There has to be a reinventing of connecting and humanizing the classical music experience for the 21st century.

My name is Margo Drakos. I am the Chief Operating Officer of InstantEncore.com.

InstantEncore.com is a free community for classical music, and we are designed to sort of revolutionize the live classical music experience.

There’s a lot of incredible fans and classical music lovers around the world, but they often are very dispersed, and so you might not always be able to fly to Los Angeles to hear your favorite artist, but if you live in New York, you still want to be able to be connected to that artist. And so we wanted to create an environment where somebody can follow the artist and individuals that they love and care for very deeply even if they’re not able to physically be in the space with them.

There’s increases in ticket sales overall, and there’s more youth orchestras, more orchestras, more chamber series than ever previously imagined. I do, however, think that classical music is really at a crossroads for finding ways to support itself. It can no longer be a passive mechanism where audiences come in, sit, hear the music, and leave. I think that the ability to connect with living audiences and to use the technology and the world — the shifting world around us to create dynamic and vibrant classical music communities needs to be reinvented.

Our goal is to be the aggregator and the publisher. We want to be able to pull everything related to classical music, whether it’s concert listings, blogs, news feeds, podcasts, video, music for streaming, music for download, for purchase, whatever it is, that that is organized into one centralized location so people can find quickly what they want when they want it.

Our mission is to provide the necessary tools for organizations and artists to be able to connect with 21st century audiences. So many times, you go to a concert, you love it, and people come up to you and say, “How can I get that recording of what I just heard?” And you’re trying to sell them some unrelated physical CD that is not really connecting with them in the same way. So we thought, wow, wouldn’t it be cool if you could go home, enter a code, and download that concert, you know, connecting with an audience way beyond the concert hall.

We just launched our iPhone applications; really exciting. And pretty much every month through this season, there will be a new update. It’s really — we’re just getting started. We have a whole host of widgets coming, whether it’s uploading photos from an iPhone app that’s from a concert and then having it go to our site and to the arts organization site or you can do a concert listing widget. You can create a play list and have your own radio stream featuring your music on any site that you wish. You can write comments right after a live event. I think that’s very powerful.

We are releasing this fall a listen-before-the-concert widget, so you’ll be able to go to various sites for various arts organizations, and there will be a little button there that says, “Hear this music before the concert,” because people love to get familiar with the music beforehand, so you can listen before the concert. On the way to the concert, you can hear the pre-concert, talk in your car on your — through your iPhone and hear a listen before the concert music streaming.

When you either know some of the musicians, when you have a background on what period of time this music was written, what was happening socially, what was happening in literature, what was happening in art, that — it brings it alive in a whole — it gives your mind an opportunity to, you know, perhaps for that little period of time to sort of leave what’s on your BlackBerry at home and to have a moment to sort of look in a bigger context.

Classical music, [I said], it’s a living and a concert event or the artist. It’s a living, breathing thing. The digital world in which we live now for the first time is really giving us an opportunity to democratize access to classical music.

My name is Margo Drakos, and that is InstantEncore.