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

[tillsbury]

It would probably be better to have a completely separate app for classical. There is no reason at all to be lumping it in with Apple Music. And at least then there would be no danger of AM suggesting all sorts of inappropriate stuff when it should know by now I want to listen to classical music.

I too have to stick to manually created playlists, which is a lot of work and obviously misses out on a lot of new recordings I could be listening to.

 

[tentales]

The point of classical not fitting in to a mold created for pop songs is valid. I was listening to classical on XM yesterday with my 5 yea old son. He hated it at age 3 but likes it now. So the was a symphony by Rachmaninov on. We went to the store to buy v day gifts for mom and 1/2 hour later my son asks “what song is this one?” And I said “still the same song.” When we got home, still the same symphony.

You can’t cut it up, so it doesn’t work with a freemium model at all, unless it’s snippets and “pops” stuff. Doesn’t work with commercial radio either, which is why classical is usually public radio. And it doesn’t work with most kids, due to attention span.

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.

Compare to the 20s and 30s, when even the commoner could tell you the names of operas and opera stars and listened to classical at home. Piano stars abounded as well.

"Dead genre" ? "wealthy white people" ? "Asians play strings ...forced" ?
That's quite the uninformed statement, but what else would one expect from someone that consumes classical music on low-bitrate XM.

True classical music fans attend live concerts, buy CDs instead of stream and have long built up a library of the best recordings out there. AM is terrible for Jazz & Classical. Spotify is a tad better but only to discover new works and then purchase the hardcopy.

There's also quite the catalog of contemporary classical music. The Guardian did a nice "intro" guide a few years back:
https://www.theguardian.com/music/series/a-guide-to-contemporary-classical-music

Since China was introduced to western classical music in the 19th century, the interest in learning and playing classical music in that Asian country has far outstripped that of the American public. Your prejudice about "wealthy white people" probably stems from the myopically focused vision of US based PBS radio & TV which is sponsored by donors, imho of which not all are wealthy, just those that get mentioned in the prologue of some performances / broadcasts.

So you might want to rethink your stance on "dead genre" and Asian performers. Here's a link that illustrates this point:
https://wilsonquarterly.com/quarter...-western-classical-music-so-popular-in-china/

 

[bluespark]

This is an outstanding breakdown of a complex but super-annoying issue. In short, Apple Music doesn't present classical music in the way classical listeners think about music. Classical music has always been tricky to organize, but a service like Apple Music should be able to make that easier, not harder. I hope someone at Apple will pay attention to this.

 

[robjulo]

I’m sure this will get fixed as soon as the cars stop driving off of the road.

 

[AppleInLVX]

Thanks for this article - well researched and written.

I've managed to listen to the classical pieces I wanted on my HomePod by first searching on my PC and adding them to a playlist. So I was aware of some of the challenge, but not all of the concerns listed in this article.

I like the fact you have proposed ideas and solutions - a pro-active article, rather than just a whinge.

Thanks!

Indeed. I haven't ever seen this thoughtful an article from MR before now, and it's a highly relevant topic. I've been defending iTunes and Apple Music to my wife, a lifelong classical music lover, for years, and felt like on this front, I've always been on the losing side. This article helped me understand it all even better. I truly hope Apple takes some of these suggestions to heart. What could be lost in making this a better service for ALL music lovers?

 

[DrV]

I have no need to listen to Apple Music of any Genre.
As you say, classical music listeners collect music. I have more than 400 Albums on Vinyl and 500+ CD of Classical and Classic Rock and 1960's Jazz and Blues. With all of that in Digital format why would I need Apple Music?
My iPod stll works perfectly and gives me all the music I require.
Now I must go back to listening to the Beethoven Piano Concerto No 3.

I have several hundred classical CDs spanning from mediaeval to contemporary music sitting in my bookshelf. Unfortunately, I don’t have the time to listen to them at home. So, there they are collecting dust.

Of course, I could rip them all into bits in the cloud. Doing that with proper indexing and metadata would take hundreds of hours. Which I don’t have. I only have maybe 10 % of the music ripped this far.

And even if I ripped everything, I would only have what I already have and know. No one would introduce any new and interesting music.

If there was a streaming service with a lot of classical music and good indexing capabilities, I would subscribe at once. Decent indexing should include composer, era, orchestral/vocal/solo, performer (soloists, orchestra, conductor) and of course catalogue number.
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To be fair, there has always been difficulty in sorting classical music by category.

Era, country, ensemble/solo, solo instrument. How difficult is that?

 

[spunkybart]

I'm not even a real fan of classical music, and don't play it much, but even I get frustrated with how the songs are titled -- long titles that Siri tediously reads, hard to get Siri to play a particular track by a particular composer, and odd selections by Apple Music.

