Deutsche Grammophon celebrates the DG Web Shop’s first anniversary with unique, new features and more freedom of choice
Mail-order for CDs and DVDs in Europe, music downloads in LossLess quality, and a new “stream-before-purchase” option
Hamburg, December 2008 – Deutsche Grammophon again makes news with its upgrade of the DG Web Shop – raising the bar for the global online music business.
CDs, DVDs, and Blu-ray Available in Europe for Mail-order
Entering its second successful year, the DG Web Shop now adds a European mail-order service for CD, DVD, and Blu-ray titles. Mail-order prices for single CDs range from €8.99 to €19.99; single DVDs sell for €24.99; Blu-ray titles cost €29.99. In addition to this physical fulfillment service for Europe, a unique “stream before purchase” option will be unveiled for international consumers, featuring seven-day Internet auditions of all audio albums sold online – for only €/$0.99 each.
LossLess Downloads Arrive
Further improvement of Deutsche Grammophon’s audio-download quality: the DG Web Shop will be the first major-label online music-shop offering music downloads in LossLess quality on a global scale.
While our acclaimed DRM-free MP3 320-kbps files remain the standard for DG Web Shop download technology, as part of the Web Shop’s enhancement, a roll-out of the first fifty Deutsche Grammophon titles will be downloadable in the widely used LossLess FLAC format as well, with more LossLess titles forthcoming. FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec, an audio format that compresses a CD quality audio file down to half of its size without any loss in quality.
More New DG Web Shop Features for Everybody
Also new on December 2, Deutsche Grammophon’s cutting-edge technology brings back the joy of “browsing through a record shop”. The DG Web Shop's new browsing feature – also known as “Cover Flow” – now offers online consumers the nostalgic record-store experience of flicking through albums, browsing one cover at a time, pausing to pick out an album to read the back-cover’s track list – all online.
This is where the elegance of the DG Web Shop’s new online experience really kicks in. In record stores past you could take an album out of the rack and ask the clerk to let you listen to it in a listening booth. In the DG Web Shop you buy instead a 7-day stream for €/$0.99 and listen to it as much and as often as you like over the next week. And if you decide to buy that album, you'll get your 99 cents credited toward the purchase.
Another new consumer-friendly feature is the “Tour the Catalog” section. Rotating weekly, it presents a new selection of ca. 25 releases from the legendary Deutsche Grammophon catalog, grouped into five topics. These topics are chosen to attract both casual and experienced listeners. For example, one topic is devoted to presenting a specific piece of repertoire in contrasting interpretations by DG stars of yesterday and today – offering a rich diversity, opened up by the Listening Booth function.
A Successful First Year
With 50,000 registered customers – growing by over 1,000 per month – the DG Web Shop’s market-reach has now quadrupled to over 180 countries during its first year of operation. It’s on track to make almost €500,000 in download sales in its first year. The DG Web Shop is second only to iTunes globally in internet sales of classical music – with the US, Germany, the UK, France, and Brazil as DG’s top-5 online markets.
With 70% of the DG Web Shop’s sales comprising older “catalog titles”, it shows the wealth of DG’s incomparable catalog. The DG Web Shop’s “long-tail” is further demonstrated by nearly 1,000 out-of-print titles accounting for 15% of sales. Unlike many purchasers of pop music, DG Web Shoppers favor downloading entire albums to single tracks by an 80/20 ratio.
Summing-up, the DG Web Shop now offers up to four formats of a single title – and at the same time improves the navigation of the site. Visually appealing, and filled with detailed information about the performers and their music, it is the online destination for the music connoisseur and novice alike.
www.dgwebshop.com
