Classical Music on Apple Music: What's Wrong and How Apple Can Fix It

[imom]

To be fair, there has always been difficulty in sorting classical music by category.

 

[adamjackson]

While this article was being written, Apple added 150 new Hip Hop playlists.

 

[andrew12]

Classical music??? What year are we living in?

Sadly, the “year” of predictable, repetitive, debased “style”, AutoTune, and Top 40 crap. You’re welcome to it - I prefer not to insult my senses and taste

 

[tubular]

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

 

[madmin]

Add me to the list of people who really appreciate this article, thank you. Apple music could be so much better if they really wanted.

 

[Colonel Blimp]

Classical music (and opera) is a dead genre anyway. It’s always depended on wealthy white people to keep it going financially, and young wealthy white people don’t care. While Asians play string instruments as kids by force, they aren’t really interested in it as adults either. Not in the numbers needed.

While this has been largely true in the States and probably also Britain, I'm told that it is not the case in Italy and, I would imagine, some other parts of Europe as well.

As for Asians, the market for western Classical music in China now dwarfs that of the rest of the world. China is producing classical musicians and listeners alike at a prodigious rate.

 

[genovelle]

The biggest problem is likely the lack of accurate Meta data.

This was discussed at length during several ASCAP panels during their EXPO last year. This is what makes old catelogs difficult to integrate into the streaming services. Spotify is currently ahead because they have been fixing data for 12 years compared to Apple’s 3.

The number of recordings and performers involved makes licensing Classical music a nightmare. Not to mention disfunct labels and publishers.

 

[LizKat]

Same problem with Jazz. If I want contemporary (modern) Jazz I have to sift through all the traditional artists from the last 60+ years.

Same could be said for probably many genres in Apple Music. They really need to focus and sort on sub-genres more.

They don't even have all of a one-genre artist in one genre sometimes, never mind failing to break out what they call "classical" and I call "serious" music. Who knows if it's the distributor who tags an album with a genre and Apple just goes along for the ride. Whatever, it's something you'd think the artist would object to. Maybe Apple should pay a board of professional music critics to vet major genre tags.

Genre problems (and track naming) are just two of the reasons that I keep several separate iTunes libraries for what Apple and apparently half the world call "classical" music. I've spent hundreds on hundreds of hours fixing up the tags on the tracks in my libraries and I'm not about to let Apple or any other music supplier call both Palestrina and Bartok "classical".

On Apple Music genre issues: I tolerate whatever turns up pegged as the "classical" genre only in the library I devote to Apple Music. For me AM is just a (very much appreciated) test lab for figuring out what version of a work I might like to purchase. I'm not buying an opera or a set of partitas or symphonies on CD without having heard entire performances more than a few times first. Can't do that with just 90-second previews in the iTunes Store, so to me the AM monthly fee is still worth it even if Brahms and Beethoven are spinning in their graves to share genre space with the likes of both Elliott Carter and Guillaume Dufay.

 

[Colonel Blimp]

Classical music??? What year are we living in?

Thank you for playing the Internet.

Unfortunately (as the inside of a Snickers bar wrapper once informed me), you are not a winner.

 

[nutmac]

Classical music??? What year are we living in?

Ditto for those listening to "Bohemian Rhapsody" after the movie came out. We should only be listening to latest music.

And while we are at it. Let's burn all the books, paintings, movies, and TV shows that came out more than a decade ago.

</s>

 

[ThisBougieLife]

As a classical music aficionado (almost 10,000 classical tracks in my iTunes library), I've never been too enthusiastic about streaming services or other music-handling apps dealing with classical. From tracks called nothing but "Allegro" to classical music sounding much, much better with lossless quality, I prefer to have as much control over my classical collection as possible. I appreciate that they're trying, though.

I organize my classical music in playlists by composer. Composer last name --> Category of composer's work --> Title of work and each track title includes the composer name, the name of the work, and the name and number of the movement if applicable. And I've standardized my system for every album I own. That's the only way it'll work for me

 

[Ernst Krenek]

This is a very good article. Thanks.