 

[Colonel Blimp]

I'm not about to let Apple or any other music supplier call both Palestrina and Bartok "classical".

From a conversation I had just last Sunday:

Singer: “Who wrote this?”
Director: “William Boyce, the greatest English classical composer.”
Organist: “HENRY PURCELL!”
Director: “Purcell was baroque, not classical.”
Organist: “Oh, yeah.”​

 

[0388631]

Glad to see Apple's on the ball... years later. Apple Music had issues with classical when it first came out and I naturally assumed it had been fixed. Though I recall a vague post I'd read by @arkitect in another area of the forum about his frustration with AM.

I believe the Verizon plan we're on gives us Apple Music for free for each line, but we personally prefer Spotify. Though, if I listened to classical all the time, I'd likely go with Tidal or Deezer for their even higher quality bitrate.

 

[miric]

Same thing with jazz on Spotify. I'd prefer Jaco Pastorius rather than madam Fitzgerald, instrumental over vocal. Though I'm not able to go to Jazz genre and listen similar to what I prefer.

 

[maverick28]

The article is what I've felt about iTunes Store offerings (and I'm not even considering Apple Music) for years: I was granted 5 song credits some 4-5 years ago, still unused. Both places can offer nothing that I would be willing to invest to. Most of my recordings I listen to come from 2 sources: (1) digitized older LP recordings made by myself, including rare or not in-demand ones (2) HDTracks, eClassical, Prestomusic - hi resolution audio for audiophiles such as myself. The latter beats Apple Music to dust, why would I need it? I can't stand anything lower than 500 kbs (500 kbs for archive records). However, as a rule I listen to ~1000 kbs and more - that's totally different experience.

 

[gnipgnop]

At the end of the day, EVERY type of music that is included on Apple Music appears within a specific album or single that was released. Searching by album name is going to work every time, and anyone who considers themselves to be a an aficionado of a certain genre should probably already know the names of the most important albums for various artists, regardless of whether it's a musician, composer, conductor etc.

Most of the complaints made about classical music are really just general improvements that could be made across the board in services like Apple Music. I listen to ambient on a regular basis and there's no 'Ambient' category in Apple Music and many of the albums/artists that I like in ambient might show up as 'Electronic' or 'New Age' or even 'Alternative' when you look at the genre grouping for the album.

 

[Rebel22]

It can be improved by bringing back the 3.5 mm jack and allowing classical music fans the ability to listen to 999kbps lossless quality, as opposed to the 255kbps which is the max you can achieve through the lightning or AirPods.

 

[gnipgnop]

True classical music fans attend live concerts, buy CDs instead of stream and have long built up a library of the best recordings out there. AM is terrible for Jazz & Classical. Spotify is a tad better but only to discover new works and then purchase the hardcopy.

Which begs the question: why would a classical music enthusiast have difficulty finding the specific recordings they're looking for on Apple Music? They should already know the album names and can definitely search using those. Once you find them through album name search, you can add them to your Apple Music library and never have to search again.

 

[entropys]

Yes because Hip-hop is currently the most popular and profitable genre of music. I don’t understand why people expect a music streaming service to not gravitate towards what’s popular with the mass audience.

I would expect a good streaming service to work out what I like listening to and not try to force Hip Hop on me. Is that too much to ask?

 

[sensel]

The problems are not exclusive to Apple. Alexa can’t handle the long or foreign titles either. Spotify is also similarly a mess. Amazon Music is no Ode to Joy.
I wonder how Qoboz is with Classical? People on the beta list for USA just got notified it is up and running this week.
Many audiophiles use Tidal as it links to a lot of mid to very high end devices that also use superior UX experience to iTunes alternatives like Roon. How is Tidal for classical?
There are also a few classical only streaming services but, I can’t afford them and Spotify/Apple at same time.

 

[gnipgnop]

The problems are not exclusive to Apple. Alexa can’t handle the long or foreign titles either. Spotify is also similarly a mess. Amazon Music is no Ode to Joy.

If voice doesn't work, you can always type it in. You'll only have to do it once since you can add any recording available on Apple Music to your personal library.

 

[tubular]

Every now and then I take a look at the state of classical streaming, see it's still pretty borked, and stick to my iTunes library of losslessly ripped CDs.

Ultimately the Apple Music metadata is about trying to fit four fingers -- work, movement, composer, performer(s) -- into the three-fingered glove of song/album/artist. You can't do it without the kind of bloated, unreadable nonsense the article talks about.

So for me it's about losslessly ripped CDs playing via AirPlay2 to HomePod, controlled from a dedicated iTunes server (a spare 2010 Mac mini with SSD), and countless hours editing the metadata into something serviceable.

