Bachtrack Ltd is a commercial organisation. We do not receive grants or donations from government or any other organisations or individuals. Therefore, all our income comes from customers, to whom we sell advertising and sponsorship of content.
There are two important aspects worth highlighting:
Every article on Bachtrack is edited by a member of our highly professional team of editors. We are not a self-posting site.
Our writers and editors are fully independent of the sales team.
In addition to banner advertisements and inserts in our monthly newsletter, here is some information about how we work in different areas of the site.
Listings
We list professional performances of classical music, opera, ballet and dance. Listings fall into two categories: “premium listings” and “essential listings”. Both carry the same basic information about venue, performers and works performed, but there are important differences.
Premium listings have been paid for by a customer. They are shown with more information than essential listings, of which the most important elements are a “buy tickets” link (which goes to a URL of the customer’s choice) and an image. We encourage all classical music institutions to take out a package of premium listings with us.
Essential listings are listings which we have been unable to persuade a customer to pay us to input, but are of events which we deem sufficiently important that the site would not be credible without them. These are typically of the most major orchestras, opera or ballet companies, or of the key concert halls in the biggest cities across the world.
As well as live listings, we also show listings of live-stream and/or on-demand video events.
Reviews
All reviews are professionally edited by our in-house editors. Some reviews are written by members of Bachtrack staff, but the majority are written by a team of independent, knowledgeable authors recruited by the editors. Our independent authors are not paid for writing reviews other than a small quarterly thank you payment; we do, however, arrange press tickets for them.
The decisions about what to review are made by what we believe is a unique process. Each month, we send to our authors lists of suggested events which are listed on our site and that we think they might like to review. Authors are given a deadline for responding with review requests (which may include events not on the list). Each of our editors then makes their choice of which review requests will be accepted.
There are three important features of this process:
Authors are never required to review performances in which they have no interest.
We never instruct authors what their opinion of a performance will be. (We do, however, insist on editorial standards including politeness).
We never sell reviews and reviews are never allocated because a customer has demanded it. The sales and editorial processes are independent.
Sometimes, we are invited by promoters to send an author on a press trip to review an event or festival, with the promoter funding some or all of the travel expenses. If our editors have agreed a review on this basis, a notice of press trip is shown at the bottom of the review, indicating what expenses were paid for.
Articles
As well as reviews, we publish articles of general interest. These divide into sponsored (a customer is paying us a fee) and unsponsored. As with reviews, these may be written by our own team or by independent authors; we edit both sorts of article to the same editorial standards. For sponsored articles, however, we always pay a fee to independent authors.
For sponsored articles, a brief is agreed with the customer as to what is the subject of the article, the names of any interviewees and a short list of items that will be mentioned in the article. From that point, responsibility passes to the author and then to our editor. Sponsored articles are shown to the customer for fact checking; we will correct errors and will also accept requests to remove confidential information that the customer does not wish to be made public. A notice of who has sponsored the article is shown at its end.
Note that we don’t publish “advertorial” in the sense that the content is never written by the customer’s marketing team or agency (it can, sometimes, be written by the customer’s artistic staff, for example if a well-known conductor is writing a guest piece about a particular composer or work). We take care that our articles are pieces of good quality journalism, whether they are sponsored or not.
Other items
We also offer listings and promotional packages to music festivals, music competitions, masterclasses and other items related to young artists.
Last updated on 4 July 2025
