A Classical Debate

Apple Music Classical. WTF.

I have a routine. I listen to jazz music every evening. Ambient music every afternoon. And classical music every morning. This is the background soundtrack to my working life.¹ Given the latter, I should be right in the wheelhouse for the new Apple Music Classical app, which just went live last night. But I find it odd.

I get the stated reason that it’s a standalone app. But I also hear a lot of people are asking this very question. Apple has clearly felt the need to drive it home multiple times today, for example, under the Q&A heading ‘Why a separate classical app?’:

Classical music often involves multiple musicians recording works that have been recorded many times before and are referred to by different names. For example, from the formal Beethoven’s Piano Sonata №14 to the popular byname of Moonlight Sonata, or in multiple languages, such as Mondschein Sonata in German. Such complexities mean that classical music fans have been ill-served by streaming platforms. Until now. A distinct app, included with an Apple Music subscription, gives these classical music lovers the editorial and catalog content they’ve been missing.

Only a brand-new app — with specialized features and a beautiful interface designed for the genre — could remove the complexity and make classical music easily searchable, browsable, and accessible for beginners and experts alike.

They also made a video to explain this further. That’s helpful context.

But it’s also odd in that it’s not like they stripped all of this music out of the main Apple Music app — as far as I can tell, it’s all still available there. So it’s not about de-cluttering that app. It’s more about letting classical music lovers dive deeper and find easier the music that they love. Fair enough, I guess. But I suspect the real reason Apple is doing this is simply because they acquired a beloved classical music service, Primephonic, a couple years ago. It was a way to help differentiate Apple Music versus Spotify. But they undoubtedly also knew that it would piss off users of that service if they killed off that standalone app. So here we are, two apps, one price.

But actually, “Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time” and then later kills them off all the time. Recently and notably, Apple acquired and then sunset Dark Sky. I’m sure Primephonic had a lot of vocal advocates, but I’m also sure that they’re not as vocal as the users of Dark Sky. Apple, of course, put the stand-alone weather app out to pasture last year after rolling out many — but not all — of the features into their own Weather app. The blowback on that decision continues. But we all get it, there are trade-offs. Apple didn’t want to offer two weather apps.

But they do, apparently, want to offer two music apps. So much so that they spent 18 months building a new app for Apple Music Classical. I’ve been using it since last night. It’s fine. It looks nice, as you might expect. But it’s also very similar to Apple Music. To the point where I’m honestly not sure why it took 18 months to launch it. Yes, yes, nothing is easy. But moving from Primephonic to Apple Music Classical, with the scaffolding of Apple Music already available to use, feels like a pretty straight shot.

You might have thought Apple didn’t want to do the work to retrofit Apple Music itself to fit this new classical music metadata, but I also have to imagine they could have done that in 18 months. And I have to imagine they could have figured out a UI to make it work. Maybe there would have been a special classical music section of Apple Music, for example, where the UI changed slightly to match the needs. Maybe the search in that section could have been even more tailored for classical music and different languages, etc. Maybe you could have even pinned that section to be a main part of the UI if you so chose. Hell, I want this for jazz music. And ambient music. And, most importantly, grunge music.

Apple, if you want to build me an Apple Music Grunge app, I’m all ears.

Here’s something else that’s odd. After again, a year and a half of work, Apple Music Classical is iPhone-only. Every app developer knows that Apple likes to nudge, subtlely or overtly, cross-Apple-platform support for apps. “That’s a nice iPhone app. Would look great as an iPad app as well.” That kind of thing. How can Apple realisticly give such guidance if they themselves don’t have that ready to roll on day one of their services!?

My above stated routine actually doesn’t have me using an iPhone to listen to music. I’m using either my iPad or Mac. And yet I can’t use Apple Music Classical on either of those. Even more strange, from their Q&A:

Apple Music Classical was built exclusively for mobile and is available on iOS with Android coming soon.

Classical fans who want to listen on their MacBook, iPad, or in their car can open Apple Music to enjoy the tracks, albums, and playlists they saved in Apple Music Classical, thanks to the shared music library.

Android before iPad or Mac?! And wait, it sounds like it may never come to the iPad or Mac! “Built exclusively for mobile”?! What on Earth?

This whole thing is just odd. Maybe the founders of Primephonic baked this into their deal? I’m just having a hard time figuring out the strategy here. I might understand it if Apple were trying to upsell Apple Music Classical as an add-on to Apple Music. Services, services, services revenue, after all. But they’re not doing that, clearly.² So instead we just have a new music app. Focused on one genre. That is very similar to the regular music app. Which contains all of the same music. For the same price. In all the same countries. And it’s iPhone-only. And Apple doesn’t offer a password app, which they clearly should. And Dark Sky is dead.

¹ Mostly whilst doing email. Fuck email.

² The app’s tagline in the App Store is “Included with Apple Music”.