Apple Failed to Release a Classical Music App in 2022

[75Batt]

I know Apple knows business more than I do, but on the surface a separate app for classical music seems weird. Feels excessive.

In the battle for subscirber growth, Classical music has been pitched as the next opportunity of growth in streaming services for a few yeats now and I guess Apple are trying to tap into this market, since nobody else has. It’s a market which is largely still accessed through traditional media. So, if Apple can attract this audience then it’s a new segment to grow subscribers in a way competitors cannot.

How Classical Music Is Becoming The Next Emerging Streaming Market

A June 2019 report from MIDiA Research that was commissioned by classical music streaming service IDAGIO delved into the listening habits of classical music fans, and the findings suggest that they're something of an untapped market for streaming.

www.forbes.com

 

[frogslapper]

Failed sticks out as an odd word choice. I'm sure Apple just changed their plans or delayed it.

 

[dominiongamma]

Apple failed to release an IPhone 14, they te-released the 13 with another color. In HEIC mode the photos are basically the same and sometimes worse. Nobody compares the raw photos from the 13 pro. Shame that Apple is charging a price like if it was a totally new device. Shame, shame, shame. ZERO innovation.

Nothing to do what the topic

 

[alfonsog]

Classical always is behind a few generations. I have many rare lp records that never were re-released on CD let alone digital. One of my friends has an lp of himself playing George Antheil violin sonatas that was released 65 years ago and that company doesn't exist anymore; so much is just lost in time. There are some small classical CD companies that still aren't releasing on digital or streaming. The market is small but I know people with tens of thousands of records and cd's all classical. It's not like popular music with a hit song and maybe a few covers... there's so many versions of the same pieces and cycles.. every famous conductor has to release a Beethoven symphony cycle or multiple and every major orchestra has multiple recordings of them. I play viola I have 7 different Walton Viola Concerto CD's, I even have 3 CD's of Elgar Cello Concerto transcribed and played on Viola all with different soloists and orchestras and conductors. I haven't really bought any CD's since Apple Music but I still buy rare LP's and digitize them. Just played a Henry Cowell quartet with no digital recording and bought an LP of it and digitized it. On YouTube my friend had us record a never even published Concerto for String Sextet by Roy Harris.

 

[videosoul]

The snide and sarcastic replies here tell you everything about the sad state of The Arts these days. No one seriously interested in arts and culture would make these sorts of low brow comments, whether they particularly like classical music or not.

 

[User 6502]

I don't understand why an app for a just one genre when classical music is in Apple Music.

At least you understand you don’t understand. That’s a start.

 

[hooptyuber]

One of my friends has an lp of himself playing George Antheil violin sonatas that was released 65 years ago and that company doesn't exist anymore; so much is just lost in time.

That's a shame. You mentioned YouTube. Maybe you could digitize the LP for your friend and post it on YouTube. It's not the ideal solution but at least the performance would live on and people could hear it. It's sad to have it just linger and...vanish.

 

[Hypereides]

At this point it starts to look like a hostile takover. Buy it and shut it down. Otherwise they could have just let the original run, until they get their own version ready.

I agree. They something similar a while back with the website Lala https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lala_(website)?wprov=sfti1

 

[BlairMALL]

The current search on Apple Music is a total failure for classical music. It was meant for Artist-Album-Song concept of non-classical music and as a result it’s often impossible to find a classical music performance by the much more complicated notion of:

Composer
Work
Work revision
Work Composer Catalog
Opus
Number within opus
Work Movement
Work Transcription
Transcriber
Orchestrator
Performer(s)
Soloist
Conductor
Orchestra
Year/Date (of concert)
Release (Remaster)
Label
Venue
Record (CD) on which the work appears
…

I’m certainly missing other fields.

Apple Music only supports entire CD-s and not separate works or movements, let alone specific filters. Good luck finding anything on Apple Music with free text search.

