Over the last few years, streaming has almost entirely revolutionised the way that the majority of us listen to music. As physical sales have declined, digital streaming has risen dramatically to take their place. New releases by major stars such as Beyoncé and Drake were streamed up to 300 million times during their first week of release alone, and streaming revenue overtook both physical sales and downloads for the first time in 2016.
If, however, you’ve been attempting to listen to classical music through a streaming service, the chances are high that you’ve found the experience confusing and more than a little frustrating. Here, we explore why streaming services can’t seem to get classical music right, and ask how they could work towards solving classical’s streaming conundrum.
What’s the Problem?
As many users of streaming services such as Spotify, Tidal and Apple Music have noted, the manner in which these services categorise and list artists often proves particularly ill-suited to classical pieces. For most other genres of music, the title of the song and the name of the artist is all that is required for an accurate listing. For a classical piece, there are a far greater number of variable factors – the original composer, the names of any individual performers who are also listed, the orchestra performing the piece, etc.
The result of all this variable data is huge variation in the way that classical pieces are listed. Sometimes you’ll find a piece listed under the name of the composer, sometimes under the names of soloists or specific orchestras. A classic rock album will exist in, at most, a handful of different versions – the original, a remastered release and a live album, for instance. By way of contrast, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony has been performed hundreds of times, and each one of these performances could find itself categorised for streaming in an entirely different way.
What Can Be Done?
One new streaming service, Primephonic, is attempting to get around the problem by devoting itself exclusively to classical music. This allows them to take a more carefully curated approach, with a team of musicologists and classical music students individually categorising every piece uploaded to the service. While this approach is certainly an ambitious and novel one, it doesn’t solve the problem with for users of other services, and Primephonic’s reviews have been mixed.
Instead, all streaming services could theoretically improve their classical listings through a better use of metadata – the information tagged to each music file. While Primephonic uses a dedicated team to sort through its metadata, could the task also be carried out by an algorithm? AI and machine learning algorithms have already found use in everything from Spotify’s personalised playlists to advanced music scoring software, but it could also be used to sort and organise the metadata of music files on streaming services.
Solving classical music’s streaming conundrum could even play a big part in increasing the genre’s popularity. Better categorisation and less complicated listings could help to welcome and engage new audiences who are currently put off by the genre’s perceived lack of accessibility.
About the author:
The author of the article is Daniel Spreadbury, one of the creators of the music notation software, Dorico. He has argued that the increased use of technology in music has had a democratising impact, by increasing access to previously obscure or esoteric forms. Simply by improving its showing on streaming services, classical music could stand to expand and widen its audience considerably.
