I think the agreement they signed a while back takes care of everything in the future. Apple Inc basically has its own music label and I think they’ve resolved all their disputes with the record company.
Considering I do most of my critical listening in front of the big system, I would love a tvOS version. While Atmos can be a bit of a gimmick depending on the mix (I am here exclusively talking about listening with a full surround system, and Atmos really should not be judged on how it renders to headphones), multi-channel can be very nice for bringing the concert ambience to the listener. I have been buying multi-channel FLACs from Pentatone [1] for years, but a streaming service would be neat.
I was in fact listening to classical music in Music on my Apple TV only yesterday (and found a nasty bug where it wouldn't play the track I asked for, which I should probably report).
I was doing this because Dolby Atmos tracks AirPlayed to my Apple TV + non-Atmos receiver come out only as stereo, but the same tracks played in the Apple TV Music app come out as 5.1.
Not only can Atmos be a bit of a gimmick, but there have already been cases of mere stereo recordings converted to Atmos through trickery, instead of having been originally recorded as multi-channel. Consumers are getting scammed.
Could you explain what you mean by this? Very few things are recorded as stereo. Things are recorded on individual tracks and then mixed in stereo. Access to the original recordings allows remixing in Atmos.
That’s the thing. There have been Atmos releases where there was no access to the original recordings, only the stereo mix. Fake surround-sound was then created without consumers being aware of this. This was reported by a poster on the ILM message board[0]:
> OK, so I had a conversation today with producer John Snyder (worked with Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor, did tons of archival jazz stuff for decades, blah blah blah) and he was telling me about how some Atmos "conversions" are being done and this is some snake-oil bullshit. In a lot of cases, they're taking stereo masters (not even the original tapes, but the album masters), playing them back in the big room of a studio with microphones set up in three different positions relative to the speaker horns, and using those new recordings to build the Atmos "mixes".
Wow. Seems like such a waste of time. Especially given on iOS at least you can hit the “spatialise stereo” toggle to do this automatically if you’re so inclined.
I think the Classical app is both for the sake of the music but also a play at multiple interfaces over the same literal .app, which is different enough from how they've been doing things that it will take longer to figure it out. I say this because when I start listening to the Classical app and then connect to CarPlay, it still appears to just be Music, but not in the way that any app could read Apple Music and serve sounds from it, more like a different entry point to Music, akin to multiple activities on an Android app. Without any inside knowledge and very minimal sleuthing, I'm definitely ready to be super wrong, but interested and kinda hopeful to be see if I'm right.
The Music Classical app is basically just a separate Music UI for searching/discovering. Anything you add to your library also appears in the regular Music app. Which I personally found disappointing cause I would have liked my libraries to be separate since my classical listening is going to differ from my normal music listening and I'd rather a random movement of a random piece to not show up in my shuffle.
Though it also seems kind of necessary because the Classical app is missing some basic playback features like "play next" or queue management.
I was excited to subscribe to the service, but my #1 (really, only) place I'd listen to classical music is at my desk while working. I know people listen to contemporary music on their phones most of the time, but I was surprised to learn that the same is apparently true for classical?
Can anyone explain to me why exactly Classical music ?
I feel like acquiring a niche in the (music) market is not the apple way.
If google/alphabet did this, it would have been killed already, but apple is sticking to it.
is tim apple or someone in the upper management just a big hardcore classical music fanatic ?
It's a big niche and a premium niche. The beauty of classical music is that (by and large) you don't need to pay out publishing royalties. And, of course, if you own the master recordings, you don't need to pay out recording royalties either. So where, for a typical stream, the DSP gets about 30 - 35% of gross revenues on the rev share model, if they don't need to pay out publishing or recording royalties the DSPs gets 100% of the royalty pool relating to that consumption.
So if Apple gradually bought catalogue of recordings of long dead composers and this ends up being a significant share of consumption on Apple Music it's basically free money.
Plus, of course, by having control of catalogue they can do more innovative things (including making some of that catalogue available for free, to entice people into the service) so there are all sort of upsides here.
I suspect also that Apple Classical Music app subscribers are probably a wealthier cohort so probably more likely to convert to Apple One subscribers - and possibly more likely to be in the market for premium headphones etc.
People who like classical music probably generally have more money then average so they are good customers to have since it might be easier for Apple to upsell them all kinds of other subscriptions and services etc.
I assume recordings themselves are cheaper because of the reasons listed in the comment above.
If that is the case, it is probably because your record store only stocks some budget and mid-range classical music releases, the sort of things that sell to relatively casual listeners instead of dedicated fans. Classical records from both the majors and boutique labels that are not part of budget series, typically go for 20€ or more per disc. Especially in the case of the label discussed in the featured article, which released many of its recordings in the hybrid SACD format which is more costly to produce.
