Richard Todd, a critic for the Ottawa Citizen, posted a comment on my previous entry about Naxos of America and MusicGiants, noting that downloads from the online music store cost as much as a CD and wondering what advantage MusicGiants offers the consumer.
Todd didn’t cite any specific examples but I just did a couple of price comparisons. Naxos’s John Adams recording with Marin Alsop and the Bournemouth Symphony, recently cited in a New York Times feature on minimalism, costs $9.03 to download on MusicGiants but is only $7.99 on classical music CD site Arkivmusic.com and on iTunes. On the other hand, Alsop’s recording of Barber’s Knoxville, Summer of 1915, costs only $5.16 on MusicGiants, about $4.00 cheaper than the Naxos suggested retail price of $8.99. Of course, in both cases, downloaders don’t get the liner notes available with a CD.
Outside of the Naxos realm, Daniel Hope’s East Meets West, which came up as a featured release on the classical page, retails on MusicGiants at $15.29, which is a little less expensive than the Amazon price of $16.98.
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