Apple acquires classical music streaming service Primephonic
Classical music is one of the hardest genres to surface through existing music apps.<p>Where an app may have an &quot;artist&quot; field, classical music will have &quot;composer&quot; and then for the performers it will have &quot;orchestra&quot;, &quot;conductor&quot;, &quot;principal soloists&quot;. For an opera all of those are primary fields that could be considered &quot;artist&quot;.<p>The variations of the data is huge, only last week I had to correct Tchaikovsky in my own data and looking at the variations I see online:<p><pre><code>    P. I. Tchaïkovski
    Peter Ilyitch Tchaikofsky
    Peter Tchaikovsky
    Petr Ilitch Tchaïkovski
    Piotr Ilic Tchaikovskij
    Piotr Ilyitch Tchaikovski
    Piotr Tchaikovski
    Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (this one is arguably most correct)
</code></pre>
This is something everyone gets wrong, and yet whomever gets it right is going to help make it easier for people to find and celebrate classical music, and to expose more people to classical music.<p>Even if today you know that you love Beethoven&#x27;s Symphony No 3... finding the best performance and recording is almost impossible, and if you do happen to stumble upon it on a streaming service getting back to it later (if it wasn&#x27;t the only one in your recents) is difficult.<p>I&#x27;m really glad someone is investing in this, and it needs to be a different app &#x2F; interface to handle this difference in metadata and in weighting of the fields. Capturing the intent of &quot;oh, this person really just wants to search Gould as a principal soloist and weight the search that way&quot; is far easier when you have an app that can provide a classical music perspective and filter over an existing library.<p>PS: Plex does this really badly too... whatever you do, don&#x27;t let the Plex Music Agents decide the metadata, Verdi disappeared and had the metadata for Veridia which I believe is a rock band.