Convert last remaining streaming hold outs - Apple has high quality audio as standard, vs Spotify who still haven't implemented it even as a premium feature. The other high quality audio streaming platforms are probably too far away from the classical demographic (though, maybe Qobuz could) so it's a market where they can - potentially - own the market.
If you can get those folk to see the value of Apple Music, and they have an Apple TV (I bet there's a strong crossover here) and get them onto Apple One family plan, then you get kids/other family members using Apple Music.
So taking classical makes a lot of sense.
But yes, there's potentially also a physical side to it. I'm assuming that if Apple starts acquiring classical labels they will pretty much let them continue to operate as a record label - but with the luxury of perhaps not having to worry quite so much about top line economics.
Not a classical label, but another "premium" label I'm friendly with did a limited edition boxset of a particular artist and sold 1000 copies at about $400 - $500 a shot in under 12 hours. So doing premium releases is big money - but also very costly to manufacture, and when people are paying that sort of money they expect a REALLY great unboxing experience. Which, I guess, kind of aligns with what Apple does elsewhere.
That's a phenomenon specific to used LP's. It has nothing to do with the current classical market or streaming.
For whatever reason, of the people who are into vinyl these days, only a vanishingly small proportion are into classical on vinyl. Far, far less than the proportion of people who bought that classical vinyl in the first place. So there's essentially no market for it. Record stores will generally buy only specific rare/historical/mint classical LP's, in contrast to how they'll buy anything by Bob Dylan.
I'm not sure why -- curious if anyone knows. The two obvious theories are that buying LP's is a "hipster" thing and hipsters aren't into classical, or else that classical listeners are always looking for the highest fidelity and vinyl ain't it. After all, it's classical listeners who have long traded FLAC files rather than MP3's.
I more meant that the typical demographics of consumers around classical music probably make it a premium market, sorry, I was using shorthand.
That said - because most classical streaming services are really bad there's still a very active market for CDs in classical music, and because the production costs of making new recordings are VERY high (and there is a still a demand for them) it's a really weird market because you've got older catalogue available for rock bottom prices, and newly made recordings at pretty high prices. Hardcore classical music fans are completionists and so if there's a new recording that fills a gap in their library they are often pretty price insensitive.
When I worked adjacent to classical I was often given box sets of new releases. I noticed that one of those (which I still have - and which originally released at around $120) was recently sold on a second hand marketplace I follow for a ridiculous amount of money (hundreds of dollars) because it was on sale for a weirdly short time so you can only get it second hand.
It makes their music service a little more comprehensive in a way that no other competitor will bother with. Leaving their ecosystem leaves the consumer with death by a million papercuts.
Roon is the only other music player that understands the difference between compositions and performances like Apple Music Classical does.
What’s cool about Roon is that it applies this approach to all Music, not just classical.
Roon also seamlessly merges any locally stored music you have with your libraries from Tidal, Qobuz, or KKBox, which allows you to manage all of your music from one place.
Take a piece by Mozart for example. That piece has been performed and recorded many times over the years. A classical music listener wants to be able to browse by the composition (all performances of the composition), but also by the performer (all compositions performed by player/group).
One classical music composition can have multiple performances, potentially hundreds. So if you are in the mood to listen to, as a random example, Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 but are interested in how different musicians have approached that work, it is helpful to have an app that allows you to look up that composition, and see all the recordings of it with their respective orchestras and conductors shown.
To take a specific example, Pergolesi wrote a setting of the hymn ‘Stabat Mater’ (which is fantastic). So that’s the composition. But it can sound very different depending on how it is performed, my favourite performance is by Emma Kirkby. But it’s hit and miss about how that gets categorised - and it’s particularly important if the piece forms part of a set of works. I don’t want to search Emma Kirkby to find a piece by pergolesi, and I want to be able to group by composer rather than performer even through the performer is listed as the artist. Or, I might want to find other pieces performed by her from other composers.
Conductors tend to follow a certain interpretation of a composer's music. If I like the way Leonard Bernstein or Michael Tilson Thomas conducts a Mahler symphony, I'm likely to want all of Mahler's symphonies as recorded by one or the other (or, heaven help me, both), not one conducted by Leonard Slatkin (tho he's really good as well) and another one from Fritz Reiner.
Though I'd make an exception if I could find the Mahler's 2nd conducted by Eugene Ormandy I grew up with in the late 1960s, though...
