21–30 of 87 posts
This 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 think alot of the suggesting issues is with the collaborative filtering model often used in suggesting songs in a streaming music service. The collaborative filtering model is not well suited for communities with extremely high variance within a specific genre. In other words, in the context of the model, classical, and classical sub genres are not differentiated enough, in terms of individual interest, to form a n…
Jazz streaming is much better but that has a very much shorter music period and clearer sub-genres.
THE PROBLEM: Live Classical is amazing and recorded Classical is meh. Same thing with Gospel music, most Jazz and Opera. If you have never heard a 75+ Gospel Choir live you really are missing an awesome experience and same can be said of Blues.
Most modern music sounds the same or MUCH BETTER recorded. Think EDM, pop music (That is the reason why most performances are more karaoke ie No back up band or even better no band and lip syncing).
Then i also listen to vocaloid music, where the complexity gets downright insane. Vocaloid music is music where the "performer" is a software using a prerecorded soundbank to render the vocals into the final piece.
For those you typically have: The song writer, the music writer, the music arranger, the vocals arranger and one to many soundbanks (which may come in variants, with two soundbanks being recorded from the same person, but with different tonal qualities). And to put the cherry on top, most of the people making this music only put them on youtube or niconico, the japanese youtube.
Getting sound files with any sort of useful metadata for those is almost impossible.
Strangely, I find that most of my classical music is streamed acceptably (not perfectly, but good enough). Try listening to Abbey Road, or Dark Side Of The Moon, or any other album that relies on zero second time gaps between tracks with a constant beat (The most recent example I can remember would be Chemical Brothers, "Further", between track 1 and 2). That is annoying, and has been throughout the history of stream…
On iTunes it does depend if the source was ripped properly (e.g. with iTunes itself), some older mp3s do not have the necessary additional data for proper gapless (I believe it is due to the overlapping nature of FFT windows - each frame in the mp3 depends on the previous/next frame to fully reconstruct the audio, so the encoder has to store "extra" frames at the start and end) so these will have little glitches.
On Spotify I guess individual sources may have issues (just like a few are obviously ripped from CDs which skip!) but the Chemical Brothers transition you mentioned plays perfectly for me. Maybe check you have "crossfade tracks" disabled in Spotify's advanced settings.
Strangely, I find that most of my classical music is streamed acceptably (not perfectly, but good enough). Try listening to Abbey Road, or Dark Side Of The Moon, or any other album that relies on zero second time gaps between tracks with a constant beat (The most recent example I can remember would be Chemical Brothers, "Further", between track 1 and 2). That is annoying, and has been throughout the history of stream…
"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…
Let's not overgeneralize. One bogus claim (about sound quality) does not render the rest of the assertions (mainly about metadata and how accurate information is missing on streaming services) faulty.
On topic: as others mentioned, don't you think some types of music lends itself better to being recognized as 160kbps vs lossless than other, and classical with it's typical larger dynamic range than a standard pop song would be one of those types? I'm not saying the author's claim is valid, nor invalid, just that it's not completely impossible he was hearing it was not lossless. Though I doubt it.
This 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.
You'd be targeting a niche market, not only because of the 3% market mentioned in the article, but because I imagine that all "serious" classical fans (i.e. serious enough to switch to consider using a dedicated streaming service) is also likely to have a big album collection. In other words, you'd likely be targeting a very fast-saturated market. And that's besides the legal/licensing horrors. That being said, I thi…
Go to any classical music concert and you will see that under 30s are in the vast minority. Look at how many venues open each year playing modern popular music (ie pop, house, indie, etc) and how many open playing classical music. I'm an active classical music fan in London - one of the classical music capitals of the world - and I cannot name a single classical music venue that has opened within the past 3 years.
Your market is, quite literally, dying.
It's sad. It's a huge loss for us as young people. But the only way a classical music streaming service can survive is through association with one of the big (probably existing) platforms.
The fact is that good metadata requires human verification and editing, and editors are the last thing any Internet company wants to spend money on.