There aren’t many brands like Ferrari or Lamborghini in classical music. For a long time, Deutsche Grammophon was one of the only ones. It was obvious why: the label stood for tradition, good taste, objects of value, cutting edge technology. When you bought something from Deutsche Grammophon, you knew you were getting a reference recording. True, the quality of the product wasn’t always as high as the impeccable reputation of the brand—at times, the brand brought more prestige to the artist than the artist to the brand. But even for people whose main cultural experience of music was through pop culture, the Deutsche Grammophon records on their parents’ shelves had an irreproducible aura. For a long time.

Deutsche Grammophon Logo
Deutsche Grammophon Spotify App Setup
Deutsche Grammophon The Originals
Deutsche Grammophon Recordings

The story of the crisis that came next has been told often. DG wasn’t the only label to suffer. Across the industry, profits from record sales crashed; the supply of recordings and artists on the market came to outstrip demand; standard repertoire was played so often a kind of interpretation fatigue set in; and a new generation of musicians came of age who didn’t achieve, or even strive for, the cult appeal of earlier stars. The window of time in which to find new business models and ways to profit from digitalization was missed. At some point, the core product DG was offering wasn’t enough to cover larger overhead and administration costs, salaries and fees, advances and marketing budgets. The label reacted to this development by distancing itself further from its core classical business and looking for new customers. And so the things that made the Yellow Label special fell increasingly away. Loyal fans began to look elsewhere for their quality records. Browse through forums for classical music obsessives today, and you’ll find few more common targets for invective than Deutsche Grammophon.

Deutsche Grammophon sells records—a whole different ballgame than concert tickets, which, at least in Europe, are often subsidized by the state. And these days, when you talk to people who sell records for a living and know about the classical music market, there’s no getting around a simple fact: companies must produce more different types of CDs than ever to cover their costs. Still, for premium labels, core brands have been stretched almost to the breaking point to accommodate music at opposite extremes of taste. Mark Wilkinson, who served as CEO of Deutsche Grammophon for the brief period between 2012 and 2015, made strategic bets on crossover projects such as Schiller and indie classical artists from the UK and the U.S. Members of popular bands—Bryce Dessner from The National, Richard Reed Parry from Arcade Fire, Jonny Greenwood from Radiohead—released CDs on Deutsche Grammophon of their own compositions. The hypothesis at the heart of the strategy was that a person who listens to Arcade Fire will also listen to minimal compositions by Arcade Fire’s guitarist. The bet didn’t pay off. In most cases, the artists recorded one album and that was it. And under Wilkinson’s leadership the core classical brand did worse than expected, especially on the key German market, although the label did sign important pianists such as Daniil Trifonov and Grigory Sokolov.

The website for classical music: Find the latest DG and Archiv recordings and news. Biographies, concerts and videos about artists, conductors and composers. Buy as CD / DVD or Download. Deutsche Grammophon, or Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft, has been the main classical music label of German record company Deutsche Grammophon GmbH since 1949. Prior to that date, the label Grammophon was used until 1943, in conjunction with the Nipper dog. Between 1942-1948 the Siemens Spezial label was used. Note: The branding. Deutsche Grammophon (DG), a user on Spotify We and our partners use cookies to personalize your experience, to show you ads based on your interests, and for measurement and analytics purposes. By using our website and our services, you agree to our use of cookies as described in our Cookie Policy. For the first time ever, Deutsche Grammophon unites its complete Pollini recordings into a single Box Set featuring 55 CDs and 3 bonus DVDs: Pollini’s early recordings of works by Boulez, Nono, Prokofiev, Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Webern – readings as up-to-date and relevant as.

In 2015, an executive named Clemens Trautmann replaced the hapless Wilkinson. Shortly before Trautmann officially took up his post, we met him for an informal conversation at a café in Berlin. We talked about positive energy on the classical music scene, musicians with clear artistic profiles, and exciting places where music was being made. I got the impression that Trautmann was ready to move on from his predecessor’s approach. He was a natural choice for his new role: a trained clarinetist, he had the knowledge of and the ear for classical music; he was also a former CEO of a successful German online real estate portal, meaning that he knew how to run a modern business and manage people. Trautmann, I thought, would place his chips on returning to a more serious musical core, supporting artists of substance, and searching for long term ways of keeping the business alive.

A year and a half later, it looks like reality has caught up with Trautmann. DG did manage to sign up, or sign back, a few established stars, such as Murray Perahia, Andris Nelsons, and Lang Lang, who returned from Sony. Yet it’s been crossover artists such as Jay Alexander, a singer with an (not ironic) disc entitled “The World is Beautiful,” who have made the albums fly off the shelves. For him and his fellow travelers—like Fernando Varela, who sings a made-for-TV amalgam of watered down funk and tenor pop—DG created a separate brand without the famous Yellow Seal, called Panorama.

Even on the main label, though, the marketing money has continued to pour mainly into the promotion of “genre defying” projects, some of which are even more saccharine and unabashedly commercial than what the company released under Wilkinson. While a few artists, such as Jarvis Cocker, Chilly Gonzales, or Jóhann Jóhannsson, have artistic substance, others are in the same league as those on Panorama. Joep Beving, nicknamed the “gentle giant,” could be accused of producing music that’s a bad knockoff of bad Chopin knockoff Ludovico Einaudi. The reason that this kind of feel-good arpeggiation hasn’t been outsourced to another label is because it works: it taps into the zeitgeist, and it gets results on the streaming platforms. Even Jay Alexander, current number one on German’s classical charts, has an estimated audience of only 930 unique listeners per month on Spotify. Beving has a million and a half.

How much space is there under the new big tent of Deutsche Grammophon? Not enough, it seems, to financially support ambition, substance, and unique artistic endeavor. A result of the organizational brain drain at the firm has been an aesthetic compass where the poles are dictated by marketing needs. DG’s recent exclusive signings have left us cold and confused. On the one hand, they give the impression of having resulted from a soulless corporate brainstorming session; but the criteria and value judgments used in that brainstorming session aren’t even up to date. Usually that’s true from the choice of repertoire up to and including the packaging design and communications strategy.

Some artists, at least, were chosen with a clear target audience in mind. Trautmann’s first signing was the South Korean pianist Cho Seong-Jin, who won the Chopin competition in 2015. DG rushed a CD to market featuring highlights of his performance at the competition, causing a hysterical boom in his home country. The CD shot to the top of the charts—not the classical charts, the real charts—where it beat out all the K-Pop boybands.

But this kind of focused targeting has not been a consistent strategy. Recent addition Víkingur Ólafsson’s debut album of Philip Glass’s Piano Etudes was too avant-garde for the Einaudi fans and too boring for Chopin lovers. “At DG, we’ve known for a long time that Iceland is synonymous with musical creativity,” Trautmann said in a recent issue of the label’s own magazine, KlassikAkzente. That realization came 20 years after Icelandic musicians and bands conquered the worlds of indie rock and electronica. By now, the brand “Made in Iceland” has lost its luster, even in the more mainstream corners of the music world.

Deutsche Grammophon Spotify App