 

[CyberGene]

There’s another huge problem (not limited to Apple Music though). It’s audible digital watermarks on countless of UMG records which includes DG and Decca and is especially audible on solo piano or strings which just ruins almost all of the classical music. The problem is described best on this website: http://www.mattmontag.com/music/universals-audible-watermark

I’ll paste what I commented on that website which describes my struggle with Apple Music support over the last few years:

I've been having the same problem with DG records on the Apple Music streaming service since the very beginning of the service. I always thought it was due to some AAC-encoding issues and I've reported that to Apple and we had a long conversation going as far as me sending them my own CD-rip excerpt of the same record with no audio issues for them to compare against their version. Ultimately they acknowledged they can hear the difference (the particular record in question is the 17-CD set of complete Chopin music where this is audible all the time since there's a lot of mellow solo piano passages almost everywhere). Here's their answer:

“Thank you for your patience. The music studios provide their content to the iTunes Store and we endeavor to distribute the highest quality content possible.

The issue you’ve reported has been noted and the vendor has been notified. We have received a response that the content is as intended. I can’t say when or if the vendor will correct the concerns reported.”

They never mentioned about any digital watermarking so I thought it was just something like DG using wrong sample rate conversion or whatever but I grew so tired of this problem that I started avoiding their releases and preferred other classical music labels on Apple Music. But whenever I encounter this problem, which is audible on more than half the DG releases, I get very irritated. It is today that I was finally fed up and decided to search on the Internet if there are other people who have this problem and here I am.

What can I say, this is just totally unacceptable. This is the kind of behavior that can make me enraged to the point I will intentionally reject UMG releases and will force myself to listen to other music companies.

 

[Colonel Blimp]

Thank you, Mitchel, for shining a spotlight on this issue. It’s especially refreshing to read an article on MacRumors that goes into some depth!

My top two issues with using either the iTunes Store or Apple Music to listen to classical music are:

1. One catch-all “Artist” tag is totally inadequate (as has already been pointed out many, many times), and
2. The metadata for classical tracks is often completely wrong (as genovelle mentioned above).

There are many classical albums in the iTunes Store and Apple Music in which one or more of the principal soloists are not named at all anywhere in the metadata of any of the album’s tracks.

(Sometimes you can see the names of the principal soloists by looking at the album artwork, but sometimes you have to find a copy of the CD or LP, or already know who’s on the album.)

Likewise, there are other albums where the wrong conductor and soloists are named. (This is especially common with compilations, when two or more albums have been grouped together into a single set.)

I am quite certain that this is the fault of the record labels, not Apple. It’s the record labels who upload both the digital tracks and their associated metadata, and they are obviously using a completely automated process to digitize and transfer their vast libraries without any knowledgable, live human being ever once checking the metadata.

(This becomes very clear when, for example, recordings by the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge—aka King’s College Choir, Cambridge—get listed as performed by the "Cambridge Choir of King’s College” or the “Cambridge King’s College Choir.”)

Quite frankly, the metadata for many of these albums is utterly disgraceful. Artists should be credited for their work!

Alas, correcting all this metadata would be very labor-intensive, and I fear that the margins on digital classical music sales and streaming are very small. For the metadata situation to improve, Apple would have to lean on the record labels to clean up their acts, but unless Apple compensated the labels for the cost of correcting their metadata, I fear that the labels would simply pull their music.

 

[RoelJuun]

A very, very good piece (your best since a long time). Thanks.

 

[Heathcombe]

Certainly, with the genre issues that he mentioned, I have had to manually change the genre myself in iTunes, which have done for many many years. You could pretty much do the same thing with any kind of pop music all other genres as well, eg POP: 80’s, Classical: Symphonies (Early 20th Century, etc, but you have to do it with iTunes on your computer.

 

[JosephAW]

Been listening to classical music for many years on Spotify and never thought about it. No wonder I like them.

 

[Loge]

I wouldn't hold my breath for much fixing here. At least with downloads you can edit the meta data to suit yourself, which I have done for many years.

One further issue with opera, is that you often don't get a translated libretto anymore, even though this could easily be packaged as a pdf. Even better if this would scroll through as you listened to it.

 

[sofila]

but everyone listens to the music of their youth

Yes, so true. Unfortunately the very moment you become aware of this is the same one you realise your younger days are gone.

 

[AstroRob]

Apple's music metadata has been a borked mess since inception, and they've never been interested in trying to make it more rational.

Just start with the old wrecked MP3 "Genre" tag. The implication is that any track of music can be described by one and only one 'genre'.

