Maybe we'll finally get a music app where classical music isn't categorized by Album/Artist :)
Classical doesn't really fit that well into a schema, since you have composers, performers, and then under performers there's soloist, or multiple soloists, which orchestra, which conductor, and so on.
And it would also be nice to have things like "show most popular recordings of Beethoven's 5th".
> Classical doesn't really fit that well into a schema, since you have composers, performers, and then under performers there's soloist, or multiple soloists, which orchestra, which conductor, and so on.
That sounds like a schema to me. Hell, even popular music can have such complexities, it’s just that they’re usually ignored e.g. if you want to correctly tag a cover featuring a rapper, that’s basically a performer (cover band), composer (the original band, or the actual composer as that’s often not the band), the soloist (the guest), there’s also the backing band and vocals which may have their own identity, and the venue may or may need a mention (e.g. a tiny desk live usually has a different feel than a concert live).
Obviously it’s not quite as bad as classical where as you mentioned there are eve more roles plus you might have hundreds or even thousands of interpretations of the same piece versus a handful.
I mentioned some of these numbers in another comment already, but for example: Search for "Don Giovanni" in the new app, and there are 1,182 "Works" that match. That's a lot of covers! The "Editor's Choice" is 79 tracks, while the five popular works listed under that one are 63, 64, 70, 38, and 59 tracks, all for the same composition.
It is true that there are complexities in pop music, especially in the modern age of "featuring" artists, but:
1. There are complexities and complexities, and classical music involves the latter.
2. If anything, much pop music seems designed to hide things like composers and session musicians as often as not. The fear seems to be that if people realized how few pop artists write their own music, they'd think less of them. I'm not sure I agree, but the point is that improved metadata is not what everybody involved in pop is looking for. Since the metadata would need be supplied by the labels, I don't think the uptake would be as high as one might hope.
The best example of non-classical music that might rise to a similar level of complexity and care is touring bands like Phish or the Grateful Dead, if all of their live recordings were available officially.
I get your point but rap was a bad example. Rappers don't "cover" songs and artists who cover rap songs are usually bedroom artists posting on YouTube.
You may want to re-read my comment. In my example there was no rap artist covering a piece, or a rap song being covered, there was a rapper guesting on a cover. Rap is not just a genre on the side.
Patching one app into another for improved UX and categorization is bonkers.
Also, my kid wanted to use Apple Music classical first thing this morning (he’s a big classical music nut), you literally have to be logged in to regular Apple Music before Classical will allow you to play anything. Weird.
I don‘t think they „patched“ stuff. Without knowing much about it I‘d guess they just took the backend, put it behind an Apple API and then built a new app based on that. The frontend there is probably the easier part and likely the reason it‘s only available on iOS at this point.
You have to be logged into Apple Music before you can play Apple Music, regardless of whether you're using the Music app, the Classical app, or the web app. I'm not sure what's weird about that?
Oh, are you saying you can't log in using the Classical app, but have to use the other one? That would be weird.
There is the slightly awkwardly-named idagio (https://www.idagio.com/), which has been doing the same kind of thing for a while.
(I'm not well placed to compare them, since I let my own idagio subscription lapse a couple of years ago due to lack of income, I never tried Primephonic before Apple bought it, and I don't have an iPhone so can't try the Apple service... aside from all that, I'm right in the target market!)
Classical doesn't really fit that well into a schema, since you have composers, performers, and then under performers there's soloist, or multiple soloists, which orchestra, which conductor, and so on.
And it would also be nice to have things like "show most popular recordings of Beethoven's 5th".