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Apple Music Classical

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Re: Apple Music Classical

#391
post #288

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It's only true as long as the content owner play with it. The day the content owner stop wanting to license their catalog, the platforms die. The majors let themselves go into that trap because they failed at finding a viable digital model and the streaming platform showed them a way to keep making some money. Show them a better model that works and they will follow the money. In 2017, the classical music market was…

What are your thoughts on apps like the Berlin Phil's Digital Concert Hall, or DG's Stage+? Those are streaming services at a more premium price, with smaller catalogs, but featuring new works and newly recorded works and generally high quality recordings. As an end consumer of classical music, a streaming app like this one or the two I named make discoverability much easier in a way that is very appealing compared t…

> What are your thoughts on apps like the Berlin Phil's Digital Concert Hall, or DG's Stage+?

I can't comment too much on their content as I haven't tried any of them. You make want to check them out though.

But commercially, it's mostly about 2 of the most recognizable names in the classical industry leveraging their notoriety. It's good for them but it won't really help the industry thrive again. The Berliner Philharmoniker or DG would be the last ones to struggle, premium subscription service or not.

I don't think a service will make a dent in the industry woes unless it becomes an industry standard. That's why my target business model was Steam and video games and not any music service.

Re: Apple Music Classical

#392

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I think the problem with separating jazz is that its boundaries are far more porous than classical. There's virtually never a question as to whether a piece is classical or not. (Except maybe soundtrack scores which are a weird category of their own.) But jazz tends to fuse with every other genre out there. You can find an artist at every point on the spectrum between jazz and hip-hop. Another way of looking at it is…

The composers of some very early jazz standards are literally unknown, or unverifiable!

Or that many "jazz standards" are based on popular music that wasn’t jazz to begin with.

Re: Apple Music Classical

#393

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> classical and jazz are the two simplest forms of music Uh, have you actually listened to any of it? At all? There are some non-Western traditional types of music I'd agree can have a level of complexity not usually encountered within the Western classical or jazz genres, but it's fair to say all over forms of Western music are vastly simpler in terms of harmonic language, tonality, form/ structure, instrumentation…

Which music forms are you referring to?

The "over" was a typo for "other" (hope that was obvious!). But that primarily refers to the pop/rock/folk genres. One point I'd agree on is that it will take longer for AI technology to produce a satisfying simulation of the human singing voice than it will for purely instrumental music. In fact despite the leaps and bounds in speech synthesis I've yet to hear any sort of convincing demonstration of synthesized singing. But I can't see why there's any real reason it won't happen sooner or later.

Re: Apple Music Classical

#394

This is great - it being a separate app solves some core problems! It's a hard firewall between my "normal" music library and classical, which means risk free shuffle play. I never want Bach and Slayer in sequence. They can optimize the UI, recommendations, etc. based on music that is all about reproduction, rather than being performed by the original artists. Going against the grain and honing in on a total niche is…

_you_ may never want Bach and Slayer in sequence, but Randy Rhoads, Eddie Van Halen, and I would. I do love this app, though. It presents everything in such a way that makes classical music more interesting, organizable, and accessible.

Re: Apple Music Classical

#395

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People who care deeply about classical music will use this even at the same or higher cost than Spotify's now-inferior product. People who don't care at all about classical music won't use this at any price. People who like classical sometimes but don't listen to it exclusively should be happy that neither costs extra, both are included in the normal price. I'm not seeing any market opportunity for charging a lower a…

> People who care deeply about classical music will use this even at the same or higher cost than Spotify's now-inferior product I care deeply about classical music. But I'm already in Spotify's ecosystem, and don't want to bother with the switching cost. I would absolutely pay an add-on for Classical only, but don't want to pay for the whole Apple Music bundle.

I used soundiiz to migrate from Spotify to YouTube music (since it’s included in YT premium). Cost 5$ and was painless.

Re: Apple Music Classical

#396

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I'd have to disagree. Classical music would be the LAST thing AI could do well. Hard to but technique, nuance, opinion, interpretation, style and the greatest utterances of our troubled civilization into an algorithm. Pop, dance, rap, blaalads....maybe. Classical and Jazz? Never going to happen.

Lmao, classical and jazz are the two simplest forms of music. Without any lyrics to generate its basically just generating some simple patterns in basic instruments. There’s no way you’d be able to tell.

Classical and jazz are actually the primary Western music genres where you encounter some deep music theory.

EG: Read something like George Russell's "The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization" (the basis from which modal jazz sprung, which includes one of the most famous jazz albums of all time, Miles Davis's "Kind of Blue"). Now add to the theory the ability to improvise around it as good as a Miles Davis level jazz performer can. It's not technically easy at all.

