Apple Music Classical is now available from the App Store

Gave it a shot. I’m sure it’s competitive with the alternatives on iOS. But, I found it pretty disappointing and even embarrassing.

IMO, too much of the shallowness of the streaming approach to music apps (which I found insultingly dumb TBH) has leaked into this app.

Generally, the ability to explore is limited with little assistance from the app. And the ability to navigate your own library is similarly shallow.

Bottom line for me is that classical music catalogues are rich in data, so a good app needs to be a good data navigation and management tool. This, to me, was lost in the designers.

EG. Filtering by genre is hidden as a second class citizenn in the top right. The result is a flat list of works without any option to list, filter again or aggregate by composer or performer or year.

When navigating your library, the moment you get to the level of a single work, you get the general view of that work listing popular recordings etc. If you’ve added any particular recordings to your library these will be ignored or forgotten.

When exploring by genre, a list of popular composers is placed at the top. Click one and it takes you not to a list of works by that composer in the preselected genre, but the general view of the composer.

Overall, it’s 2023, Napster is old enough to have a job and kids now, and a big tech company has the gall to release a crappy music interface without any reasonable interface to exploring the data they clearly have on the backend. For classical music!?

Enshitification embodied.

Though there is scope for it to become a nice app. Unlikely though.

Edit: read the linked article. Incredibly shallow and clearly not by someone who likes classical music or cares about having a good app. I guess we get the apps we deserve huh.

I think, it's great and it will probably make me switch from Spotify to Apple Music. Spotify is a complete shit show if it comes to classical. The search results are mostly useless and the lack of standardization in the naming of classical "songs" makes it very hard to find different performances of the same piece.

Also whether and in which meta data field you can find the composer, soloist, conductor, etc. is also quite random. They don't enforce any standards on the meta data they get from the labels and the labels don't seem to care, either.

From what I've seen in the Apple Music Classical app, the do a very good job in aggregating and cleaning up the meta data. I don't find the interface to be super intuitive, but it's good enough.

Spotify also mangles the audio quality to such a degree that often the same recording on YouTube has better quality than the Spotify one (which I pay for...).

I just hope that Apple can convince some of the missing labels which have been holding out (looking at you, Hyperion).

Wow, this doesn't "just work" for me. I don't have an Apple Music subscription, but I've "purchased" plenty of classical music using iTunes, going back, what, 15+ years? The app doesn't appear to be designed for this use case. Why not? Isn't it just an elaborate skin on the basic Music app?

The app knows about my classical purchases, in that they are accessible from certain built-in playlists. For example, the piano pieces I own show up in Instrument Playlists/Piano. When I do a search, my music shows up among the search results, but lots of other results I don't own are also shown, so searching isn't a practical way to access my library.

None of my stuff shows up in Browse or Library. I have to "Add Albums" to my library? Just what I want, a learning curve, and extra effort, to play music I already own.

It appears Apple's main intention is to lock-in classical fans into a monthly subscription. Fine, but then just say, "This app requires a subscription to Apple Music."

This will be a refreshing take on background noice during work tomorrow. I have zero exposure to classical music, I’m just excited to dive in with Apple Music’s curation and let them tell me what’s nice

Amusingly, it shows your recently played albums even from the main music app. If you click on them, you see only the songs it counts as classical.