This stupidity leads to things like Pet Shop Boys albums being individually sorted randomly into "Pop," "Electronic," "Dance". That's one artist with a clear style being split up willy-nilly into different buckets based on the whim of whoever tagged a particular release.

Genre should at the very least be a multi-valued tag, being inclusive of the variety within a track or album, not exclusive. But I'm afraid that ship has sailed so long ago that Apple things all we really need are their hip curated playlists, and why would we ever want intelligent ways to filter or categorize music.

 

[Spacewiz]

Last August, Apple Music was updated with a new section in Browse curated by Deutsche Grammophon, one of the biggest classical music labels in the world. While classical music fans welcomed the specific focus of the area, many of our readers quickly pointed out the numerous issues that remain for classical listeners on a daily basis within Apple Music, and the fact that they've been there since the launch of the service with seemingly no correction in sight.

To help break down and highlight these problems, we reached out to a few experts in the classical music field, including professor Benjamin Charles, who wrote a blog post about his frustrations with streaming music services last October. We also spoke with Franz Rumiz, a classical music fan whose article "Why Apple Music fails with classical music" struck a chord with the community in early 2017.

Frustrations with classical music streaming are nothing new, but as Charles tells us, this is a problem that affects nearly every streaming music service, including Apple Music rival Spotify. In an effort to find out exactly what's wrong with classical music on Apple Music -- and what steps could be taken to address these problems -- we asked Charles and Rumiz to detail the biggest issues with classical music on Apple Music.

The Problems

Classical music is treated as a single genre

When you tap on "Genres" in Apple Music's Browse tab, you're treated with a list of over 30 styles of music, from Alternative and African Music to Christian, Electronic, K-Pop, and Metal. This is where classical music fans have to visit to find their favorite music, within the singular "Classical" genre section.

For Charles, this is the first in a long line of problems. The section spans centuries, including all of the notable composers like Mozart (born 1756, died 1791), Maurice Ravel (b. 1875, d. 1937), and John Cage (b. 1912, d. 1992), but this grouping is frustrating for classical music aficionados, given how little these musicians have in common among one another.
Classical music wasn't designed to fit in modern album templates

Streaming classical music on a service like Apple Music forces the expansive art form into a strict, boundary-ridden template. Because of this, numerous aspects of the music are truncated in a way that deflates their impact, particularly for anyone without existing knowledge of classical recordings.

Charles says that one aspect of classical music that's mixed up in the shuffle is the listener's interest in a piece's composer versus its performer. While some artists, like Leonard Bernstein, both compose and perform their music, Charles questions how Apple Music determines the best recording for a piece of music: "Is a recording more significant because it is composed by Bach, or is it more significant because it is performed by Glenn Gould?"

Further complicating matters, orchestral recordings introduce both the conductor and orchestra as contributors, essentially breaking any possibility for these pieces to be read and seen within the boundaries of a modern album format. With concerti, the soloist, composer, and orchestra also need credit.

This results in albums with names like "Prokofiev: Piano Concerto No. 3 in C Major, Op. 26 - Ravel: Piano Concerto in G Major, M.83; Gaspard de la nuit, M. 55," credited to "Martha Argerich, Berlin Philharmonic & Claudio Abbado."

Not only is this far too much information to read clearly in Apple Music, but the app's basic UI functions fail to provide links to every credited artist, making further classical music discovery a frustrating endeavor. In the above example, the link for "Martha Argerich, Berlin Philharmonic & Claudio Abbado" directs listeners only to Martha Argerich's Apple Music profile page. On that note, Rumiz points out that classical music playlists are essentially nonsense. This is because each playlist takes in arias and overtures from various operas, completely disrupting the ordered way that classical music is intended to be listened to. This happens in playlists like Apple's "Essentials" for composers like Richard Wagner, and in mood playlists designed for studying or relaxing.
Siri isn't very helpful

Because of these wordy titles, any voice-enabled features touted by Apple and found within Apple Music are much harder to use for classical music fans.

As Charles bluntly puts it, "Can you imagine: 'Hey Siri, play the third movement of Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 3 from the album Prokofiev: Piano Concerto No. 3 in C Major, Op. 26 - Ravel: Piano Concerto in G Major, M.83; Gaspard de la nuit, M. 55 by Martha Argerich, Berlin Philharmonic & Claudio Abbado."

