Apple Music Classical is everything I’ve wanted Spotify to be

Julian Bream’s 1957 staging of Wyeth’s Tombaugh sur la Morte made a lifelong impression on me. At the age of 10, his passion for music ignited and he picked up the guitar. During his formative years, he came to enjoy Mahler and followed the Vienna Philharmonic, delving into all the performances of his favorite movements. Ironically, it taught me how important metadata is to a great music listening experience.

Over the years my tastes have evolved towards the opposite genre: metal. Despite all their differences, there is ample overlap in the ideologies of the two genres. Both focus on technical prowess, nuances and emotions. Both also suffer from curation and, more specifically, metadata issues. It’s hard to blame the average listener for lumping all metal into one bucket of heavy music when streaming services have disrespected the genre. Even today, streaming services can’t tell the difference between Gothenburg black metal, symphonic black metal and, for example, ambient black metal.

This means that even the best music streaming music apps have their own inherent problem of making your data and music accessible. Apple Music’s new Classical app takes a different approach to music curation and presentation, and we hope there’s a better way to stream your music.

I’ve been streaming everything from Ainaudi’s iconic neoclassical works to the haunting celestas and bells of Mozart and Simonetti over the past week, but Apple is finally making music geeks and average listeners alike. We are confident that we have built a music app that will satisfy you. Here’s why every music streaming service should take inspiration from Apple Music Classical.

Metadata powers digital music

I spent a good part of my teenage years amassing a huge music collection. I spent hundreds of hours cataloging and adding metadata to understand the spider web of my music collection.

My music library is now stored on a dedicated NAS drive, allowing me to delve deeper into my discography, find related side projects, and create dial-in playlists in seconds, depending on my mood. Convenience trumps the categorization, though, and while most of my music listening is done via streaming, the experience sucks.

A quick tap and swipe of the Apple Music Classical app reveals a crisp, simple interface fine-tuned for your classical music listening experience. A neatly organized grid of categories displays genres, composers, eras, and more. It doesn’t take more than three taps to reach a list of artists within a particular genre, new albums, and more. It pays homage to existing data and puts the power of discovery in the hands of the listener. This is in contrast to how most music streaming apps prefer listening to playlists categorized by mood, editorial curation, or a combination of both.

Want even more fine-tuning? Swipe right to the Instruments tab. This app lets you get into the weeds with guitar, harpsichord, piano and more. Designed for listeners who want to get familiar with the music.

I love that Apple Music Classical has embraced that its user base may not be adventurous and offers a library tab that is reminiscent of old-school offline music players. , albums, artists, composers and more. It’s traditional, but it works. Within hours, I had curated a list of my favorite composers to listen to with ease.

Contrast this to Spotify’s experience, where finding a library of your favorite artists and albums is far from the most effortless experience. Instead, Spotify prefers to show you giant thumbnails of the playlists you follow. Plus, Spotify still can’t separate live albums and compilations and throw them out alongside an artist’s standard release catalog.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with Discovery’s playlist model. Perfect if you’re feeling the cultural zeitgeist of pop music or if he’s in the mood for 180 BPM metal at the gym. Unfortunately, playlist-based listening keeps the listener moving through groups of similar-sounding music. How often do you get up, pause, and tap a playlist to discover an artist and dive further into their work?The playlist model is his one that a music lover like me cares about. It feels like it completely contradicts one thing: knowing the artist.

That same respect for the genre extends to how the Apple Music Classical app displays an artist’s photo, artwork, or life history. Instead of adding jarring video clips and elaborate graphics, the app is designed from the ground up to pay homage to artists and remain a simple career in music. Of course, this approach isn’t entirely new and can be viewed as an extension of the similarly designed artist page in the regular Apple Music app. But it’s clear that the focus is more on curation than on becoming trendmakers for the widest audience.

There is also a strong focus on cohesion throughout the Apple Music Classical app.One of my favorite aspects is the currently playing page below[情報]It’s a tab. A separate page lets you drill down into details such as the composer, catalog number, record his label, and more. Tap these to see more works by the artist or composer. Not all of these tabs are now relevant to other music genres, but many are. It’s driving me crazy that most other streaming apps can’t access this important data or do much with it. If nothing else, it might encourage you to spend more time in the app and discover more music from composers, for example. This will be a win-win for the platform and listeners.

Spotify lets you view song credits, but there’s no way to click through to discover the individual’s other work. Similarly, the regular Apple Music app doesn’t display song credits at all, and unlike the classic-focused one, it doesn’t have an info tab.

In fact, the best example of a mainstream music streaming service that offers similar access to metadata is Tidal. I’ve been a Tidal subscriber for a long time and have had far too many discussions about which platform wins in the Spotify vs. Tidal showdown. That said, the platform is a great example of displaying artist credits. You can tap individual contributors to play all the music they have created or composed. Given that most music streaming services source their audio files from the same repository, Apple Music Classical and Tidal indicate that this data may be exposed. The problem is lack of intent. These features should be table stakes, not nice to have.

The discussion about balancing accessible interfaces and metadata goes deeper. Today, my personal listening history is hidden like a proprietary secret, so it’s impossible to know how many times I’ve looped Metallica’s latest single. It does not mean. Year after year, Spotify Rewind offers a shareable slideshow of the same data. Allowing me to look at that information and create playlists based on it is the logical next step. However, no one is interested in publishing that data.

The Apple Music Classical app isn’t perfect either. For those exploring classical music for the first time, the breakdown by genre and composer can be daunting, and streaming services, by definition, should aim for a wider reach. Sure, there are already some great playlists out there, but discoverability can be an issue for those unfamiliar with the genre. I think.

Apple Music Classical is a clear example of an app created by people who truly love music. It’s an app that lets you, the music listener, know your mood, learn about the nuances of a particular song or movement, and immerse yourself in an artist’s work. It’s also a great starting point for balancing discovery and curation.

Hopefully Apple will take a cue from the Classical app and incorporate some of the interface tweaks and features into the standard Apple Music app. As it stands, the Music app can seem borderline chaotic. I haven’t listened to a single Bollywood track on Apple Music, but the browse page is chock-full of recommendations for the latest releases. It makes no sense.

Similarly, Spotify’s upcoming TikTokification fails in the face of grainy music listening. No, I don’t care about Spotify, devotional music or the latest Happy Tamil Music playlists.

Apple Music Classical proves that a better music listening experience can coexist with the chaos of streaming recommendations. But will other services learn from it? That’s the million dollar question.