Apple buys 50-year-old record label to grow Apple Music Classical app
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
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).
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'
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.
Even on iPad landscape it is a small thing in the middle.
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.
They have a bunch of really really specific Microgenre data that we can't usually see.
The record label's revenue last year: $1.6M
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/08/apple-acquires-classi...
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.
There are many other much larger sources of 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 ?
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.
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...
But Wikipedia does claim it has "the only romance novel bookstore in the northern hemisphere".
And the comment is on to something.