In our tests, simply stating "Hey Siri, play Prokofiev's Piano Concerto" did lead to Siri playing the correct concerto in the correct order, but as with all things Siri, the command was not consistently reliable. The proclivity toward the use of foreign language titles for some pieces, and the acceptance of English versions of the same titles, also regularly stumps Siri.

"Sometimes we use English titles, sometimes we use foreign language titles; 'The Rite of Spring' and 'Le Sacre du printemps' seem to be used equally to describe the same piece," Charles explains.

There are breaks between each track

Rumiz's biggest issue with classical on Apple Music is the breaks that happen between tracks in recordings (this frustration originally led Rumiz to write his Medium post on the topic). For any classical piece that is through-composed (music intended to be played from beginning to end in one continuous stream), Apple Music interrupts the fluidity of the piece by placing a break of ~1 second between each track.

Rumiz does point out that Apple has removed these breaks from many recordings over the years, but it isn't solved for all recordings.
There is a large barrier to entry for new listeners

This is Charles' biggest problem with classical on Apple Music. Although the browsing and playback experience can be awkward, the music professor ultimately notes that his background and education in the subject help him navigate Apple Music's less-than-stellar classical music selection with some ease. If you're on the other end of that spectrum, trying to get into the genre and navigating 300+ years of music on Apple Music, it's "effectively impossible."

Charles is understandably disappointed in the lack of education and forethought put into classical selections on Apple Music. There are no program notes, select few pieces of biographical information, and no guidance when navigating among composers. Despite the music having thorough research readily available, Apple Music ditches all interconnections between notable composers in favor of static tabs of music lists.

One of the few educational areas in Apple Music's classical section is buried at the very bottom of the page, and offers a quick overview of the genre's history.​

Listening to classical music often requires the listener to understand the work in context to get everything out of it. Without these tidbits of history, connective tissues between composers, and educational program notes, Apple Music fails this fan base.
There's a lack of legitimacy

As an extension of the previous grievance, Apple Music's Beethoven page lacks a link to the composer's spiritual successor, Brahms, but it does provide a link to an artist named "Chopin." Unfortunately, this is not the Polish composer, but a rapper who appeared on a hip-hop song named "Circumstance," which was released in 2018. "Even if it did link to the correct Chopin, there are far more relevant composers to link to," Charles points out.

Furthermore, Apple populates composer pages with songs from albums and playlists that don't necessarily paint these artists in a respected light. Beethoven's "Top Songs" include songs from albums like "The World's Most Beautiful Wedding Music," "Classical Music for Power Pilates," and "Exam Study." While relevant to each of these activities, Apple's decision to push these results higher on the page above more reputed collections "sends strong signals of a lack of legitimacy in the classical music world," Charles argues.

The Solutions

Build better composer pages and offer more categories

This would be feasible, since Apple just last year updated the artist pages across Apple Music with new profile picture designs, new featured albums, album reorganization, and a "play all" button. Although composers and their works are inherently more complex, Charles points out that some already have their own identification systems, including the Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis (BWV) catalog for Bach and the Köchel (K) catalog for Mozart, which have the potential for streamlined integration into Apple Music.

In the same vein, Rumiz says more categories would do wonders for expanding the ease-of-use of classical on Apple Music, by offering more complex categories like "soloist" and "conductor," instead of following the rules of pop and rock music where songs only have one artist. While this would be a big task for Apple, Rumiz notes that it will be "necessary if they want classical music fans to continue using Apple Music on the long run."

Fix irrelevant recommendations

In a simpler and easier solution, Charles hopes Apple can more intelligently guide users to important and noteworthy composers, pieces, and musicians, that actually have relevance to one another. No more erroneous "Chopin" pages and "Ode to Joy" recommendations found within Power Pilates playlists.

Make it smarter and hire a human curator

Overall, Charles is hoping for Apple to boost the intelligence of its classical music section on Apple Music. To start, he recommends Apple hire a musicologist whose job it would be to personally back the rejuvenation of the classical music features on the service. This would be just like most other sections of Apple Music, where algorithms are backed and double-checked by human editors, like Arjan Timmermans's role as Apple Music's "Head of Pop."

