Does Apple Music support the classical music listener?

I'm not sure how you are searching, but I found this album of the complete symphonies of Dvorak by Rafael Kubelik and the Berlin Philharmonic.

https://itun.es/us/yEd7o

You might like to take a look at the Naxos website: you can subscribe for $19.95 per year and they have a huge catalogue available for streaming with a lot of little-known composers from the Naxos, Marco Polo, Da Capo and other catalogues. The main downside is that navigating their site is a fairly slow process. You can try it out for free - you will be able 25% of each track. The quality seems to be pretty reasonable.

The biggest problem with classical music on Apple Music is not the lack of content, but the lack of composer info!

They do not list any composers on any album. The composer field (that's filled on the iTunes store) is empty on Apple Music! How did that happen? It was clearly done by people who have never listened to a single classcial piece of music in their lives... How are we supposed to know which work is by who when works by multiple composers are featured on an album?

Spotify does list composer info for every classical album, also in list view!

Apple please fix this!!!! This is not up your quality standards!!!

Here is another update to this question:

Not only do they not list composers on Apple Music / iTunes, on an iPhone there absolutely no way of knowing which piece of classical music you are listening to. All you see is the track name and the artist (which in the case of classical music is pretty useless). You need to see who the composer is!!!

So I just downloaded SPOTIFY for iOS. I searched for a classical music track, hit "play" and there it was, the composer info was right underneath the track name. SPOTIFY clearly wins when it comes to classical music.

I should be really easy for Apple to add this mind-boggling omission. But I guess that's what happens when you put people with a very narrow musical focus in charge of a music service that's supposed to be for every style and genre.

Just FYI there are now only two classical stations on Sirius XM. One opera and one not.

Completely agree with this... it's just nonsense to classify a section of the Mozart Mass in C minor as a "song" or complete operatic works as "albums". And the random selection of movements of classical pieces is an insult to classical music listeners. This morning I went on to Apple music (after I'd looked at this post). I started with Alban Berg's violin concerto - one movement only - before it went on to a couple of the 7 early songs, then suddenly I was in Act 3 of Wozzeck. Another frustrating aspect is the way searches aren't able to distinguish between a composer (Monteverdi) and a group taking their name (Monteverdi Choir). Searching for Monteverdi on iTunes store brings up loads of Bach recordings by the Monteverdi Choir - fine recordings but not Monteverdi.

Apple really ought to employ some people who actually understand classical music to design a more appropriate interface that makes sense for classical music and doesn't insult our intelligence.

I'm also mystified why there simply isn't more classical music available given nearly 100 years of recorded classical music. Come on Apple, I'm a huge fan but it's time to lift your game.

mjgcae wrote:

The other challenge, noted by others, is that the entire paradigm of online music is "songs" that can be enjoyed in random order ... not a single work in multiple movements. It can be a challenge to organize and maintain the integrity of a single work.

This problem is exacerbated by the fact that I don't think anyone at Amazon, Apple, Spotify, iTunes, Apple Music or anywhere else who entered the information on albums and tracks knows the first thing about music. Most of the time, the composer is listed in the Artist field, Or in opera recordings, character names, not artists. And there is no consistency in how sections of a work are Titled. All of this makes searching into a meaningful classical music stream problematic.

I fully agree with you. However, as noted before, if the composer was listed under artist, my biggest complaint would be addressed - but the composer is nowhere to be found on Apple Music, the filed is simply empty in the iTunes version of Apple Music and on iOS there is no way to look up the composer for anything. All they list is the artist. Impossible for Classical Music and other genres where you need to know who composed the piece you are listening to. And Spotify does get this one right, by the way!

As far as the issue of songs vs. classical music works is concerned, Apple already did address that problem in their iTunes store. They found a way to display works (symphonies, chamber music works etc.) as a group of tracks that belong together. But they only did that so you can buy an entire string quartet for example at once. Once these tracks land in your music library, the grouping is gone and the individual tracks are on their own. Well, the message is clear - we're happy to take your money, but we don't really care about you after that...

When you put people like Trent Reznor, Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine in charge of music at Apple, it was to be expected that classical music (along with other niche genres - like Jazz, Raggae among others) gets pushed to the side in favor of mainstream music that these three men live and breathe. But I think this attitude is extremely short sighted. People who listen to classical music do not fit into a stereotypical pigeon hole. Our tastes in music can be extremely wide and we're paying for that service like everyone else. Come on Apple, this not what this company usually stands for.

