Why Can't Streaming Services Get Classical Music Right?
1–10 of 87 posts
Re: Why Can't Streaming Services Get Classical Music Right?
#2[deleted]
Re: Why Can't Streaming Services Get Classical Music Right?
#3Pareto Principle?
Re: Why Can't Streaming Services Get Classical Music Right?
#4They're simply not built for it. Most streaming music services are built for people that want to listen to deadmau5, g-funk or top 40 while they put on their party dresses and pre-drink. A lot of us also use them to stream random tracks while we work: stuff with no lyrics, etc.
But a bespoke solution for streaming classical music should ideally have metadata fields for all those things: conductor, soloists, orchestra, recording venue, date, etc. etc.
I'd be willing to bet that internally most of those services are using nothing more sophisticated than the id3 tags I remember mucking with in winamp back when Napster was still a thing.
Re: Why Can't Streaming Services Get Classical Music Right?
#5They're simply not built for it. Most streaming music services are built for people that want to listen to deadmau5, g-funk or top 40 while they put on their party dresses and pre-drink. A lot of us also use them to stream random tracks while we work: stuff with no lyrics, etc. But a bespoke solution for streaming classical music should ideally have metadata fields for all those things: conductor, soloists, orchestra…
Never had issues listening to classical music on Spotify, on Ultra the sound quality isn't an issue, neither is finding what exactly you wan't since you can find specific performances by an orchestra or even a specific conductor.
Re: Why Can't Streaming Services Get Classical Music Right?
#6"The other huge issue, in terms of classical streaming, is sound quality. It stands to reason that picky, "elitist" classical music fans would also be picky about audio standards as well. And while it's entirely true that bit rates don't matter one whit when you're listening through standard-issue earbuds, most of the best-established current services don't emphasize great audio quality. Mahler's epic, sweeping Fifth Symphony, for example, is a watery shadow of itself when I hear it (listening on very good headphones) at 160 kpbs on Spotify's free service. Lossless sound is one of the biggest points of differentiation that Tidal is trying to make for itself, but so far the scope of their classical offerings and the quality of their metadata have been a disappointment."
This person has never ABX tested 160kbps lossy versus lossless. This bogus and unfounded claim calls the rest of his expert assertions into question.
Even on ideal headphones/amp, I know no one who can consistently identify 160kbps from original PCM in an ABX test.
Re: Why Can't Streaming Services Get Classical Music Right?
#7"The other huge issue, in terms of classical streaming, is sound quality. It stands to reason that picky, "elitist" classical music fans would also be picky about audio standards as well. And while it's entirely true that bit rates don't matter one whit when you're listening through standard-issue earbuds, most of the best-established current services don't emphasize great audio quality. Mahler's epic, sweeping Fifth…
Consistently, maybe not. But I have a few songs in my library that, despite 256kbps bitrate, have half-second encoding artefacts (i.e., maybe six seconds in some 80+ hours collection) that always made me go "whoa, why does my speaker sound funny? …oh, it's that song again" until I canned them – I had them both as MP3 and FLAC in my library due to just importing everything on my HDD. After I wasted time checking speaker cables for the fifth time, I just deleted the MP3 versions.
With FLAC/PCM you simply don't have any "is the bitrate sufficient? Is there no encoder nor decoder bug that introduces artefacts despite sufficient bitrate?" questions, which for me is worth the increased storage requirements.
Re: Why Can't Streaming Services Get Classical Music Right?
#8This reads like a spec for a startup opportunity. It's so clear to any one of us what the data model needs to look like and how to make search work. The only real issue is the human labor needed to do the data entry, and the licensing.
The market is huge though. Whoever steps up and attacks this with VC will do quite nicely.
I wouldn't be surprised to see a startup launched from this article in the next YC round.
Re: Why Can't Streaming Services Get Classical Music Right?
#9This reads like a spec for a startup opportunity. It's so clear to any one of us what the data model needs to look like and how to make search work. The only real issue is the human labor needed to do the data entry, and the licensing. The market is huge though. Whoever steps up and attacks this with VC will do quite nicely. I wouldn't be surprised to see a startup launched from this article in the next YC round.
I have been telling people this for years, including people already running music businesses but they havent listened. Its a good market as people will pay more, even though the total market size is smaller.
Re: Why Can't Streaming Services Get Classical Music Right?
#10This reads like a spec for a startup opportunity. It's so clear to any one of us what the data model needs to look like and how to make search work. The only real issue is the human labor needed to do the data entry, and the licensing. The market is huge though. Whoever steps up and attacks this with VC will do quite nicely. I wouldn't be surprised to see a startup launched from this article in the next YC round.
http://musicbrainz.org/ already has this data available.