Why Can't Streaming Services Get Classical Music Right?
41–50 of 87 posts
Re: Why Can't Streaming Services Get Classical Music Right?
#42This is actually only half the problem. Classical music is one of the genres where the profit-sharing model doesn't work very well. Spotify pay out every time a track is listened to (IIRC, this is triggered when you're 30s into the track). This works well for pop music, where the songs are short and they are listened to many times by the typical user. It works less well when the "songs" are 45 minutes long and typically only listened to once (famous works are recorded by multiple orchestras and listeners are likely to check out several and perhaps only ever return to their favorite interpretation).
This means that for many it's still more profitable to sell a small amount of CDs than to be on spotify.
I suspect this will change over the years because there's now a very large overlap between those that still listen to CDs, don't use spotify, and listen to classical music.
Re: Why Can't Streaming Services Get Classical Music Right?
#43Similar thing for Japanese music.
Should I search for 椎名林檎, the Japanese spelling, Shiina Ringo, the transliteration following standard transliteration rules, or Sheena Ringo, the transliteration that the artist has chosen herself? (It's the latter, which was unknown to me)
Moreover, you might be searching for the phonetic spelling using Japanese kana, しいなりんご. That's a lot for a system to handle. Maybe Chinese people will search for her using simplified characters (not for this one in particular, but definitely others)
Re: Why Can't Streaming Services Get Classical Music Right?
#44What makes listening to anything other than entire albums (radio, streaming, etc) unpleasant for me is the volume settings. Most people listen to classical way too quietly. Most classical music has a very wide dynamic range. Your volume should be adjusted so that the very quietest parts are loud enough to hear every subtlety and so that the loudest parts shake your bones. A single trumpet playing at full volume is lo…
Better speakers might allow for more detail at lower volume. I use a pair of studio monitors, and it's so much better than cranking up the volume.
Re: Why Can't Streaming Services Get Classical Music Right?
#45This 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…
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Re: Why Can't Streaming Services Get Classical Music Right?
#46I've been frustrated about this for quite a while. About a year ago, I decided that I should just try to roll my own (just for me, using my music collection). I've since open sourced my effort here: https://github.com/tchaik/tchaik What it does (so far): - prefix grouping (so that Symphonies/Concertos etc are automatically grouped together, and the groupings transfer into playlists etc - so you can queue a whole symp…
I did the same thing. I solved gapless playback by generating XSPF files and letting a local media player do all the legwork; getting HTML5 to do it seems a little way off.
Re: Why Can't Streaming Services Get Classical Music Right?
#47If I'm not mistaken Classical Archives does streaming:
Re: Why Can't Streaming Services Get Classical Music Right?
#48What makes listening to anything other than entire albums (radio, streaming, etc) unpleasant for me is the volume settings. Most people listen to classical way too quietly. Most classical music has a very wide dynamic range. Your volume should be adjusted so that the very quietest parts are loud enough to hear every subtlety and so that the loudest parts shake your bones. A single trumpet playing at full volume is lo…
Unfortunately it's not practical to do this for most people who have neighbours. I don't want to hear your classical music polluting my sound-space as much as I would some Techno or Heavy Rock at full volume (both of which are also more enjoyable at loud volumes).
And if you're listening in a car, then digital compression is the least of your audio problems.
Re: Why Can't Streaming Services Get Classical Music Right?
#49Strangely, 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…
Both iTunes and Spotify have perfect gapless playback for me - I wouldn't use them if not, as I listen to quite a lot of electronic mix CDs and any gap ruins the flow. 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 dep…
What music do you listen to? Because I have literally never found an album that does gapless. Does the free version not get gapless playback?
Re: Why Can't Streaming Services Get Classical Music Right?
#50WCPE in Wake Forest NC streams classical in Windows Media, MP3 and Ogg Vorbis formats
http://theclassicalstation.org/listen.shtml
As classical fans themselves, they pay more attention to artists, composers, and performances. But there's still a limited amount of info they can announce.