I don’t know about the States, but the dominant classical CD label in England is Naxos, who more or less invented the paperback CD here — costs £5.00 and made by Lithuanians. I bought quite a lot of them when I was trying to educate myself, but later decided they weren’t often good value for money. None the less, they have been a huge and deserved success, and have probably done a lot to force other labels to bring out their paperback lines (Sony Classics, and so on).
This morning it was announced that the whole Naxos catalogue is available through Emusic. this matters not just because it’s downloadable, but because they are actually selling the music. Though you pay by subscription, which gives a fixed number of downloads a month, the music comes in high-quality MP3, without DRM; once you have it you may store it as you like, legally and technologically.
Mind you, if you’re just looking for a bit of Schumann, stream this.
Er… what’s DRM? I’m assuming it’s the gizmo which attempts to make the file unburnable and unusable in any other format. It’s easily worked round…
Digital Rights Management. Some of it is easily worked round, some less so. I have a program called Total Recorder which ought to work round every known form, but why take the chance?