There was a recently a review of Apple Classical in The New Yorker [1], which compares it to a few other services, some also mentioned in this thread. Apparently, many fare better on grouping compositions as an serious listener would appreciate.
I'm not sure if the other options own their own label(s), though. It will be interesting to see how this acquisition shapes the content available on the app.
I love the Internet because I had that same thought. They can definitely claim this purchase for the catalog to expand their classical music offering, but not Apple (Computer) Inc is also now in the record label business, just like Apple Records is. Maybe it's also testing the waters for a move like that. Sort of tin-foil-y, but I dig it.
There's nothing to re-stir because Apple Inc has completely bought out all Apple Corp trademarks in 2007. Yeah, apparently if you make enough money previously made agreements aren't really binding.
Not enough money can make contracts renegotiable, too, if it’s lots of not enough.
If your debts are high, and you can convince your debtors they’re better off taking a cut on what you own them than waiting for your bankruptcy, they’ll accept a deal that’s, on paper, worse for them than the original one.
Is a 50 year old record label old? It's weird how the article calls out the age of the record label, it means it was founded in the 70s which doesn't seem particularly noteworthy to me...
Edit: UMG, Sony Music Group, and Warner Music Group are 89, 93, and 65 years old respectively. So I guess it's noteworthy that it's a relatively young label?
The comparison between the age of Apple 47 and the slightly older record label is somewhat amusing in comparison to most acquisitions of much younger technology companies.
The company (BIS Records) is older than Apple itself.
That's not the most common pattern in tech acquisitions. The targets are usually either small and fairly new companies that provide some new tech or talent, or large and old companies that provide an established market (e.g. Compaq buying Digital, or AOL buying Time Warner).
> That's not the most common pattern in tech acquisitions.
I don't think any company in history ever said "I'd love to acquire that company, but I'll take a pass because it's been so successful that it managed to stay in business for so long. We definitely want none of that."
I wish Apple would do the same type of app for Jazz, as they did Classical. I used to use Roon for the awesome discovery, info on songs, but cleaned up a lot of my subscriptions (and I didn't need Roon for any of the fancy crooss-platform streaming support it had), but in playing with the Apple Classical app, I could see how doing the same thing with Jazz would be really well received.
Considering that another 50-year-old label with an aging founder is ECM Records, it wouldn’t surprise me if Apple did buy that eventually and do something with jazz, especially considering that label’s reputation for pristine sound and overlap with classical.
The problem with a jazz app, as I see it, it that its boundaries are too fluid.
I feel like I can definitively tell you whether a given track is classical or not.
But there's a lot of jazz I could include within classical, but also jazz I could include within hip-hop, jazz that I'd consider also just pop... that's the remarkable property about jazz, that it can fuse with anything. So I don't know how you'd draw a boundary around what tracks would and would not be included.
Not to mention that the two main reasons a dedicated classical app exists is to be able to organize by composer and by multi-movement work (e.g. symphony). While jazz generally fits well into the standard organization by artist and track.
Say, i'd like to listen to music produced by Brian Eno. Or composed by Max Martin. Or performed by Masayoshi Takanaka. Surely artist/track is not helpful there
I mean sure, but as those artists illustrate, that's nothing about jazz specifically. And 99+% of people have no interest in anything outside the artist -- they're self-described fans of Britney Spears, not Max Martin.
But of course streaming services seem to find ways to surface at least some of that, e.g. there's an official Spotify playlist of songs Max Martin has written/produced:
> And 99+% of people have no interest in anything outside the artist
This is precisely something that's different about jazz, though--there's often no reasonable notion of "the" artist. It would be perfectly reasonable and expected for someone to say "play me some music with Paul Chambers on bass," which off the top of my head would get recordings led by Trane, Miles, the Adderley brothers, Chet Baker, Toshiko Akiyoshi, Sonny Clark, Philly Joe Jones, JJ Johnson, Sonny Rollins, and I'm sure that I'm remembering only a small fraction.
As you note, people don't really do that with pop, or even classical. People do look for music with a certain soloist or conductor, but they mostly don't ask for music with a certain principal clarinetist.
Why limit genre at all? Looking at my library, albums from Neil Cowley and Nils Frahm show on classical app, but from Portico Quartet and Floex do not. Roger Eno shows, Brian Eno not. What kind of lottery is that.
Also, some attention to the main app would not hurt. Albums from different artists with the same name are randomly mixed together. Albums usually show year and label info, but there is no way to search for it.
The author didn't mention anything about the actual company, BIS. Most of this article is cribbed from general sources and other tech reporting. What makes them notable? Why were they picked? How deep is the catalog? How many recordings do they represent? Even the Wikipedia entry is better than this.
