Apple Music Classical is finally coming! This is indeed a strong reason to make music lovers across the world embrace themselves. For the uninitiated, such an app was on the cards for quite long. And at last, this freshly-minted go to app for classical music lovers, will see the light of the day, later this month.
For your information, Apple Inc. made an extremely significant move almost two years back, during the pandemic times, when the demand for dedicated music streaming apps hit an all-time high. The Cupertino-based tech-giant won a secret bidding war to acquire music service Primephonic in 2021.
The erstwhile Amsterdam-headquartered Primephonic, was a classical music streaming service with a huge fan following spread around every nook and corner of the world. It is believed that this smart business was made in a bid to offer an enhanced classical music experience to listeners and make sure that they “get a significantly improved classical music experience”.
You would be amazed to know that Primephonic catered to this seemingly niche audience, who possess a rich taste for probably the finest component of music — the world of classicals, right since 2014. It used to operate as a website, providing users with a vast catalog, having innumerable works from artists throughout history. Back then, Primephonic attracted music aficionados with high-quality downloads.
Incidentally, in 2017, the Amsterdam-based classical music company, came up with a dedicated music streaming service. It became an instant hit with the music buffs around the globe and had great perks like providing metadata and interesting as well as important pieces of information regarding a particular digital music deal. Though this might not seem to be a big deal now, it was not-so easy to offer these services six years ago.
There was no looking back for the Dutch music concern as its new music streaming service managed to strike a chord with the global audience who were eager to have such an offering. One must also remember that a huge paradigm shift was taking place, quite silently — people were shifting from websites to music streaming services. For, different apps, across domains, started to gain popularity, which only rose by leaps and bounds, with the passage of time. And there weren’t any dearth of takers, especially for the niche ones.
In a nutshell, Primephonic did wonders and struck gold over the span of seven years before Apple went on to acquire the former. Hence, the tech pundits knew it clearly well that Apple had some long-term, serious plans in this regard and going by Apple’s history, would surely make it big as they already made two bold steps to make it happen in due course of time — firstly, they neutralized the biggest global player in the classical music arena and secondly, they not only acquired the huge resource of Primephonic but also were likely to retain its massive user base, created over the course of seven long years.
Therefore, the job was half-done already. Though solid starts are important in businesses as well as wars, they don’t win you one. For, they only set the stage to launch your next move. Hence, despite the road seemingly appearing smooth enough the task cut out was still a hard nut to crack. Now, it has a way forward with the announcement of the Apple Music Classical.
Taking every aspect into consideration, Apple’s new classical music app comes as a giant leap over the former Primephonic. And in all likelihood, Apple Music Classical might just enter the race for the crowned champion among the best music apps in the world.
The reports, expert views and initial user reaction — all suggest the same that the equations of the music streaming services, globally, won’t remain the same anymore and Apple Music Classical will make it a different ball game altogether. And most-importantly, it would go on to affect the present power structure of smartphone players in the world, at least, to some extent. Who doesn’t know that a simple tweak in such calculations can have serious ramifications?
But what’s exactly in store so far as the all-new Apple Music Classical is concerned? How does it differ from the existing competitors in this segment? What gives it a super edge over others? Find out the answers to all these questions along with the inter-connected ones as we delve deeper with our special feature on Apple’s upcoming dedicated classical music streaming service.
Therefore, without further ado, here we go! Raise a toast to a musical bonanza that would cover everything you need to know about the Apple Music Classical. Cheers!
Taking every aspect into consideration, Apple’s new classical music app comes as a giant leap over the former Primephonic. And in all likelihood, Apple Music Classical might just enter the race for the crowned champion among the best music apps in the world. [Image Credit: Apple Music Classical]
Apple Music Classical: Now Schuberts Will Play Only for You
“If music be the food of love, play on.” — That’s how Duke Orsino expresses his sheer passion in the opening sequence of William Shakespeare’s tragicomedy Twelfth Night or What You Will. Music has remained an integral part of the human experience, since ages. However, the form has changed over thousands of years.
Today we have various forms of music, which are also responsible for creating different moods. They come with their own rich legacy and history as well. A Blues might keep your nerves cool, blot your anxieties and tensions, whereas, a piece Jazz will instill energy, for, it originated from the American South as a form of protest during the turbulent times of the American Civil War.
However, classical music has a class of its own. Arguably the greatest genre of music, even as we look at tune to it in 2023. From Beethoven and Mozart to Schubert, Wagner and Bach — the greatest creations of the most-blessed artists to have played music, appears are timeless. There’s absolutely no doubt about it.
