Many thanks to you all.

After 15 years, soclassiq.com is coming to an end.

I opened its pages in January 2009. The web was still in its early days and the place occupied by classical music on it was very small: a few blogs, websites for concert halls, festivals or major orchestras, and a few websites selling CDs online. Music streaming was in its infancy (Spotify opened in October 2008, Deezer and Qobuz a few months earlier). Traditional record shops were on the way out.

However, demand for recorded classical music remained stable throughout the world, while other segments saw their CD sales collapse. Every year, the number of live productions increased worldwide, as did the number of labels and recorded works.

It was an anachronistic situation, to say the least, since more and more people were coming to classical music while the industry was turning away from it, and the web offered no answer to assimilating a music covering 10 centuries of history, the hyper-diversity of which does not plead in its favour.

The intention was to provide inquiring minds and experienced music lovers with the keys to understanding this diversity, to discover or rediscover the repertoire, the composers, both famous and little-known, their works, and so on...

A huge catalogue has been compiled^*. Many algorithms have been developed to enrich this catalogue, to capture the latest news on classical music and opera, to browse these collections, to easily explore such diversity, step by step. soclassiq.com has been offered in 5 languages, making classical music accessible to more than 2 billion people. In 15 years, I've never come across an equivalent website. Of course, the range of content dedicated to classical music has grown since then. These are essentially editorial sites. Very few offer a discovery experience with an educational vocation. None on the scale of soclassiq.com, which has remained ‘’unique in its field‘’ from day one to the last, and ‘’free and without advertising‘’ (self-financed).

Despite its qualities and originality, it has to be said that soclassiq.com has failed to establish itself in the landscape. There have been brief periods when traffic has soared, and very enviably, above 5,000 visitors a day. Some people liked it and became regulars, even assiduous. Many did ‘3 little laps and then left’. Recurrent traffic was more modest. It is now inexorably dwindling to just a few hundred visitors a day. I've never counted the hours, days or nights I've put in to improving the experience, extending the collections and meeting Google's requirements for greater visibility. But at the same time, the millions of pages on offer were intensively browsed by automated systems, sometimes with very high frequency. After analysis, 90 to 95% of the technical resources were absorbed by robots (from Google and many others). As a result, hosting costs have risen steadily since the site was launched, and are now disproportionately high for a few hundred visitors, very few of whom are repeat visitors.

Obviously, there is some emotion in closing this chapter. I've given a lot of my free time and money, and I have no regrets. I have received many messages of gratitude and encouragement. soclassiq.com was appreciated by a number of music lovers. I thank them for their loyalty.

There was still a lot to do and there was never a shortage of ideas.

It's with a sense of mission accomplished that I close the chapter, and with pride because the longevity of soclassiq.com has been exceptional.

Laurent Houmeau (laurent.houmeau@soclassiq.com)

20 August 2024