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This blogger, Richard Gehr, is not an employee of AARP. The opinions expressed in the blog are not necessarily the opinions of AARP and AARP assumes no liability for the content posted by Mr. Gehr or any other participant

Richard Gehr | November 29, 2007

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Century-old classical-recordings company Deutsche Grammophon opened its online store, the DG Web Shop, yesterday, with some 2,500 albums in its inventory. The site's music has been encoded at an audiophile-delighting bitrate of 320 kilobits per second (compare to iTunes's 128 kilobits-per-second encoding). Pricing is flexible, and, unlike iTunes, encourages the purchase of entire albums. The CD featuring Hélène Grimaud's "Emperor" piano concerto, for example, costs $11.99 in its entirety (including a booklet file), with separate movements ranging from $1.99 for the eight-minute Adagio to $4.69 for the 20-minute Allegro. And Anne-Sophie Mutter's "Simply Anne-Sophie" costs nearly twice as much when purchased as individual tracks rather than as a single $11.99 album (with a booklet). Be careful when signing up for the site's newsletter, though. The checkout process ate my voucher and ended up charging me for the free track I was promised in exchange for my e-mail address.

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