If you've done that editing, though, it turns out that the Remote app for iOS can do a very nice job for you -- you can start from an alphabetical list of composers, drill down to the work you want, add it to your Up Next queue.

And let me grumble again: because my server is 2010-era, it's capped at High Sierra, which means in turn it's capped at iTunes 12.8.x. iTunes 12.8.2, from last July, recognized Airplay2 stereo pairing, but then they broke it in 12.8.3 a month ago. It's disheartening to lose a feature like that.

 

[gnipgnop]

The issue in the article regarding "breaks" in compositions is incorrectly blamed on Apple. In reality, it's the responsibility of the rights holder to provide a seamless version. This is something that is common in electronic music, where an album available on Apple Music will provide BOTH a track by track version and a continuous mix version and the listener can choose which one they prefer to listen to. It isn't the responsibility of Apple to provide that.

 

[LizKat]

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

Era, country, ensemble/solo, solo instrument. How difficult is that?

Well like any spec... once you get to encoding it, exceptions may be discovered.

Faced with the fact myth that Vivaldi wrote the same concerto grosso 500 times, and by necessity some of them were in the same key, one may in desperation end up with a playlist titled something like "This one dammit".

One might put a composer's acknowledged cataloger's abbreviation in metadata for certainty of reference to a particular work, e.g., BWV827 for a JS Bach work, FP 61 for a work by Poulenc and so on.

Sometimes there's a good reason for manually compiling lists. At least iTunes lets you construct both smart and manually constructed playlists, and both can be given desired names that "even Siri" could launch on command.

One day I bumped into the link below by accident and was duly impressed. It's literally just a list of works featuring the oboe, although it's part of a huge undertaking with live links, the IMSLP (International Music Score Library Project).

What struck me immediately was the fact that some of the work titles made no reference to the oboe at all. Some human being knew that hautbois means "oboe" in French, and someone knew that Jean Gabriel Prosper Marie's Chant Pastoral is a work for oboe and piano or orchestra.

https://imslp.org/wiki/List_of_Compositions_Featuring_the_Oboe​

There was a moment in time when all I wanted was to listen to one track of Coldplay vs one track of Joe Satriani (during the time when a question of plagiarism surfaced). So a simple playlist and then ask Siri to play "The Chris Versus Joe Question".

Sometimes all I want to know is whose soprano I prefer in some solo in a song cycle. That usually ends up being a manually constructed playlist as well since it's faster in that case than a smart playlist.

On the other hand maybe all I really want to know is how much Poulenc I have on hand and I don't even want to play any of it, just refresh memory of some aspect of my collection. At that point I could not care less what Apple or a distributor called the genre of the relevant works, but I could end up pretty annoyed back in the early 00s when I sometimes had to look at more than "composer" to get a correct smart list.​

What I'm coming to here is that we can ask distributors to police genre tags but that it's unlikely "genre" is the be all and end all of categorizing music for any of us. Everyone may have need of particular --even peculiar-- groupings from time to time, and the genre tag is not going to be of much help even if "Classical" got busted down to levels like "Baroque keyboard" and "German expressionist opera".

"Classical" music aficionados may have lots of reasons past genre to mess with the metadata on their digital downloads of music depending on their general interests and sometimes on specific subgenres, say operas or cantatas. And certainly some related reasons not to let iTunes organize the files. It's not likely you want a bunch of opera tracks stashed by "artist, album, track", and if you ever want or need to move that opera's files someplace else, good luck rounding them all up if you had let iTunes work its artist-centered magic on their locations.

I know Poulenc's Dialogue of the Carmelites pretty well but damn if I remember the names of all the soloists. So it was track by track get info, find file... and in fact that mess was what made me take charge of my music's metadata and also of where my iTunes files reside.​

One way to get around limitations of the tags (once you've fixed them up) is to use smart playlists to organize temporary or permanent arrangements of works one may want to listen to in a certain order for whatever reason. The editing rules for smart playlists let you not only drill down by reference to any tags, but also understand constructs like "contains" versus "equals", as well as logical selectors (AND... OR) in order to end up with a set of tracks you could give a name to that Siri would be able to launch.

Does that sound like work? Sure, but it lets us be the boss of the music we have on hand. In the end we get what we pay for, and sometimes our own labor is the best part of a good investment. It doesn't resolve search problems with online catalogs for streaming purposes,,,, and I think that's probably an intractable problem until we get more ways to "tag" stuff we don't download, aside from stashing tracks in playlists.

