Deryk Barker on my "other" reason for HIP's popularity:

>I don't recall what it was Ian,

Basically, that the composer knew best what would most please an audience,
and that that applies as much now as it did at the time of composition.
I'm not suggesting that you need to, Deryk, but you can find many aspects
of this argument expounded at length, and not without some repetition, in
the earlier stages of this thread!

>but HIP has certainly been a great favourite of the record companies...

And therefore they have sold a lot of HIP recordings.  At some stage,
possibly not too far in the future, all the likely HIP purchasers will have
acquired as many HIP recordings as they want / need / can fit in the house,
and even the Don Satzes of this world will start wondering if they really
need yet another . . . And then the Machievellian marketing men will
start looking for a new interpretive movement / fashion or fad (delete
as appropriate) to let them persuade all the collectors to take a few
truckloads of HIP CDs to the second-hand stores to clear some space for
the next Big Thing.

Being thoroughly cynical for a moment, the great thing about HIP from
the industry's point of view is that it is not just a single "fad" but
a multiply-recyclable one.  As soon as they've shifted enough boxed sets
of Beethoven symphonies to make a profit based on the assumption that he
really did mean his metronome markings, you can find some academic to prove
that his metronome was faulty and, oh dear, you've all got to go and buy
them all over again . . . and this process can be repeated a good few times
before the buying public begin to see through it.

I'll leave my readers to guess how much of that I really mean.

Ian Crisp
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