But one may argue that the dedicated audience for classical music is niche. Yes, it might be partially true but it should also be noted that the domain continues to guarantee a huge market, globally. Just to clear the air of confusion, in 2018 the revenue of classical music amounted to 145.9 million U.S. dollars in North America and 135.8 million dollars in Europe, according to Statista. This not only sets all speculations to rest but also sheds light on why Apple decided to tap on this market, something which began with its acquisition of Primephonic in 2021.
For the uninitiated, something on the lines of the freshly-churned Apple Music Classical was about to hit the Apple App Store by the end of 2022. However, due to some undisclosed reasons, the Cupertino-headquartered tech-giant missed out on that. But now it has decided to go all guns blazing as there’s so much into it.
In a press release, the company let the entire world know that Apple Music Classical should not be confused with any other such app as thanks to an array of highly-significant factors and a wide range of over-the-top features it moves on to a different pedestal, for sure — “Apple Music Classical makes it quick and easy to find any recording in the world’s largest classical music catalog with fully optimized search, and listeners can enjoy the highest audio quality available, and experience many classical favorites in a whole new way with immersive spatial audio.”
We all know that Apple Music remains one of the major highlights of Apple devices and the all-new Apple Music Classical will only add some serious firepower to an already heavy arsenal. It has been learned that this new app won’t be bundled into iOS; rather, it will come live in the form of a standalone release in the Apple App Store. Apple users, across the globe, can enjoy access to this upcoming app that comes included with a standard Apple Music subscription.
More often than not, classical music is regarded as one of the best use cases for spatial audio, offering recordings an enhanced feel of presence. Apple promises that along with the Apple Music Classical, listening to classical music will be nothing less than a dream-like experience as the app will provide users with “hundreds of curated playlists, thousands of exclusive albums, insightful composer biographies, deep-dive guides for many key works, intuitive browsing features, and much more.”
Apple Music Classical is reported to stream at up to 192 kHz/24 bit hi-res lossless and Apple states that it will contain “thousands” of spatial audio recordings, which is certainly massive. Similar to the erstwhile Primephonic, it will bless users with detailed and accurate classical metadata, something which remains a task cut out for services that try to pack all music genres into one single app.
In addition to all these, here you will be able to modify your search “by composer, work, conductor, or even catalog number, and find specific recordings instantly.” In a nutshell, simply a hassle-free experience for the users, which is fundamental to fetching truckloads of traffic.
Let’s have a quick look at the major highlights of its salient features and other important details for our own convenience —
- You can easily access Apple Music Classical courtesy of a standard Apple Music subscription.
- The app is first coming to the iOS platform on March 28, 2023, followed by the release of an Android version (however, the date for the latter has not been specified yet).
- During launch, it will only come live on the iPhones and there won’t be an iPad counterpart of the app.
- Though the app’s design is based on Apple Music, it’s coupled with a simplified UI that heavily relies on Apple’s New York font instead of SF Pro.
- Supports iOS 15.4 and newer.
- At launch, there won’t be any room for offline downloads.
- Will offer more than five million tracks.
- Huge metadata — covering all the major boxes like, opus number, movement, composer, arranger, conductor and other important details.
- Does away with the Radio tab and it needs to be seen if it will support classical Radio Stations from Apple Music.
- The Now Playing screen now has an all-white or all-black background, as opposed to Apple Music, which fetches a background from the currently playing track’s album artwork.
- Users can also read editorial notes about the composers along with the descriptions of their major works.
- For legendary composers, there will be high-resolution digitals portraits, inspired from the respective classical periods.
- You will be able to see the portraits of Chopin, Bach and Beethoven, when the app goes live on March 28.
- To add more spice to the excitement, Apple has introduced a new Twitter account for Apple Music Classical, named @appleclassical, which is solely dedicated ro rolling out exclusive news and updates about the app.
Apple is always known for creating something different. For your information, the baseline of the brand reads “Think different.”, devised by its founding-father Steve Jobs himself. It seems to have an ace up its sleeve all the time and the brand has proved it time and again. Even in recent times, the tech-giant surprised us with the remarkable Emergency SOS via Satellite feature, which has life-saving capabilities and is indeed an epoch-making invention in the realm of tech.
At the first glance, the new Apple Music Classical appears loaded with ample promises and boasted of rich potentials. However, we need to wait for its release and a considerable time after that to truly assess if it could allow Apple in managing to give market leaders Spotify a serious run for money.
Don’t worry, we will be keeping a close tab on how this unfolds and get back to you with exclusive updates. Stay tuned with us to remain posted on the top tech stories from the planet and beyond (for, we also cover space).
