Apple is keeping the promise it had made — a new dedicated app for classical music. Called Apple Music Classical, it will debut on March 28 and it will highlight what the company has done after acquiring the music service Primephonic in 2021.
In August 2021 Apple acquired Amsterdam-based classical music streaming service Primephonic to ensure listeners “get a significantly improved classical music experience”. Online classical music store Primephonic had been serving the classical music scene since 2014, offering high-quality downloads from an enormous catalogue, and in 2017 it launched a streaming service. It became successful because of how it made sense of the available metadata or all the information about a digital music file.
Instead of bundling with iOS, this will be a standalone release that can be downloaded from the App Store. Access to the app comes included with a standard Apple Music subscription.
“Apple Music Classical makes it quick and easy to find any recording in the world’s largest classical music catalogue with fully optimised search, and listeners can enjoy the highest audio quality available, and experience many classical favourites in a whole new way with immersive spatial audio,” Apple has said.
At launch, Apple Music Classical will be available on all iPhones that run iOS 15.4 or later. And an Android version of the app is “coming soon”. The catalogue for the app will include over five million tracks spanning new releases to “celebrated masterpieces”.
It appears that Apple Music Classical will present a simple interface. Users will be able to search by composer, work, conductor or even catalogue number, to locate recordings. These can be streamed in highquality audio of up to 192 kHz/24- bit Hi-Res Lossless. And a slew of recordings will be available in Apple’s immersive spatial audio, as well. No doubt, classical musicis an excellent way to showcase the power of Spatial Audio.
Making classical music a streaming challenge is available metadata or all the information about a digital music recording. When it comes to classical music, there needs to be relevant metadata, like the name of the piece of music, the composer, the album it’s from, the performers, movements, the label that released the recording and year of recording. What makes it complex are the various movements and each piece of music has been recorded by several artistes.
Users will be able to read editorial notes about the composers and descriptions of their key works. Legendary composers will have their own high-resolution digital portraits available, which Apple commissioned from artists. In true Apple style, these were designed with colour palettes and artistic references from the relevant classical period. When the app launches, portraits will be available for Ludwig van Beethoven, FrédéricChopin and Johann Sebastian Bach.
THINGS TO REMEMBER…
- Apple Music Classical will be accessible with a standard Apple Music subscription.
- The app will first be iOS only and Android version is coming soon.
- At launch, it will be available only for the iPhone.
- It will support iOS 15.4 and newer.
- The app will solve the issues rival apps have with metadata related to classical music — opus number, movement, composer, arranger, conductor and so on. Classical music is not just about artiste, album and track title.
- The app’s design is based on Apple Music, but with a simplified UI that heavily uses Apple’s New York font instead of SF Pro.
- Apple has launched a new Twitter account for Apple Music Classical, @appleclassical, to track news and updates about the app.