This includes adding program notes that would enhance the listener's understanding of classical music, so that they're actually taking part in digesting and understanding the composition and not just passively listening. Charles explains the importance of knowing a piece's real-world history: "Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique is a great example: it features a story (loosely based on the composer's own life) of an artist obsessing with a love interest, taking opium, and murdering his beloved in a drug-induced trip. This sort of thing kind of changes how you hear a piece!"
Acquire a company that does most of this already

In a move that would make sense given Apple's history, Apple could also simply acquire a company that's doing most of these things already, and implement the technology within an update to Apple Music. Charles pointed me toward the Berlin Philharmonic's Digital Concert Hall [Direct iTunes Link], a classical music streaming service that has live and on-demand concerts (up to 40 each season), hundreds of archived recordings covering five decades, composer interviews, documentaries, artist portraits, and a family-friendly education program that dives into the history of each piece.

While the Digital Concert Hall mostly lacks simple music streaming, if Apple made a deal with Berlin Philharmonic, the service's features would greatly boost classical music offerings on Apple Music.

Rumiz doesn't recommend an outright acquisition, but he does point towards a company and service that is already leagues ahead of Apple in the classical music field: IDAGIO [Direct iTunes Link]. This service costs $9.99/month and focuses solely on classical music. While some important recordings are missing and require him to return to Apple Music or Spotify, Rumiz says that IDAGIO's usability and interface are far better than Apple Music, eliminating many of the frustrations classical fans have with streaming services.

Boost the video offerings

According to Rumiz, a well-organized and fully featured suite of classical video content "could be an important selling point" for a streaming service intent on gaining more classical fans. Apple has a few of these, offering background interviews with artists, but Rumiz points toward YouTube Music as the current leader in this category, since it offers full recordings of concerts and operas.

The Future

In the end, Apple -- and Spotify, Google, Amazon, etc. -- have a tricky battle ahead of them if and when they decide to address the issue of classical music on streaming services. "It doesn't seem to be a business priority [for Apple]," Charles admits, and in the current scheme of things, the company's focus on pop and hip-hop in Apple Music is logical from a financial standpoint.

But that doesn't change the fact that there are millions of classical music fans willing and ready to pay the company that can get these things right. "This is a completely untapped market," Charles tells me. "One streaming service could completely own the classical music audience if it wanted to."

Article Link: Classical Music on Apple Music: What's Wrong and How Apple Can Fix It

[doublepost=1550276962][/doublepost]This is a large part of why I have been ditching iTunes purchases and buying far more CDs. The double advantage of actually owning a physical copy and being able the organize the genre in ways that actually make sense.

Apple ain't what is was, neither hardware or software. A shame really.

 

[Jaho101]

The other issue is with sound quality. The compression that they use always adds weird warbling effects as it struggles to deal with reverb and complex harmonies. There are some Schumann recordings that I can't even listen to because the harmonies mess with the compression so badly, really puts me off.

 

[Colonel Blimp]

The other issue is with sound quality. The compression that they use always adds weird warbling effects as it struggles to deal with reverb and complex harmonies. There are some Schumann recordings that I can't even listen to because the harmonies mess with the compression so badly, really puts me off.

This might be an artifact of watermarking, not of compression. (See CyberGene’s excellent post above.)

In double-blind listening tests with good headphones in quiet rooms, 256 kbps AAC is almost always indistinguishable from uncompressed CD audio. (In fact, the consensus over the years among folks in the Hydrogenaudio AAC forum, where they are meticulous about conducting listening tests, seems to be that AAC-compressed audio is almost always indistinguishable even at 192 kbps. 256 kbps, which is what Apple Music and the iTunes Store use, is actually overkill.)

 

[sgtaylor5]

Can we be honest about AM?

Pros:
1) vast library
2) native ui interface on MacOS (not electron)
3) no ads

Cons:
1) recommendations are just awful. ("for you" is then a poor experience)
2) it's all about rap / hip hop. ("browse" is about what dominates ... in LA(?)).
3) "radio" is more of the same re: "browse"

In some cities there are actually good radio stations that play interesting music (KUTX in Austin, for example). I rarely end up discovering something interesting on AM.

and that’s why I only subscribed to AM for one month; Amazon Music seems to have better playlists and stations for the music I like to listen to -classical and jazz.

 

[brentonbrenton]

What bothers me is how "Bollywood" is not available as a genre in Apple music when bollywood releases a tonne of music each year.

Maybe you don't see something I do..?