In only its nine years of existence iTunes has become an incredible marketing tool for musicians. It's so easy to engage in impulse buying; just present your credit card or gift card.

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Nancy Bauer

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In Blink Malcolm Gladwell tells how women musicians came into their own in the world of classical music. Audition committee members had fooled themselves into thinking that they could assess merit after the first few notes the musician played. The winners of auditions were invariably men. A committee holding auditions where a son of a member was competing decided to have the musicians stand behind a screen. Lo and behold, a woman was chosen, to the amazement of the committee. Men had long believed that women weren't as good musicians as men were. The screen proved that their vaunted ability to judge quality by just a few notes was sullied by their prejudice against women, especially those playing the so-called masculine brass instruments. Now auditioning from behind a screen is the norm, and women have taken their rightful places in orchestras.

Joanne Lipman, in a New York Times article about women's progress, writes, "After focusing for so long on better jobs and higher pay, maybe the best thing - the enduring thing - we can do is make sure respect is part of the equation too. If we can change the conversation about women, the numbers will finally add up. And that's what real progress looks like." Women musicians are at last getting this respect.

But another revelation was to come. It turns out that beautiful women musicians are good for marketing classical music. Janine Jansen, Alison Balsom, Angela Hewitt, Kate Royal, Michala Petri, the Eroica Trio, the list goes on.

My son Ernie noticed this phenomenon and suggested the idea for this column. He sent me their website URLs and that of one of his favourite singers, Cecilia Bartoli. Her site embraces truly ingenious marketing. Not only is she beautiful, the album currently being promoted is Sacrificium, the music of the castrati, emasculated male sopranos. A computer-generated photoillustration of her head on the naked body of an adult castrato, a history of the strange practice, a video of the dynamic Bartoli and snippets of her music make it fascinating - in three languages.

Also on the Internet is the beautiful Alison Balsom with her long blond hair, looking like a woman Dante Gabriel Rossetti might have painted, playing the most masculine of instruments, the trumpet. The website of the Eroica Trio comes up black, but immediately an enchanting version of Summertime begins to play. When the visuals come, you see many photos of the three beautiful women in elegant evening gowns.

Janine Jansen's website features this quote: "(She) is the bestselling artist in the Dutch iTunes Music Store. The new album with Beethoven and Britten violin concertos has reached the No. 1 position. Jansen has again achieved the status of 'Queen of the download.'" Her site is offered in four languages with many photos of her in lovely dresses with suitable décolletage. The dress in the photo advertising her playing of Vivaldi is especially gorgeous.

In its nine years of existence, iTunes has become an incredible marketing tool for musicians. It's so easy to engage in impulse buying; just present your credit card or gift card. I see that there are several services, TuneCore for example, which will submit your music to iTunes and to other online music stores. A clever, patient musician could even submit his own, I'm told. I read in the Telegraph-Journal that Quispamsis violinist Stephanie Mainville has a new album out. I looked it up on iTunes and saw that it was already there. Putting your music on YouTube is another marketing tool. I can listen to our family friend Kyrie Kristmanson there.

Writers don't have to do anything to get their books on Amazon.ca, but they do have to go through many hoops to get the books published in the first place.

Giving concerts is an age-old marketing tool. I see on FAA Arts News, a local arts newsletter, that this week alone there are four classical concerts in Fredericton. Musicians who play popular music have an astonishing number of bars for gigs, advertised in newspapers. I have watched two Frederictonians make the big leagues in publicity: Measha Brueggergosman and Holly Cole. Both their websites come up black and then resolve into stunning photos of the two women.

Controversy can help market musicians as well as movie stars. The band Coldplay had much free publicity from the lawsuits filed by three different people claiming that Coldplay's popular hit Viva la Vida had been plagiarized. But who would want to be caught up in a scandal just to sell his art?

Well, depending on the scandal, I would. I daydream of saving the life of someone important thus generating volumes of publicity for my novels. I'm good at daydreams, not so good at real marketing.

I thank Ernie for pointing me in the direction of these issues.

Nancy Bauer is a writer of fiction and arts commentary based in Fredericton. She can be reached at wbauer@nbnet.nb.ca.