Services like IDAGIO (and previously Primephonic) support custom search filters. I use the free version of IDAGIO (no subscription) to find particular records through a custom search with combination of the above fields in the filter, after which I find the CD(s) that contain what I’m looking for and then try to find/match them on Apple Music which is a tedious task since Apple Music often lacks detailed metadata to even find the corresponding CD, so I have to resort to track names or something more specific, etc. and hope I can eventually find a visual match for the “album” cover among the hundreds of results to eventually match it.

In short, Apple Music sucks big time for classical music fans.

 

[BlairMALL]

The current search on Apple Music is a total failure for classical music. It was meant for Artist-Album-Song concept of non-classical music and as a result it’s often impossible to find a classical music performance by the much more complicated notion of:

Composer
Work
Work revision
Work Composer Catalog
Opus
Number within opus
Work Movement
Work Transcription
Transcriber
Orchestrator
Performer(s)
Soloist
Conductor
Orchestra
Year/Date (of concert)
Release (Remaster)
Label
Venue
Record (CD) on which the work appears
…

I’m certainly missing other fields.

Apple Music only supports entire CD-s and not separate works or movements, let alone specific filters. Good luck finding anything on Apple Music with free text search.

Services like IDAGIO (and previously Primephonic) support custom search filters. I use the free version of IDAGIO (no subscription) to find particular records through a custom search with combination of the above fields in the filter, after which I find the CD(s) that contain what I’m looking for and then try to find/match them on Apple Music which is a tedious task since Apple Music often lacks detailed metadata to even find the corresponding CD, so I have to resort to track names or something more specific, etc. and hope I can eventually find a visual match for the “album” cover among the hundreds of results to eventually match it.

In short, Apple Music sucks big time for classical music fans.

Thanks, CyberGene!

While I am certainly a novice with regard to classical music, it seeMs like a specific app would help. Until I read your post, I wasn’t fully convinced and was happily ignorant of the details. Hopefully, the app is simply delayed and not off the table altogether.

 

[CyberGene]

You might find Concertino useful. It’s an app proving front-end for Apple Music which adds much improved search.

Ohh, that’s nice! Thanks.

P.S. Well, the idea is terrific and might consider supporting them but for the moment it’s just too undeveloped. I opened the Scriabin page (my favorite composer) and these are the only works that are displayed. As fans of Scriabin know, he has composed hundreds of works.

P.P.S. OK, I’m stupid, these are only the “essentials”. Pressing the categories above reveals much more works. I’ll use it for a while.

 

[CyberGene]

I could edit my post above but I really think this deserves a separate post. By a suggestion from M1956 I downloaded the Concertino app and after a few minutes I think it’s all I wanted from Apple Music Classical. No need for Apple to bother! An open source project is apparently doing their job. Thanks for the suggestion and a highly recommended app!

Bye, Concertino

getconcertino.com

‎Concertino

‎Finally, classical music and Apple Music working together! Transform Apple Music into a magical classical music jukebox - browse composers, genres and periods, search for recordings, create playlists of multi-movement works, start no-nonsense radio stations and much, much more, for free! -...

apps.apple.com

I suggest to MacRumors to promote that app, it’s really worth it and many people might not be aware that it exists while it actually does exactly what an assumed Apple Classical app is expected to do.

 

[DrV]

To illustrate why Apple Music is not at all suitable (I can think of some more graphical expressions) for classical music, let me give some real use cases:

1. I just took a seven-hour flight. I wanted to download something to listen to. As J.S.Bach’s polyphonic organ works are always akin a sudoku, I thought this would be a great opportunity to have some time to concentrate on them. I have two different boxes of CDs (around 12 discs) in my shelf but finding the music in Apple Music is not easy. Should I search for “Bach Orgelwerke”? “Bach organ works”? Finally I managed to find Ton Koopman’s recordings for Vol. 6&7 and Vol. 8&9. Nothing wrong with them, as Mr. Koopman is an excellent baroque keyboard player, but Bach’s organ works have been recorded many, many times by different artists. Where were discs 1 to 5?

