Passionato launches today, giving classical music lovers the opportunity to browse, sample and download single tracks, works or albums from its catalogue of classical music recordings. Tracks are available from its store in superior audio quality (320kbps MP3 or lossless FLAC). All of the music is DRM-free, which allows music purchased on Passionato to be transferred to any computer or portable audio player – including Apple’s market-dominating iPod – and burned to CD without any restrictions.
Post-launch Passionato will continue to sign-up more independent labels, and to add new releases from the key major and independent labels on a weekly basis.
Passionato is free to join, with no subscription and with highly competitive, flexible pricing according to whether users download tracks, works or albums. Users will be able to download free beta software – the Player – which allows them to organise all the music they download alongside any music they import (rip) from their classical CD collections. Passionato’s extensive recording information (metadata) means the Player can identify any classical CD a user imports by matching it with Passionato’s own database, providing instant information on, for example, composer, date of recording, record label, recording location, recording producer, recording engineer and period.
Passionato’s Store allows users to listen to samples of up to 60 seconds of every track in its catalogue, and to browse by composer (subdivided by period, e.g. Baroque, Renaissance or Romantic, or by nationality), by artist (subdivided by voice, e.g. mezzo-soprano or baritone, or by nationality) and by record label.
In this way, users can roam Passionato’s store freely, discovering new recordings without having to pay a penny. The Passionato Store also features the Passionato team’s own expert recommendations on highly rated works, thousands of reviews from national media and specialist music publications, and a regularly updated chart. Users can rate works using the Player, an easy method of sorting favourite pieces.
Passionato also encourages musical debate amongst classical music lovers within its dedicated Community section. The forums provide a place for quick-fire debate on a wide range of topics.
In the spirit of discovering and sharing classical music, Passionato includes a number of Web 2.0 features. Users can post links to their favourite classical albums on 34 of the most popular online social networks, including Facebook and MySpace, directing friends to the Passionato Store where they can hear free audio samples. Users can also send personal recommendations/links to their friends directly via email via the ‘Send to a Friend’ function, and bookmark their favourites using sites such as Del.icio.u.s.
To coincide with Passionato’s launch, everyone who registers at passionato.com can claim 10 free pre-selected tracks, one of which is which is an entire 30-minute work (current pre-selected work is Saint-Saens’ Symphony No.3).
James Glicker, Founder and CEO of Passionato, carried out the preliminary research for Passionato while living in the US after he finished a two-year term as President of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. James’s twenty years in the music industry include positions as Head of Worldwide Marketing at BMG Classics, Managing Director of BMG Australia and President of MusicNow.
“I’m an avid consumer of classical music myself and, having worked in the industry for twenty years, I am aware of how technology and the internet are becoming increasingly a part of how people access, consume and share knowledge about classical music. Passionato is delighted to have the cooperation of the largest majors and we will over the next six months and beyond be signing up even more labels – all with the ultimate goal of presenting people who love classical music with an easy and cost effective way of organising and expanding their music collections,” Glicker said in the press release
The UK recorded music industry association, the BPI, adds: “Digital distribution already offers great choice as to how music fans can access and enjoy music online, and its potential is even greater. We expect the new Passionato service will greatly enhance the digital music offering for classical music aficionados and we warmly welcome innovation of this type in music retail.”
Passionato is here.
I can’t wait for this stuff on the P2P networks.
This is PHENOMENAL news! Thank you MDN for posting it!!! As soon as they get their servers back up, I’m all over this download. And Saint-Saens’ “Organ” Symphony is a fantastic choice for a free first download — it’s a gloriously cinematic piece and a a glowing example of French romanticism. Everybody go get this.
What about this “Zune” device? i have heard that they make great suppositories, in addition to their music-playing abilities.
Classical on P2P? I doubt that stuff specifically bought and downloaded from Passionato will ever end up on P2P. People who buy and listen to classical are, on the average, of significantly higher education and income. They would have no reason to steal or facilitate theft via P2P. They could probably offer free downloads with voluntary payments, and people would still pay.