I had no idea Apple had a separate app for classical music. I think it's a great idea. If they could make an app that does not inundate me with recommendations for music that literally anyone who ever met me would know I would be uninterested in, that would also be great.
Isn't there a rating system? I mostly listen to hand crafted playlists, so I don't remember. But I would be surprised if they have a recommendation engine where you cant just dislike certain songs, and like others.
That's not the issue. I listen to all sorts of music. The problem is searching and indexing. You want movements to stay together, you want to be able to search by conductor, concert hall, recording date, featured soloist, composer, Opus or Catalog number, etc. Nobody handles this correctly.
This is probably the end for serious labels that publish classical and Western art music. We don't need some Silicon Valley hipsters deciding what's art.
Gatekeeping is necessary to protect, nourish, and grow anything. The alternative is enshittification and commercial "anything goes" BS dilluting it to death. Like it has happened with many other things, like news outlets from major print media well gatekeeped before being gossip rags today.
Well I think it's one thing to have curated recommendations, but quite another to have a curated selection of albums. I don't want Spotify's idea of 'the best' (e.g.) Mahler recordings; I'll make up my own mind!
It's interesting how Apple debuted their new Classical app some time ago, and then only now are they purchasing this record label (or perhaps this is when they're merely going public with that news?). Either way, curious to see what comes of this as an overall product+business strategy.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 185 ms ] threadThere are many other much larger sources of classical music.
https://archive.ph/0smlW
Even on iPad landscape it is a small thing in the middle.
[1] https://www.pentatonemusic.com
I was in fact listening to classical music in Music on my Apple TV only yesterday (and found a nasty bug where it wouldn't play the track I asked for, which I should probably report).
I was doing this because Dolby Atmos tracks AirPlayed to my Apple TV + non-Atmos receiver come out only as stereo, but the same tracks played in the Apple TV Music app come out as 5.1.
> OK, so I had a conversation today with producer John Snyder (worked with Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor, did tons of archival jazz stuff for decades, blah blah blah) and he was telling me about how some Atmos "conversions" are being done and this is some snake-oil bullshit. In a lot of cases, they're taking stereo masters (not even the original tapes, but the album masters), playing them back in the big room of a studio with microphones set up in three different positions relative to the speaker horns, and using those new recordings to build the Atmos "mixes".
[0] https://www.ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?sh...
It even has an (almost) identical UI to the iOS version
Though it also seems kind of necessary because the Classical app is missing some basic playback features like "play next" or queue management.
I feel like acquiring a niche in the (music) market is not the apple way. If google/alphabet did this, it would have been killed already, but apple is sticking to it.
is tim apple or someone in the upper management just a big hardcore classical music fanatic ?
So if Apple gradually bought catalogue of recordings of long dead composers and this ends up being a significant share of consumption on Apple Music it's basically free money.
Plus, of course, by having control of catalogue they can do more innovative things (including making some of that catalogue available for free, to entice people into the service) so there are all sort of upsides here.
I suspect also that Apple Classical Music app subscribers are probably a wealthier cohort so probably more likely to convert to Apple One subscribers - and possibly more likely to be in the market for premium headphones etc.
I assume recordings themselves are cheaper because of the reasons listed in the comment above.
How does that square with Apple wanting to put the music from this label in an app? Upsells to collectible media?
If you can get those folk to see the value of Apple Music, and they have an Apple TV (I bet there's a strong crossover here) and get them onto Apple One family plan, then you get kids/other family members using Apple Music.
So taking classical makes a lot of sense.
But yes, there's potentially also a physical side to it. I'm assuming that if Apple starts acquiring classical labels they will pretty much let them continue to operate as a record label - but with the luxury of perhaps not having to worry quite so much about top line economics.
Not a classical label, but another "premium" label I'm friendly with did a limited edition boxset of a particular artist and sold 1000 copies at about $400 - $500 a shot in under 12 hours. So doing premium releases is big money - but also very costly to manufacture, and when people are paying that sort of money they expect a REALLY great unboxing experience. Which, I guess, kind of aligns with what Apple does elsewhere.
For whatever reason, of the people who are into vinyl these days, only a vanishingly small proportion are into classical on vinyl. Far, far less than the proportion of people who bought that classical vinyl in the first place. So there's essentially no market for it. Record stores will generally buy only specific rare/historical/mint classical LP's, in contrast to how they'll buy anything by Bob Dylan.
I'm not sure why -- curious if anyone knows. The two obvious theories are that buying LP's is a "hipster" thing and hipsters aren't into classical, or else that classical listeners are always looking for the highest fidelity and vinyl ain't it. After all, it's classical listeners who have long traded FLAC files rather than MP3's.
