A classical comebach?
Last week, Apple released Apple Music Classical — a stand-alone streaming app designed for concerto connoisseurs. After its release, the app shot straight to #1 in the App Store, as fans of classical music — who've long been left behind in the switch to streaming — swiped and tapped through the 5 million tracks.
The initial popularity of the app is surprising — data from Luminate reveals that classical music captures just 0.9% of on-demand audio streams. That's way behind Rock, Pop, Country, Latin and nowhere near the broadly-defined “R&B / Hip-Hop” genre, which accounted for almost 30% of streams.
Classical music may never truly be "pop", but it's also clear that as a genre it's been poorly served by the streaming revolution... and it's all because of metadata.
Metadata just means “data about other data” — which in this context refers to the music's supplementary information, where a song file typically includes the song name, artist name, length and album, to mention but a few.
That taxonomy works for most music, but for classical the system breaks down. Bach’s concertos have been recorded many times, by different orchestras, with different soloists, arrangements, conductors, publishers and producers. Indeed, even the simplest piece of metadata, the track name, can be confusing. Take Beethoven’s popular Moonlight Sonata. That piece comes in 3 movements, and was originally marked “Sonata quasi una fantasia”, but the full name is technically “Beethoven's 14th piano sonata, Opus 27, Number 2”.
Apple’s app is hoping to cut through that complexity with more metadata for easier searchability.
