Review: A First Look at Apple Music Classical
On March 28th, 2023, Apple launched its newest music product: Apple Music Classical, a standalone app designed to simplify the discovery and exploration of classical music.
This is a quick look at its interface, features, and potential shortcomings, written from my perspective as a professional musician. I’m curious how this service compares to previous efforts to create a dedicated platform for classical music, and how it might fit into my daily routine as a performer and music educator.
Apple Music Classical has the potential to redefine exploration for three distinct categories of listeners:
Professional musicians and music students;
Existing classical music fans;
New listeners.
For this post, I’ll focus on folks already working with classical music, either as performers, educators, or students.
Metadata Challenges
Like the London Symphony Orchestra? Well, here’s “40 Most Beautiful Tracks of All Time.”
When searching for a specific aria from Jacques Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffman, Apple Music’s “regular” interface leaves a lot to be desired.
The challenge of managing classical music metadata isn’t new, further exacerbated by the track-centered and algorithm-driven approach of streaming services.
Working with an interface that isn’t designed to differentiate between composer, ensemble, and soloist is a test of research skills. Finding a specific movement in a sonata compilation album means navigating a list of disembodied “allegros,” while getting to a specific aria within an opera can feel downright impossible.
Waiting for the scroll bar to get through the long title of the track becomes a guessing game. You might even need to play the track to orient yourself within a piece. “That’s a slow one, probably the second movement.” It’s time consuming, cumbersome, and doesn’t leave you wanting to explore the interface more.
And this is all for the folks who already know what they are looking for. For listeners just getting into classical music, these design constraints often mean relying either on algorithm-driven suggestions (which misclassify metadata), curated playlists (limited to the most popular performing artists and composers), or finding suggestions elsewhere and then searching in the app (leading to the issues described above). For a musical genre trying to break down its history of gatekeeping, clarifying confusing metadata and making search more effective would be a big step in the right direction. Other musical genres have already been tackling the ways software design can decolonize and democratize musical spaces, so classical music has a lot of great examples to look to.
Early Solutions
By the late 2010s, there were several boutique services geared specifically to address the problem of classical music metadata, the biggest being Idagio and Primephonic. Both promised refined metadata and a higher level of personalized music curation. I tried both of these services, and even recommended them to my students. Two things held me back from becoming a long-term subscriber:
As a professional musician, I could get by with finding recordings without these specialized tools;
A separate subscription for a classical music-only service didn’t fit the budget.
For my professional listening, I have the benefit of a network of friends and colleagues to get recommendations, as well as books, articles, and festival listings. (As a contemporary musician, many recordings aren’t available on streaming platforms anyway.) And for casual listening, the track-centered approach of traditional streaming platforms was working fine for me. Because of these factors, Primephonic/Idagio didn’t feel like a necessity.
I wasn’t interested in adding a separate streaming service that was limited to a single genre. How would this platform define what music it would host, and what would it exclude?
Apple-ification
Apple Music Classical greatly improves the browsing experience.
In 2021, Apple acquired Primephonic, promising to re-launch it as part of its broader music service. A niche classical music streaming app would get a mainstream Apple-ified version. After several delays, Apple Music Classical finally released in late March 2023.
Partnering with top tier music organizations like the Berlin Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera, Apple is producing exclusive recordings and live streams (including remastered recordings in the Dolby Atmos spatial audio format), in addition to partnering with musicians like Yo-Yo Ma and Hilary Hahn to craft content for the platform.
For now, Apple Music Classical is available only for iOS, and is free for existing Apple Music subscribers. While users can browse and listen to recordings within Apple Music Classical (a separate app), you still have to go to the regular Apple Music app to access certain features (a bit confusing and unclear why Apple designed it this way).
On first glance, it’s clear that a reworked approach to metadata is at the core of this experience. In order to determine whether or not it lives up to the hype, let’s take a look at Apple’s claims, and then compare them with some use cases.
Apple’s Claims
In the Apple Music Classical press release, they boast of the following features:
Largest Classical Music Catalog
Search Built for Classical Music
An Interface Designed for Classical
The Highest Audio Quality
Expert Recommendations and Classical Insights
Exploration Made Easy
Audio fidelity and catalog size has always been something Apple Music has focused on, with human curation becoming a key attractor as it crossed the 100 million song mark back in 2022. With a redefined approach to metadata, it’s clear Apple is taking exploration and search seriously as its next venture.
“I’ve been working with Apple to help solve the problems of classical music streaming,” said Jonny Greenwood. “They’ve come up with a really elegant set of solutions to the unique problems that hinder the search for — and collection of — digital classical music. Put simply, there’s only one recording of Joni Mitchell’s ‘Blue,’ but thousands of ‘Rhapsody in Blue.’ This first kind of search, in someone newly interested in classical music, can be so off-putting and bewildering, so I’m very excited for everyone to finally have a way into this remarkable universe of music, which is welcoming to new (and old) classical fans, and which rewards enthusiasm for music with music, directly and intuitively.”
Given these big claims and lofty goals, I wanted to run Apple Music Classical through a few hypothetical scenarios to see how different categories of users might interact with the product.