While this thing is shaping up to be the direct competition to iTunes (and I’m sure labels are working hard to make it successful), it is probably good to see some competition, as insignificant as it may be in the end. What might help would be a smooth iTunes/iPod integration (like the Amazon dowlnoad utility), and Mac compatibility. Without any or all of those, as great as this Passionato sounds, it’s unlikely to make a noticable dent on iTunes.
A welcome site,indeed!
I was able to get to their home page, but not much further. And it’s pretty slow. I kept being directed to a technical problems apology page. Too bad.
From what I could see, even though they mention having a catalogue of 18,000 recordings, it seemed a bit limited. There’s no complete listing of composers. The list of genres is also set up strangely; Bruckner, Mendelssohn, Bruch and Dvorak are listed as Post-Romantic. HUH?
The few recordings I was able to view didn’t have samples or even sellable tracks available. And what the heck is Lossless FLAC? Unless I’m mistaken, it certainly isn’t iPod compatible.
I’ll probably check again in a day or so and see if their servers can handle the traffic.
I still prefer CDs, with a booklet, cover art, liner notes, libretti. I can rip them to iTunes at will. Even so, it’s good to have a site like this appear.
Wow, as an avid collector of classical music myself, I am very happy to see this. I only wish they were using AAC instead of MP3, since 320 kb/s MP3s are pretty huge… but they should sound nice. I’ll have to buy a couple of albums and see!
In any case, yay!
@Pedrag
Not quite a direct competitor, considering that Passionato will only carry classical music and will likely only ever be concerned about it, and iTunes carries everything, it’s kinda like a high-quality shoe store being a direct competitor to walmart.
A 320 kb/s MP3 can be converted to AAC in iTunes for a smaller file with virtually no loss of fidelity.
@Mr. Reeee
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I prefer CDs too. I have the CDs of everything on my iPhone.
Something even better, the gold Master Recording of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road by Elton John is now going for $110. Try doing that with a digital download.
Ran into a few issues…
1) signing up didn’t send me any confirmation email
2) they seem to have a poor (and slow!) download implementation — right-click to download zip file — ??? My first attempts failed.
@McIntosh,
Can’t argue with that. I wholeheartedly agree.
I wonder if they restrict purchases to “the territory” like iTunes does? Hopefully one day those responsible will get over their “territorial” license obsession and let us purchase music, T.V. shows, movies from anywhere. A “special event” can announce “revolutionary” thinking like that. At least let us send a gift certificate to someone in another country! Surely that isn’t too hard to figure out?
I think they’re a bit overloaded. This site has great potential though. Will keep checking it.
Great idea. It’s a nice site but the albums are expensive. May as well get the CDs and rip them.
down: This is clearly not an American site. It’s evident from a few minutes there. So, in other words, I imagine they’re pretty multi-national.
It looks promising, but (without being overly familiar with the current Euro to USD exchange rate) the albums did seem expensive, and there isn’t much downloadable music on the site yet. They’re probably still in the ramp-up stage though.
@ Mr. Reeee: Like you, I still prefer CDs over downloads. One reason for this is very few services offer lossless downloads.
FLAC is an open source format. Yet despite FLAC gaining more-and-more acceptance among audiophiles, Apple refuses to support the format in iTunes or on the iPod. I own an iPod, and I personally have thousands of tracks in the FLAC format (ripped from my CD collection). Since I could care less about the iTunes Store, I use a program called Foobar2000 to manage my music, sync with my iPod, etc. With the appropriate plugins installed, Foobar2000 converts my FLACs “on-the-fly” into iPod-compatible formats. Especially since totally turning off the iTunes Store is now the only way to get rid of the arrow-style links to the iTunes Store in iTunes 8, I don’t feel that I’m missing anything using Foobar2000 instead of iTunes.