Classical music is fundamentally differently structured than “pop”:
- An album has both a composer (like Mozart) and an artist/artists (the orchestra, the soloists etc.)
- An albums consists of works which consist of one to many movements, and an album likely contains works from different composers sometimes played by different artists
- You almost always want to listen to one work - you can deliberately listen to only one movement, but it’s not like pop songs where you can randomly shuffle songs
- One work will be on many albums, played by different artists but still share the same catalog identification (there usually is one per composer, like the Köchel catalogue to identify Mozart works)
- A work is created in a certain year (often long ago) and then performed /released in a different year (often recent)
Basically, with classical music you’re dealing with a ton more metadata which has a lot of meaning on the experience.
I don’t want to listen to “a song by Beethoven from the 9th symphony”, I want to listen to “Beethoven’s 9th symphony, performed by the Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by Herbert von Karajan, the version released in 1963”.
That’s why classical streaming services exist: to expose that metadata and make it easily searchable/browseable.
)
