The Andante Label

The shelves of record stores are filled these days with magazines, fan items, video cassettes, and DVD's, while CDs are gradually disappearing. Part of the crisis in the record industry is the Internet; despite expensive litigation, record labels cannot prevent an increasing number of fans from downloading their favorite pop songs from the Web. At the same time, large record labels have drastically reduced their investment in classical recordings, which used to be viewed as boosting their image. But there is a label in New York which bucks the trend - Andante sells neatly-packaged reproductions of historical recordings through the Internet. The web page of Andante (www.andante.com), however, is meant to be more than just a record label. For a subscription price of approximately nine Euros per month, visitors of the web site are entitled to listen to streaming of concerts via Internet. The subscription package also includes access to Grove's Dictionary of Music, dissertations in musicology, and concert schedules from all over the world. One of the co-founders of this label is a lawyer, whom Georg Hirsch visited at his law firm in New York.

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