People buy and listen to their music where they buy and listen to their music. I, as a content provider, can’t influence that. There are many people in this business that say, ‘I wish people still bought vinyl. I wish people still bought CDs.’ But you can’t base your business on that.

X5’s Stockholm-based staff of 10 producers has churned out more than 5,000 classical compilations, creating as many as 400 in a week. The producers often rely on sales data to determine, for instance, what should go into compilations like “The 99 Most Essential Chopin Masterpieces,” which was ranked No. 1 Tuesday on Amazon MP3’s classical best-sellers chart. Priced at $1.29, the collection has ranked among the site’s 100 top-selling classical albums for 20 months.

Men have a uniform: they either don formal wear or daringly (I am being heavily sarcastic here) eschew it. Women do not have a comparable uniform, in part because women’s fashions are more varied and in part because women didn’t play a major role in classical performance in the years when these traditions were being codified. Yes, there were a handful of soloists; but for years, there were few women (if any) in major symphony orchestras, and virtually no female conductors; and female orchestra players and conductors still have to contend with the issue of what they should be wearing on a regular basis.

Mere excellence used to be enough; an orchestra that swooped nimbly through a Brahms symphony, its strings resplendent and brass ablaze, could count on the loyalty of its local aristocracy. But even as the industrial cities that nurtured America’s great orchestras shrink and audiences drift away to other forms of culture, the players keep upping the ante on virtuosity. These days, technical perfection is the equivalent of running water: It attracts attention mostly when it’s lacking.