From left to right: Yo-Yo Ma, Hilary Hahn, Sir Simon Rattle with Hans Abrahamsen; Lang Lang|World Economic Forum; Ben Murphy; NBeale|CC BY-NC-SA 2.0; CC BY-SA 3.0; CC BY-SA 4.0; CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Apple released a stand-alone app—Apple Music Classical—last week, and it’s a huge hit among classical music lovers who want to listen to a particular piece by a composer, conductor, pianist or orchestra.
It features a refined search engine, along with a beginners’ guide to different musical eras, including commentary from famous artists to make classical music more accessible to old and new classical music lovers.
The app lists relevant compositions from classical musicians unlike Spotify and Apple Music. And it’s possible because of metadata.
Metadata contains music details like song, artist and album (usually the data required in pop or rock music, or any other genre of music).
But classical music has way more metadata (composers, conductor, key of the composition, and so on) than other genres of music. Other music streaming platforms are not including the information because (a) it is too much data, and (b) it takes too much time.
Apple acquired the Dutch startup Primephonic in 2021, which already had the back-end data infrastructure needed to incorporate metadata into Apple’s new app.