2. Often, I need to find a specific work by its catalogue number. Almost all classical composers have these numbers, e.g., Bach’s famous Toccata and Fugue in d minor is BWV 565 (and probably not composed by J. S. Bach, but that is another story). Usually, I end up looking for music in YouTube because either the works are not available in Apple Music or the stupid app just does not find it.

3. I would like to find something new. For example, I’d like to find 17th century Italian violin music. A trivial search within a small set of metadata (year of composition, country, instrument). Nothing like this is possible with Apple Music.

4. Sometimes, I want to compare performances of the same work by different ensembles, orchestras, or conductors. Is there a difference how Verdi’s Requiem was performed half a century ago and how it is performed today? Again, very difficult.

I’ve come to the conclusion that Apple Music is lacking three things: music (most discs in my own collection do not exist), metadata, and search front end.

 

[jhwalker]

I’ve come to the conclusion that Apple Music is lacking three things: music (most discs in my own collection do not exist), metadata, and search front end.

Aside from that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?

 

[anthogag]

If you're on public beta, send feedback for the Music app and mention the lousy search for Classical music and perhaps mention CDs that aren't in Music 🗣️

 

[Unami]

The current search on Apple Music is a total failure for classical music. It was meant for Artist-Album-Song concept of non-classical music and as a result it’s often impossible to find a classical music performance by the much more complicated notion of:

Composer
Work
Work revision
Work Composer Catalog
Opus
Number within opus
Work Movement
Work Transcription
Transcriber
Orchestrator
Performer(s)
Soloist
Conductor
Orchestra
Year/Date (of concert)
Release (Remaster)
Label
Venue
Record (CD) on which the work appears
…

I’m certainly missing other fields.

Apple Music only supports entire CD-s and not separate works or movements, let alone specific filters. Good luck finding anything on Apple Music with free text search.

Services like IDAGIO (and previously Primephonic) support custom search filters. I use the free version of IDAGIO (no subscription) to find particular records through a custom search with combination of the above fields in the filter, after which I find the CD(s) that contain what I’m looking for and then try to find/match them on Apple Music which is a tedious task since Apple Music often lacks detailed metadata to even find the corresponding CD, so I have to resort to track names or something more specific, etc. and hope I can eventually find a visual match for the “album” cover among the hundreds of results to eventually match it.

In short, Apple Music sucks big time for classical music fans.

Search in every other genre is quite bad as well and plagued with the same problems. At the moment I'm using Spotify and AM in parallel and it's night and day. AM got better quality and I've heard from artists that they pay better - all good reasons to use AM. Spotify's UI isn't the best either but it still beats AM.

I'm trying to convince my GF to switch to an Apple One Family subscription, so together we could save some money, but it's really hard to win her over when she doesn't find music she find's easily on spotify. It's rather convinving me not to switch and just pay for icloud. Also that they keep some functions of their homepod apple-music exclusive to convince people to buy AM (can't use radiostations as alarms - but you can ask siri to play those stations without subscription. You can't use your itunes match library for alarms either) is one thing that makes me not want to buy from them.

Search in general must be pretty hard to do. Apple maps and Mail are far from best in class in that regard - which is a pity, because all the bells an whistles won't help you much if you suck at core functionality.

 

[DrV]

Aside from that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?

Not bad for a comedy written by an Englishman.

Apple Music might be great for mainstream contemporary popular music. For the vast corpus of classical music (onto which much of that popular music builds) it is almost useless.

I have no problem with that, companies may create whatever products they want. What I really hate is that Apple seems to have killed a good classical music service for no reason along the road.

 

[BellSystem]

Hopefully this dumb idea went in the bin and they just plan to add whatever features to the normal Music app where it belongs. Classic music only had a 1.1% market share in 2021 according to Billboard. So what’s the point? Whatever enhancements are needed should just be done in the Music app.

 

[BornAgainMac]

Seems like the App just needs a reskin of the Music app and a WHERE clause.