Exploring Composers and Performers
A big element of classical music education involves checking out repertoire. A teacher might assign a particular piece to a student, whose assignment might be to explore other pieces by the same composer or of a similar era. While a teacher could curate a specific list of suggestions for places to start, real exploration begins when students start to make their own connections and discoveries.
I personally enjoy finding new music to listen to by reading books, for example Alex Ross’s The Rest is Noise. Ross situates composers within historical and cultural contexts which generate connections for readers, and provides a companion website with musical examples that go along with each chapter. I was eager to see how Apple Music Classical provided similar contextualization for tracks.
Composer Search: Toru Takemitsu
I’m a big fan of Toru Takemitsu’s music. As a flutist, his music challenges me to push my technique and artistry. I’m currently working on “Voice,” a 1971 work for solo flute commissioned by flutist Aurèle Nicolet.
Let’s say I wanted to find all the recordings of “Voice” on Apple Music Classical (several aren’t available on streaming). The first benefit of this new interface is that now there’s a dedicated page for composers, along with their dates and a even a biography of varying quality (no bio for Takemitsu, so this is clearly a work in progress).
You can search by work to see how many recordings are available (9 for Takemitsu’s piece “Voice”).
While it’s definitely doable to achieve the same result by searching “Toru Takemitsu Voice” in regular Apple Music or Spotify, the search doesn’t know how to limit its results. In addition to getting the 9 results for “Voice,” it’ll also show you other tracks from those albums, related albums, or totally random tracks that happen to have the word “Voice” in their title. What I like about this new system is how it gives useful limitations on search results.
The bottom of the page also lists “related composers,” but it’s unclear how exactly Apple creates this list. It would be extremely useful if in the future, Apple added annotations for why it’s suggesting these other composers to listen to. For example, who did that composer study with, or who were their students or frequent collaborators? What school of composition are they situated in? Given the fact Apple has clearly hired professional musicologists for their curation, this shouldn’t be an impossible task and would make this service significantly more useful as means for deeper exploration.
The new composer page has the benefit of quickly showing me other works written by the same composer. Adding instrumentation filters would make this even more powerful: what if I wanted to listen to all recordings of Takemitsu’s music that feature flute? This would be particularly useful for contemporary music where the piece title rarely includes the name of the instrument. For some odd reason, filtering by instrument is available when looking at “All Albums” by Takemitsu, but doesn’t return the search results I expected (searching the word “flute” from album search did not include all results with “Voice” in them). When searching works, you can sort by: popularity, name, opus number, and key, so this is something Apple should keep developing.
Overall, the composer page is a welcome addition to Apple Music. It makes searching for specific works by a composer easier, but still lacks sorting tools that would be useful for a music professional or music student. As expected, the overall level of curation is much more refined for the most popular classical music composers, so I’m probably pushing this product past its common use case. Still, Jonny Greenwood did tout the “remarkable universe” unlocked via Apple Music Classical, so seeing gaps in design logic when going just a bit off road to someone like Toru Takemitsu (arguably one of the 20th century’s most influential classical music composers) shows me that Apple still has a long way to go with this product.
Performer Search: Jordi Savall
Jordi Savall is a conductor, composer, viol player, and is one of my favorite performers to listen to. Similar to composers, performers get their own page. Depending on their popularity, they will get more/less personalized curation for their profiles.
At the top of Savall’s page it says they are a Viola da Gamba player and a Conductor. What would be very cool is if you could click “Viola da Gamba” and get a list of other performers of this instrument. I like how at the bottom of the artist page there’s an “Often Appears With” section.
As opposed to the composer page where you could search by work, here the search is limited to albums, and there is no way to search by specific composer. I could browse through Savall’s discography to find albums of Marin Marais (a Renaissance composer), but it would be nice to be able to search through a list of tracks composed by Marais on which Jordi Savall is the performer. He also works as a conductor, but there’s no way to specify on which albums he is the conductor as opposed to the performer.
At the bottom of each album, there is a section titled “On This Album,” which usually lists the ensemble, performer, and sometimes the composer. In the case of this specific album (Marin Marais; Alcione), the composer is left out. It’s highly likely that someone searching for “Marin Marais; Alcione” would know Marais is the composer, but leaving this detail out of the “On This Album” section tells me that this section isn’t filled consistently
Conclusions
Apple Music Classical is a welcome addition to the streaming world, but definitely feels like a beta product in its current state. In this article, I focused specifically on its search and filter features, writing from my perspective as a professional musician. I identified a few limitations of currently available content, and issues with the design logic. While I think these are all possible to solve, it’ll depend on how committed Apple is to truly revolutionizing the discovery and exploration of classical music. I’m very curious what exclusive and curated content Apple’s creative partners will bring to this new product.
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March 2023
- Mar 28, 2023 Review: A First Look at Apple Music Classical Mar 28, 2023
- Mar 10, 2023 A Chat with Artusi’s VPs of Technology, Marketing, and User Experience Mar 10, 2023
- Mar 3, 2023 Review: Artusi Interactive Music Theory and Aural Skills Mar 3, 2023
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February 2023
- Feb 15, 2023 Music Theory Lecture Tech Feb 15, 2023
- Feb 14, 2023 Music School in a Digital World Feb 14, 2023
