Apple Music Classical: High notes, off-key moments, and more in its first year
Later this month, Apple Music Classical will turn one-year old. Should it be proud of its first year in action? Or do its flaws indicate that it's still a work in progress?
In the early days of spring 2023, Apple debuted a fresh new addition to their streaming service line up: Apple Music Classical. Building on the preexisting infrastructure of streaming behemoth Apple Music, Apple Music Classical serves as a companion app for iPhone and iPad to cater exclusively to classical music listeners.
As we are mere weeks away from the one-year anniversary of Apple Music Classical’s debut I wanted to check-in with the current status of the service. Why was a new genre-specific music streaming app necessary? Where does it excel, and where is there room for improvement? What should the future entail?
How–and why–did we get here?
Whereas “Apple Music” and “Spotify” are household names, even avid music consumers may not have heard of Primephonic. Until September 2021 Primephonic was a streaming service exclusively centered on classical music. It was designed to facilitate the unique nature of classical music - but was not created to take on the big streamers. In fact, according to its CEO, “between 35-40 percent of people with a Primephonic subscription also subscribe to Spotify or Apple Music.”
On August 30, 2021, Apple publicly announced that it had purchased and was shuttering Primephonic, and that “Apple Music plans to launch a dedicated classical music app next year.” Although Apple ended up missing a 2022 launch date, the long-awaited Apple Music Classical app finally made its debut on March 28, 2023.
Apple Music Classical app itself is a companion app for the Apple Music app. You still need a paid Apple Music subscription to use it, but subscribers do not have to pay extra to access Apple Music Classical. All of the songs, albums, and playlists are available on Apple Music proper, but Apple Music Classical optimizes the experience for consuming classical music.
For those less familiar with classical music it might not make sense to release an app limited to one genre. After all, why not release separate apps for each music genre? The answer is simple: classical music is structured different than contemporary songs.
In fact, an official support document from Apple explains this:
Classical music is different. It has longer and more detailed titles, multiple artists for each work, and hundreds of recordings of well-known pieces. The Apple Music Classical app is designed to support the complex data structure of classical music.
A 2019 article in PC Mag about Primephonic further explains:
A classical piece can have up to 10 different parameters compared to the title-artist-album triad of a pop song. Spelling counts, too. While there's only one Beyoncé, there can be over 40 possible spellings of "Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky," and the algorithms used by mainstream music-streaming apps can't handle the subtleties.
Listening style can vary as well, argued MacRumors user Krizoitz:
Classical pieces also tend to be much longer and while they can be broken up into smaller parts, such as different movements, the listening style is going to be less shuffle or playlist based, listening to the entire performance is more common.
So that explains how we got Apple Music Classical and why a separate experience for classical music makes sense - but, admittedly, I still have no idea why Apple Music decided to capitalize on classical music in particular. Numbers from 2018 show that only about 1% of music consumed in the United States fits within the “classical” genre.
Maybe Apple wants this to be a wedge feature to use against Spotify. Perhaps classical music has a refined vibe that Apple wants to fit within its branding. Or maybe Tim Cook is a really big fan of Beethoven. I really don’t know! But as someone who listens to classical music daily, this app was more than welcome.
The good: sleek design, large catalogue, constant updates
Whether you enjoy the design of the Apple Music Classical app really depends on whether you like the design of the original Apple Music app: they’re very similar. White with splashes of red – or black with splashes of red in dark mode – give the app a clean look that I subjectively appreciate.
The first different between the apps that I noticed is that Apple Music Classical replaced usage of the San Francisco font (Apple’s version of Helvetica or Arial) with their New York font (Apple’s take on Times New Roman), giving a slightly more “classic” feel to the content.
While the Listen Now section on both apps functions similarly - a smörgåsbord of music recommendations - the Browse section is totally redesigned. In the original Apple Music app, Browse is basically a second Listen Now section but with different suggestions. In Apple Music Classical, Browse gives users the option to explore different sections of the classical music offerings: Catalogue, Playlists, and Instruments are offered in three tabs.