Again, I enjoy using Apple Music in my own way, which is to compare specific performances in order to help me select a CD for purchase. Usually I can find in Apple's catalog what I want to work with in order to do that. Otherwise lol I resort to Amazon or Spotify. Either way my pretty transient AM library is less focused on genre than some of my other iTunes libraries, but I've long since given up expecting any commercial entity to tag music in the way I might elect to do. That doesn't mean we shouldn't pressure distributors to clean up their act a little, and ask the middlemen like Apple or Spotify to insist on that too, by requiring that the labels at least identify composers (!) in metadata, and by consulting artists on how they believe a release should have its main genre identified.

 

[elemenohme]

They have the same issues with long-running TV shows (like Doctor Who), which has seasons, multi-part stories, and different lead actors.

Their data structure for describing iTunes content just isn't flexible enough -- and has changed a number of times -- making the organization fall apart. I have shows and music I bought years ago that are all jumbled together now. Oh, well.

"It's the schema, stupid."

 

[WatchFromAfar]

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.

Considering classical music can be hundreds of years old your statement makes no sense. If something came out in 1715 was it considered dead by 1815? or 1915? etc? why should a piece of music that has survived that long suddenly die because "young wealthy white people don’t care" as you see it?

BTW "always depended on wealthy white people"? Did it?

https://www.classicfm.com/discover-music/black-composers-who-made-classical-music-history/

https://www.theguardian.com/music/m...rs-whose-works-deserve-to-be-heard-more-often

https://sonicscoop.com/2018/02/21/6-black-composers-made-music-history/

 

[MauiPa]

Although an excellent article even with a few very thoughtful recommendations, it is a little disheartening to characterize issues that the author (and others) have as problems. While I am a classical music fan, I find the Apple Music format to be quite satisfactory for my needs.

I admit that I am not trained to the level of the recommendations by aficionados who want to take it well beyond what is reasonable to me, and hey I fully support that, I think it would in fact be awesome. Instead of a music library for streaming music it could become an online musical thesaurus and classical educational tool.

But let's not limit the discussion to Classical only, many of these same "suggestions" apply to many musical genres and music in-general. Many could be applied to Jazz as well, for example. Let's not forget plain old simple rock, it exists in many forms and many sub genres, from many regions, different instrumentations, languages, and styles.

Occasional I like to pick a region/country/ethnic group and just listen to music I have never heard before, a little education with that would be great!

Let's face it, Apple Music had 56 million subscribers last year (assume that is higher now). I would presume they could afford it. I also just checked Spotify, and while it is all just personal preference, Apple Music seems miles ahead.
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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.

HAHAHA. so funny! maybe you haven't noticed what a big international business classical music is, I'm sure google could help you find some facts. It's absolutely huge. A lot of the musicians in jazz, pop, rock, ....... are in fact classically trained as well.

Just a point of suggestion, it might not be your thing and that's fine, but please refrain from throwing others under the bus.

thank-you

 

[nt5672]

Compressed classical music is not very pleasant most of the time. Can't imagine listening to it on an Apple device, let alone Apple's low res streaming service.

My guess is that they'll remove the 'Classical' category. It's, just too much work and Apple is really only interested in paying for PR to say it works hard to achieve incredible results, not actually achieving them.

 

[LizKat]

They have the same issues with long-running TV shows (like Doctor Who), which has seasons, multi-part stories, and different lead actors.

Their data structure for describing iTunes content just isn't flexible enough -- and has changed a number of times -- making the organization fall apart. I have shows and music I bought years ago that are all jumbled together now. Oh, well.

"It's the schema, stupid."

I have noticed that about TV shows too, when I reload some I had archived I end up having to mess with the metadata to get old and new purchases to display well in episode view in iTunes on my laptop. I find I don't have the patience to do that with TV shows since often I just want to rewatch a series and ditch it again. Classical music libraries are another story and there I'm willing to tweak the tags until I get what I figure will enable me to search reliably for what I want, and show me what I'm looking at in enough detail when I fetch it.
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Compressed classical music is not very pleasant most of the time. Can't imagine listening to it on an Apple device, let alone Apple's low res streaming service.

My guess is that they'll remove the 'Classical' category. It's, just too much work and Apple is really only interested in paying for PR to say it works hard to achieve incredible results, not actually achieving them.

Surely you jest... the Classical category is the only reason I bothered to subscribe to AM, as much as I also like other genres of music and will occasionally fish up a later release of some artist I've liked in the past just to see if I like the tracks. I'll grant you the audio quality issues but my purpose was to avoid buying an expensive box CD set of classical works without having spent dozens of hours listening to comparative performances of the works in question first. I don't need lossless quality to choose this or that tenor, or pick a set of tempos taken by an orchestra's conductor or soloist. The day AM loses "Classical" is the day they lose me too, and I'm pretty sure I'm not alone among "classical" aficionados in how I use AM.