Agree with you completely. However, this is not a new issue. iTunes, going back 15 years, has always behaved this way. Apple Music has made the problem worse, because with iTunes I could at least create a playlist for a work. Which is why I'm not even going to try Apple Music.

Lawrence Finch wrote:

Agree with you completely. However, this is not a new issue. iTunes, going back 15 years, has always behaved this way. Apple Music has made the problem worse, because with iTunes I could at least create a playlist for a work. Which is why I'm not even going to try Apple Music.

Actually you can create playlists with Apple Music just like with iTunes - in that regard it behaves the same way. And yes, the problem with classical music and iTunes has been there since the beginning. However, they have slowly addressed at least some annoying issues - the iTunes store now lists composers for classical pieces and not artists, for example. With Apple Music they seem to have thrown all that (minor) progress in the trash and we're back to square one...

I agree with most of the problems listed above, but let's take a step back. I remember 25 years ago before the internet was big and how difficult it was to find classic music recordings. Most record stores would have a tiny little section in the back for Classical music if they had one at all. All they had was mainstream recordings, nothing off the beaten path like 20th century music. Sure the big cities like NY would have a Tower records with an extensive collection, but if you lived outside a big city you were screwed. I would have to plan my purchases for the times we visited NYC. I would make lists and save up my money so I could buy 5 or 6 albums and just hope they would have the things I really wanted. Now for $10 a month, I have access to hundreds of thousands of classical albums. Not just the big names like Bernstein and von Karajan, but obscure things like the latest album by Wuorinen. Sure the organization isn't so great, but look at the big picture. Has there ever been a wider selection of recordings at your fingertips? Now I read Gramophone magazine and I can usually listen to over 50% of the albums they review. 25 years ago, I would have to make a choice and hope it was the right one because it would cost me $15 to buy that album. Now I can listen to the album once and if I don't like it, never listen again because I didn't have to pay anything besides that one $10 fee.

jcarucci wrote:

I agree with most of the problems listed above, but let's take a step back. I remember 25 years ago before the internet was big and how difficult it was to find classic music recordings. [...] Now for $10 a month, I have access to hundreds of thousands of classical albums...

This is of course very true. I am extremely happy to have access to all that music now for as little as $10 a month. But - leaving the composer field empty is not just a matter of "bad organization", it makes identifying a classical piece of music sometimes virtually impossible.

I grew up in Austria and in my (mid-sized) home town we had two large record stores that would sell nothing but classical music albums - all the way down to the most obscure titles. These stores are all gone now, but not because people don't listen to classical music any more, but because they could not compete against Amazon and iTunes. Spotify (a European company) does treat classical music with a little more respect (by listing composers for classical music, even on iOS). They are far from being perfect but at least they offer a valid alternative to Apple Music. Competition is good for everyone and if Apple still doesn't seem to care at the end of my trial period, I will switch, since I do like the subscription model a lot.

I have to agree with this. One of the hopes I had had for Apple Music is that with their curated approach I would see playlists which would include complete works. Instead I see for example an introduction to Mussorgsky which not only includes just solo movements, treating them like song, but shuffles the movements together. A little Pictures at an Exhibition, a little Night on Bald Mountain, and now some more Pictures. Very depressing. I love the catalog that Apple Music offers, but the For You and Playlist aspects are useless for the classical lover.

I have been comparing Spotify to Apple Music the past 2 weeks and I find that they have pretty much the same catalog and often the same problems. For example, Joshua Bell has this album called French Impressions: https://open.spotify.com/album/5FUPAG4ZjlOSJf0t3uITB7

On both Apple Music and Spotify the composers are missing which is a problem because each piece has a different composer. But when I looked at the tracks on iTunes, I opened the Get Info screen and see that the composer field of the files were in fact filled in. So I think it comes down to the fact that the software just doesn't do a good job displaying this information. As everyone has noted the software was designed for popular music where the composer is not very important. I think what Spotify does in some cases is put the composer as part of the song title, which really isn't great either. The mp3/aac file formats have a separate composer field.

The one thing that makes Apple Music better for me, is that if they don't have an album, I can add it to my iTunes library and it will be uploaded to iCloud and live side by side with the albums that Apple Music does have. I don't believe Spotify has anything like this.