Catalogue breaks musical selections into broad categories, such as Composers, Periods, and Choirs. Playlists offers users a wide variety of stylings, like Composer Essentials, Music by Mood, and Curated by Artists. Instruments, as its name suggests, gives listeners the ability to filter based on which instruments were featured in recordings.
The Library and Search functionality works identically on Apple Music and Apple Musical Classical. Eagle-eyed users will notice that Apple Music has a Radio section, but, at the time of writing, Apple Music Classical does not. This is an interesting instance where interoperability between the two apps is limited, given that Apple Music offers eight proprietary classical radio stations and countless classical music terrestrial radio station streams.
Where the app truly shines is in its organizational structure. Individual tracks are grouped together that enables listeners to easily find different renditions with considerable ease. Even playlists that pull tracks from different periods, artists, and genres have the songs spaced out in a manner that enables users to quickly access auxiliary information.
For example, I found Frédéric Chopin’s 12 Études in a playlist and tapping on it brought me to a dedicated page where I could read about the work’s historical context, listen to a plethora of variations of the track (940 in total), check similar works, or explore a rendition as recommended by Apple Music Classical’s editors.
As an early adopter, I have found that the Apple Music Classical staff keeps the Listen Now page feeling fresh with frequent playlist updating, collaboration with contemporary classical artists, updated tracks with Spatial Audio, and requisite highlights of new albums. I don’t have a window into the behind-the-scenes world of Apple Music Classical, but as a listener it makes me feel like Apple isn’t just releasing an app and then forgetting it exists.
The Bad: insufficient compatibility, missing features, load times
Apple Music Classical is designed to be a companion to the original Apple Music app. This means that all Apple Music Classical music can be listened to from the Apple Music app, although the reverse is not true: only music deemed “classical” can be played in the Apple Music Classical app.
Some of this leads to seamless functionality. Music classified as “classical” in your Apple Music playlists will automatically show up in Apple Music Classical. Your Apple Music Classical history shows up on your Apple Music profile. Music sent to people on iPhone or iPad who have not downloaded Apple Music Classical can still open the tracks in Apple Music. It’s the kind of “it just works" vibes that Apple thrives on.
But not all of it “just works.” And that can be frustrating.
The consensus online appears to be that Apple Music Classical lacks some core features that users consider essential. Apple has confirmed that there is no way to shuffle tracks, and downloading music for offline listening requires leaving the Apple Music Classical using the original Apple Music app. Honestly, is shuffle in 2024 too much to ask?
(As a side note, both Apple Music and Apple Music Classical have sleep playlists but neither has a built-in sleep timer. Why!? And before commenters tell me that the timer in the Clock app can turn off music after a specified time, let me remind you that both Apple Podcasts and the audiobook player in Apple Books have sleep timer functionality without having to open a separate app.)
A lot of this can be boiled down to a question to which Apple itself seems not to have an answer: how much is “good enough” for a companion app? For example, Apple Music Classical lacks Shortcuts support, browser support, and a year-end Replay. But should it? Would emulating these Apple Music features be a needless waste of time when users can merely use the original app? Or are do these features comprise core use-cases that one should expect out of an official Apple release?
When Apple unveils a new app, it is not the product of squirrelly indie devs with a side hustle: it is of a $3 trillion company with ample resources. Furthermore, official app releases from Apple can set expectations for apps across the App Store ecosystem.
At launch, Apple Music Classical lacked both Mac and also iPad support. Over at Cult of Mac, D. Griffin Jones nails just how absurd this is:
Apple can’t tell us every year at its developer conference with a straight face that it’s easier than ever to make great cross-platform apps — that size classes make scaling iPhone apps to run natively on the iPad is seamless; that Catalyst makes building Mac apps incredibly simple — and not release an iPad nor Mac app after 18 months of development time.
Even more absurd: while the initial iPhone version of the app could be downloaded onto iPads it could not be installed on Apple Silicon Macs, despite their ability to run iOS and iPadOS apps. An update in November brought iPad support to Apple Music classical, but still nothing for the Mac.