That said - because most classical streaming services are really bad there's still a very active market for CDs in classical music, and because the production costs of making new recordings are VERY high (and there is a still a demand for them) it's a really weird market because you've got older catalogue available for rock bottom prices, and newly made recordings at pretty high prices. Hardcore classical music fans are completionists and so if there's a new recording that fills a gap in their library they are often pretty price insensitive.
When I worked adjacent to classical I was often given box sets of new releases. I noticed that one of those (which I still have - and which originally released at around $120) was recently sold on a second hand marketplace I follow for a ridiculous amount of money (hundreds of dollars) because it was on sale for a weirdly short time so you can only get it second hand.
I feel apple is the only player in the game.
They also know what matters is the content, and they’re obviously growing that content.
Roon is the only other music player that understands the difference between compositions and performances like Apple Music Classical does.
What’s cool about Roon is that it applies this approach to all Music, not just classical.
Roon also seamlessly merges any locally stored music you have with your libraries from Tidal, Qobuz, or KKBox, which allows you to manage all of your music from one place.
What is the difference and why's it important for an app to have these categories?
This seems ok for me - at least, not terrible. I can see why you'd want the two categories though.
https://open.spotify.com/album/6bPCZb1WjvotzyNkg2LciV?si=doH...
Though I'd make an exception if I could find the Mahler's 2nd conducted by Eugene Ormandy I grew up with in the late 1960s, though...
Idagio mentioned in this thread does this as well. You can choose your performance by conductor / soloist / ensemble etc.
https://www.idagio.com/
I'm not sure if the other options own their own label(s), though. It will be interesting to see how this acquisition shapes the content available on the app.
[1]: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/apple-aga...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v_Apple_Computer
If your debts are high, and you can convince your debtors they’re better off taking a cut on what you own them than waiting for your bankruptcy, they’ll accept a deal that’s, on paper, worse for them than the original one.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt_restructuring, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chapter_11,_Title_11,_United_S....
Under pressure, everything becomes fluid.
Edit: UMG, Sony Music Group, and Warner Music Group are 89, 93, and 65 years old respectively. So I guess it's noteworthy that it's a relatively young label?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
That's not the most common pattern in tech acquisitions. The targets are usually either small and fairly new companies that provide some new tech or talent, or large and old companies that provide an established market (e.g. Compaq buying Digital, or AOL buying Time Warner).
https://www.applebank.com/
The earlier agreement had Apple Computer agreeing not to go into Music to avoid confusion.
Apple Records, as the label of the Beatles, was hardly an unknown company
I don't think any company in history ever said "I'd love to acquire that company, but I'll take a pass because it's been so successful that it managed to stay in business for so long. We definitely want none of that."
Another way of saying '50 year old record label' is 'a record label that has been accumulating copyrighted material for 50 years'
The record label's revenue last year: $1.6M
https://www.allabolag.se/5562548676/bis-records-aktiebolag
I feel like I can definitively tell you whether a given track is classical or not.
But there's a lot of jazz I could include within classical, but also jazz I could include within hip-hop, jazz that I'd consider also just pop... that's the remarkable property about jazz, that it can fuse with anything. So I don't know how you'd draw a boundary around what tracks would and would not be included.
Not to mention that the two main reasons a dedicated classical app exists is to be able to organize by composer and by multi-movement work (e.g. symphony). While jazz generally fits well into the standard organization by artist and track.
But of course streaming services seem to find ways to surface at least some of that, e.g. there's an official Spotify playlist of songs Max Martin has written/produced:
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DWXDAhqlN7e6W?si=...
This is precisely something that's different about jazz, though--there's often no reasonable notion of "the" artist. It would be perfectly reasonable and expected for someone to say "play me some music with Paul Chambers on bass," which off the top of my head would get recordings led by Trane, Miles, the Adderley brothers, Chet Baker, Toshiko Akiyoshi, Sonny Clark, Philly Joe Jones, JJ Johnson, Sonny Rollins, and I'm sure that I'm remembering only a small fraction.
As you note, people don't really do that with pop, or even classical. People do look for music with a certain soloist or conductor, but they mostly don't ask for music with a certain principal clarinetist.
Also, some attention to the main app would not hurt. Albums from different artists with the same name are randomly mixed together. Albums usually show year and label info, but there is no way to search for it.
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/08/apple-acquires-classi...
But Wikipedia does claim it has "the only romance novel bookstore in the northern hemisphere".
And the comment is on to something.
They have a bunch of really really specific Microgenre data that we can't usually see.