE COURSE OF BEING DEVELOPED AND IS FOR IDICATIVE PURPOSES ONLY

   SUMMARY

      This is a website dedicated to serious music in South Africa.

The site consists of three main components

1.                  An integrated calendar of music events in Cape Town, Pretoria Johannesburg and Durban.

2.                  An integrated index of serious musicians and composers with relevant CV’s

3.                  A mechanism for promoting, selling, warehousing, distributing and storing music of both commercial and non commercial CD’s for electronic downloading as sample tracks or whole CD’s.

This website will provide an invaluable resource of serious music for performers, composers, organizers and the music listening public.

When sufficient traffic has built up it will be self sustaining from advertising income.

MOTIVATION

It is trite to say that the world is changing, but this is undoubtedly true in the world of music.

Traditionally only world class or renowned musicians would produce records or in the last decade CD’s.

Now with the evolution of electronics and the internet it is now possible for any performer to produce a CD at relatively low cost.

However, unless the CD has large popular appeal, the bigger music production and marketing companies will not fund, promote or distribute these “privately produced” CD’s.

The musicians are for the most part not commercially savvy and are unskilled in promotion and marketing.

They are however keen to produce their own CD’s, both as a tangible record of their performances, as well as a promotional tool (a musical CV).

They also hope to sell these CD’s, but for reasons mentioned above, most are unsuccessful, other then those sales made by the artist at their concerts.

Our market research with musicians indicate an overwhelming desire to have a central repository where the public can hear and or buy their CD’s, promote their careers and as  a secondary benefit  recoup monies already spent on producing the CD.

Another paradigm shift is the method of distributing and listening to music.

The advent of the MP3 personal player the IPOD etc. together with the increasing access to the internet has forever changed the way music will be distributed and stored.

It has become common to see people in the street on trains in cars etc. listening to their IPODS which store an unbelievable number of CD’s, and an enormous volume of music can be downloaded off the web off sites like Buymusic (500,000 tracks), Musicmatch (80,000 tracks)MSNmusic (1,000,000 tracks)

HOWEVER ONLY A VERY SMALL AMOUNT OF SERIOUS MUSIC IS AVAILABLE ON THESE SITES.

Some amazing statistics:-

iTunes sold 200 million tracks over the net in 2004 .

The sales of IPODS were 10 million units by 2005.

In 2005 40% of USA’s 177 million net users went online for music.

Apple has just launched its iPhone a combination cell phone and ipod.

The director of the Hout Bay Music Project which is involved in teaching music to under-privileged children in the informal settlement in Hout Bay, believes that the proposed website will offer a viable method of listening to serious music for those who can in no way afford buying CD’s.

www.classicalmusic.co.za will have a profound effect on the access to independently produced CD’s.

The calendar section of the website will allow concert planners, musicians and the music listening public to quickly and easily gain access to the music available up to a year in advance and will hopefully avoid clashes with other performances and allow the public to find what is available where and when and a summary of the details about the performers, soloists, works to be performed etc.

Hopefully this will be expanded to a simple on-line booking system.

Any approved Musician, Ensemble, Music Society or Orchestra can submit requests to be listed on the calendar in return for advertising the “www.classicalmusic.co.za” website on their programs.

The CV section will provide an integrated alphabetical list of musicians and will be sorted by instrument and geographical location with CV’s photos, email addresses, contact numbers and other pertinent details.

This will undoubtedly improve promotion and bookings for the musicians and be an invaluable resource for arrangers, organizers and impresarios.

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