In the process of researching and writing this piece, I also discovered that Apple Music Classical links do not automatically open in the Apple Music app when opened on a Mac. This appears to be because the URLs are from “classical.music.apple.com” but if you manually remove the “classical.” then it opens just fine. This is not the largest blunder in Apple history, but it sure is sloppy. What gives?
At the time of writing, Apple Music Classical still has no app for Apple TV’s tvOS or Apple Watch’s watchOS. CarPlay support is presumably coming soon, as a glitch following a software update last month caused it to erroneously appear on users’ dashboards before promptly crashing. Vision Pro users are able to use it as an iPad-emulated app, but not natively.
On a personal level, this has interfered with how I enjoy Apple Music Classical. When I throw events, visit coworking spaces, or drive a car, I prefer to use the Apple Music app on tvOS, macOS, and CarPlay respectively. I know that I could use AirPlay or meticulously find the right classical songs on the original Apple Music app - but this degrades my experience. People pay good money for Apple devices that seamlessly work together; the limitations of Apple Music Classical undermine this ethos.
Last, I have noticed that music tends to load much slower in Apple Music Classical than in the original Apple Music app. When I stream a song using the latter app, playback under normative connectivity circumstances is instantaneous; when using Apple Music Classical, however, it takes 1 to 2 seconds to buffer. This dynamic occurs even when I separately find and play the exact same track on each of the two apps. While this is a minor inconvenience at best, it makes the app feel slow and clunky to use.
Looking Forward: diversity, feature parity, video
With the release of the iPad version last year, the continual content updates, and the pending debut of the CarPlay app, it is clear to me that Apple has plans to continue Apple Music Classical for the foreseeable future. But what should the future look like?
For starters, hopefully it looks more diverse. “Apple Music Classical in its current form has an adjective problem,” writes Parker Hall in Wired, “If you are to believe the name of the app and the content therein, the so-called classical music is primarily Western.” While the catalogue does not exclusively contain Western classical music offerings, adding more non-Western classical music traditions should be a priority for the team.
But the largest issue, in my view, is consistency. The 2024 goal for Apple Music Classical should be feature parity with the original Apple Music app: available on all the same platforms with as many of the same features as possible all catered to classical music listeners. Additionally, fix the weird load-time disparity when streaming songs in the Apple Music Classical app.
Classical music listeners sometimes complain on Twitter (currently known as X) that they feel like the odd man out on mainstream streaming platforms. This is largely due to the fact that, as discussed above, classical music tracks possess different qualities than contemporary songs do. Feature parity with the original Apple Music app, fixing bugs, and continually updating the catalogue is really all you need to help address these concerns.
But if Apple wanted to go above and beyond they could focus on implementing video as a part of the experience. Whereas Apple Music features music videos, interviews, and other video content, Apple Music Classical does not. Although classical music does not have “music videos” per se (imagine what videos Mozart would have come up with), integrating live performances into the app would be a welcomed addition.
Imagine being able to stream opera through an Apple TV+ and Apple Music Classical collaboration. Vision Pro users could engage with these live performances as if they were really there using Cinema Mode. Perhaps the concert discovery features on Apple Music could be extended for classical offerings, too.
Conclusion
Apple Music Classical’s first year of operations has hardly been perfect - but the app is functional, catalogue has been often updated, and a metric ton of potential awaits. Users who yearn for more of the functionality from the Apple Music app should maintain cautious optimism with Apple seeming genuinely interested in growing the app, as recently demonstrated by its expansion into East Asian markets.
I want to reiterate that cautious optimism is warranted, but being realistic is essential. Sorry to disappoint, but the 2025 Apple Music Super Bowl Halftime Show will not be featuring classical music. However, classical music listeners don’t need that - we need a feature-rich and compatible app that boasts a large, diverse quality catalogue of high-fidelity tracks. Apple than more of capable of making that happen.