 

[Mainyehc]

The current search on Apple Music is a total failure for classical music. It was meant for Artist-Album-Song concept of non-classical music and as a result it’s often impossible to find a classical music performance by the much more complicated notion of:

Composer
Work
Work revision
Work Composer Catalog
Opus
Number within opus
Work Movement
Work Transcription
Transcriber
Orchestrator
Performer(s)
Soloist
Conductor
Orchestra
Year/Date (of concert)
Release (Remaster)
Label
Venue
Record (CD) on which the work appears
…

I’m certainly missing other fields.

Apple Music only supports entire CD-s and not separate works or movements, let alone specific filters. Good luck finding anything on Apple Music with free text search.

Services like IDAGIO (and previously Primephonic) support custom search filters. I use the free version of IDAGIO (no subscription) to find particular records through a custom search with combination of the above fields in the filter, after which I find the CD(s) that contain what I’m looking for and then try to find/match them on Apple Music which is a tedious task since Apple Music often lacks detailed metadata to even find the corresponding CD, so I have to resort to track names or something more specific, etc. and hope I can eventually find a visual match for the “album” cover among the hundreds of results to eventually match it.

In short, Apple Music sucks big time for classical music fans.

You do know that Music.app on macOS, née iTunes, actually supports a few of those tags and that you can even toggle some of those on the column browser filtering in the og Song view, right? 🤔

 

[tubular]

pointless. Just use Apple Music to listen to classical music…

Please try to understand the problem before waving it aside.

 

[tubular]

You do know that Music.app on macOS, née iTunes, actually supports a few of those tags and that you can even toggle some of those on the column browser filtering in the og Song view, right? 🤔

"Supports" in the sense of "preserves the information." Actually using it in anything resembling an efficient way is a different story.

 

[newton4000]

I could edit my post above but I really think this deserves a separate post. By a suggestion from M1956 I downloaded the Concertino app and after a few minutes I think it’s all I wanted from Apple Music Classical. No need for Apple to bother! An open source project is apparently doing their job. Thanks for the suggestion and a highly recommended app!

Bye, Concertino

getconcertino.com

‎Concertino

‎Finally, classical music and Apple Music working together! Transform Apple Music into a magical classical music jukebox - browse composers, genres and periods, search for recordings, create playlists of multi-movement works, start no-nonsense radio stations and much, much more, for free! -...

apps.apple.com

I suggest to MacRumors to promote that app, it’s really worth it and many people might not be aware that it exists while it actually does exactly what an assumed Apple Classical app is expected to do.

Thank you - this is interesting!

What has been really frustrating is that I - and many others - were Primephonic subscribers in addition to AM subscribers. So Apple has killed the service and left us in the dark, with potentially only faint hope.
Could they not have kept it running for now?

 

[tubular]

Bach’s famous Toccata and Fugue in d minor is BWV 565 (and probably not composed by J. S. Bach, but that is another story).

By coincidence it's literally less than six hours since I listened to exactly this work (in a recording from Helmut Walcha from DG's 120th anniversary boatload-o-discs box set), because -- well, making a Steam Deck boot video parodying the opening credits of "Rollerball," which even as I type it strikes me as a perfectly unhelpful explanation.

So tell me that other story.

 

[CyberGene]

You do know that Music.app on macOS, née iTunes, actually supports a few of those tags and that you can even toggle some of those on the column browser filtering in the og Song view, right? 🤔

Sure, I use those extensively when I import ripped CD music in Apple Music. But Apple themselves don’t always use those tags on their classical music content. Besides, my point was about browsing music in a smart way, e.g. find all performances of a work and narrow down by e.g. orchestra. That’s not possible. One should know exactly what he’s searching for and come up with good enough search string that contains all the possible data. Mind you, a symphony can be found as “simphonie” or even “simfonia” depending on the language of the label, so there’s no standardization in their catalog. And the search is unforgiving and it expects Frédéric not Frederic, etc. As I said, the classical music search is totally broken. It’s not a conjecture, it’s a fact, I’ve been using Apple Music since the very beginning and I’m listening almost entirely to classical music. Without cross-search with IDAGIO and visual matches based on album art I wouldn’t be able to find half of what I search for. Other than that I like the audio quality and integration with HomePod, CarPlay, etc. Otherwise I would be on IDAGIO.