Even if other music genres are much technically easier, so much of music is the social experience anyways.

Take punk music. Though some parts got more technical later, much of it (particularly the late 1970s / early 1980s stuff) is, in my opinion, very technically easy; not too challenging to play, with very basic music structure (which was half the point, a return to rock's garage roots).

I'm guessing an AI can probably be developed (especially with today's fairly realistic sounding guitar VSTs) to make some "technically correct" old school punk rock, certainly much easier than it can be programmed to make "technically correct" modal jazz. An AI, however, cannot replicate the human parts, eg the social or community aspects of a music scene. Which with a lot of music is a huge portion of the point (certainly for punk it was).

Re: Apple Music Classical

#397

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There are a few composers I support on Patreon who also do their own production via extensive combinations of plugins and soundfonts in applications I've barely ever heard of before. The result is hard to distinguish from a human orchestra, save in the nature of the occasional errors, which are always of composition rather than execution. This would I think be a lot more common were it not such a niche interest. Even…

I'm not too proud to admit I enjoy the video game stuff The stigma against video game music can’t go away soon enough! Composers are creating some really amazing stuff for video games and gamers themselves are an enormous audience for the wider classical music industry to draw upon. To their credit, a lot of orchestras have recognized this and have been performing video game music for years. Along with film scores (a…

Film scores are so completely in the shitter and have been for going on two decades, that maybe they could stand to take some cues from video games. I miss films having memorable, distinctive music. At least for title themes. Even mid-budget films often had that, in the Olden Times of 2+ decades ago. It's one of my kids' favorite things about older movies—they noticed, without prompting, and they love it. Marvel managed, what, a single run of a half-dozen kinda-almost-memorable notes, over 40+ films? What a joke. It's so bad that their deciding halfway in to simply score everything with pop music was kinda an improvement, but is still a form of just giving up.

Re: Apple Music Classical

#398

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The composers of some very early jazz standards are literally unknown, or unverifiable!

Or that many "jazz standards" are based on popular music that wasn’t jazz to begin with.

Some of them are even Disney songs

Re: Apple Music Classical

#399

I would love to see something like this for jazz, which has musicians constantly moving through groups and albums as musicians and composers and writers. Like take "Take Five", one of my favorites. It was written by Paul Desmond for the Dave Brubeck Quartet, with solos by Desmond on alto sax and Joe Morello on drums. Those are all fun pieces of information that I wish I could click through to see more of. Just like c…

I want that for pop music, too! I don't understand why Apple (and other companies) don't get that there are users who want to slice and dice music in this way for every genre. When I go looking for "No-one is to blame" by Howard Jones, I want the version from "Dream Into Action" not the crappy radio remake he did with Phil Collins on the drums. When I listen to "Leave it" by Yes, I may want to make the connection tha…

From popular genres I would think hip-hop would be the one to target; pop and rock have had pretty much for its entire existence encouraged listeners to link a recording with a band, and not to think about a producer or composer/writer, and to be generally negative about the idea of different performances (derided as covers, unless, like Joan Jett your covers become identified as the standard).

Hip-hop fans are generally much more interested in the producer, songwriters, and also sample use. They'd be a great audience for richer metadata and better presentation of same.

Re: Apple Music Classical

#400
post #363
post #152

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> That could never change. Trying to revert that situtation was my bet. The 20th century was a golden age for recorded music. Maybe there is no coming back but I don't think (or I didn't think then) that streaming services are in a very strong position in the long run: consumers like them because the current deal is that you pay a single subscription and you have access to basically all the music (a very nice proposi…

>The 20th century was a golden age for recorded music. Maybe there is no coming back With AI generated music on the horizon I think we have definitely peaked.

That’s been said about almost every style and genre of art. What’s so funny, is that it’s never happened; quite the opposite. Look at the renaissance of early music, as only one example. Sadly, 99% of all music that has ever been made was not written down or recorded. I think there’s a lot of opportunities to hunt down and discover lost, unrecognized, or forgotten music and bring it back to forefront. I was just listening to Indian classical bansuri (bamboo flute) music by Ronu Majumdar and Ajeet Pathak on Naxos. The album features 12th century ragas in the Hindustani tradition. What’s amazing about it, is you can hear how this style greatly influenced rock and roll from the mid-1960s to the mid 1970s, particularly the long and winding guitar solos that were famous during that era. And if you read about that time, it turns out that rock musicians were indeed listening to this music and getting ideas from it. There isn’t any AI around that is going to make deep connections like this. We are still very much in human-driven territory. What will certainly become common, however, is for human musicians to augment their compositional skills with the help of AI, not to replace it altogether.
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