How does Kimiko Ishizaka get over 3,000 people a day to view The Goldberg Variations on YouTube, and stream The Well-Tempered Clavier more than 1.5 million times on services like Spotify? Through her conviction that the music of Bach (and Chopin, and Beethoven, and Schubert...) is for everyone.

How many is a lot of people on the Internet?

In Charlotte Gardner's insightful Gramophone article discussing streaming services and the classical music industry, record label executives fret about the apparent shrinking audience for classical music. The British classical market has shrunk by half since 1999, for example, currently only representing 3% of total music consumption. To counter this trend, the Open Goldberg Variations and Open Well-Tempered Clavier projects specifically aimed to bring new audiences into the world of J.S. Bach, and to introduce them to the piano playing of Kimiko Ishizaka.

‘If the classical industry is to survive long term then it needs to find some fresh customers fast’ - Charlotte Gardner

The strategy was two-fold: first, ask fans to participate in the funding and creation of the recordings by pledging payments in advance on the crowdfunding website Kickstarter.com. This eliminates the risk that Hyperion Records CEO Simon Perry cites when pondering how his organisation will pay for new recordings in the future. Kimiko's fans funded her recordings in advance, so there was no risk in bringing them to market. Second, Kimiko strategically decided to release her recordings using a Creative Commons license. This was done to maximise the reach of the recordings - thus overcoming the 3% problem.

‘I don't have a pot of gold at the bottom of my garden' - Simon Perry

Kimiko also focused on a tech-savvy audience from the beginning, playing concerts at technology conferences and maker festivals like DrupalCon and O.H.M. as part of her promotional tours. She even took a "tech first" approach whilst sharing the stage with Lang Lang at The Glenn Gould Variations in Toronto: while he spoke about the importance of music education, she demonstrated technology assisted score following that made the independent voices in Bach's C# Minor Fugue a reality for the college-aged audience.

"A lot of people are focusing on selling to an ever decreasing number of people, when the reality is that this represents a tiny proportion of the people who genuinely want to listen to the genre." - Chaz Jenkins

The results speak for themselves. Kimiko is now more visible than Glenn Gould on YouTube and Google when searching for the term "Goldberg Variations". (You don't believe me, let me Google that for you...) This is in part due to the fact that you can find her entire recordings on the Wikipedia pages for the Goldberg Variations and The Well-Tempered Clavier. All of the top locations where new learners are likely to go when they're curious about this music lead to Kimiko Ishizaka's fan-funded, zero-risk recordings.

With 3.2 billion people on the Internet, even 3% is a potential addressable audience of 96 million people. But in reality, far more people are curious than that about J.S. Bach and classical music. It's completely hipster to love Bach these days. Just ask Campbell Vertesi of The Cast.

"I believe in Bach as a baroque badass, a rock star of a composer, musician, and human being who destroyed the expectations of the music industry of his time." - Campbell Vertesi

Achieving a huge scale and audience is very important to Kimiko Ishizaka's continued success. Kimiko, like Signum Records chief Steve Long, sees a direct correlation between streaming and paid downloads. Each YouTube video on her channel admonishes viewers to "Download tracks" of the music from her Bandcamp page, where the model is "pay what you like". The majority of people download for free, which is fine - and in the original spirit of the projects - but every 4th or 5th person sends money Kimiko's way, and it is often times more than the price of a new CD. They do this because they know Kimiko is working on her next project, Bach's Art of the Fugue, and they are eager to show their gratitude, and support her next recordings.

Each Bandcamp download also equates to a registration on her mailing list, which is how she's added more than 5,000 new opt-in subscribers to her list since March.

"for every thousand streams that are on Apple Music we're seeing a download in iTunes" - Steve Long

And there we have the virtuous cycle: Fans de-risk the recording by funding it in advance, the Creative Commons license helps achieve massive reach, that in turn builds more fans who donate money and join the mailing list, and the chances of Kimiko being even more successful with her next project keep going up. In the meantime, advertising and streaming revenue from YouTube, Spotify, Deezer and others provides Kimiko with a small but stable income to help her pay her rent and keep her life distraction free, an important detail at a time when she's practicing BWV 1080 over 6 hours every day.

People shouldn't fret about shrinking classical audiences. Plenty of new listeners seek the meaningful and authentic experience that classical music delivers, and the still rapidly growing number of internet-connected people with instant purchasing power means that the right musicians with the right messages will succeed in making great new recordings, even as the old way of doing things erodes in the shifting sands.

Enjoy some great music on the Internet today!