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Why Can't Streaming Services Get Classical Music Right?

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Re: Why Can't Streaming Services Get Classical Music Right?

#71

Post by keithpeter »

saturdaysaint wrote: post #62

She has a point, but overall I'm reminded of Louis C.K.'s "Everything's amazing and nobody's happy" schtick. I've gotten pretty deep into classical music - consuming a dozen or so books on the subject and listening to nearly all of the referenced works - essentially because of streaming services. I would have had to spend thousands of dollars to be able to listen to all the classical music I've listened to in the las…

I found the resources at CHARM fascinating as I have an interest in the evolution of recorded sound and how that has worked to change performing styles.

http://www.charm.rhul.ac.uk/studies/chapters/intro.html

The ISGM provides competently recorded professional performances of chamber repertoire (mostly classical/romantic eras) for download and in their biweekly podcast. Some well-known performers.

Remember that a professional musician at the start of a career now has to compete with 100 years of recorded material, all potentially simultaneously available!

Re: Why Can't Streaming Services Get Classical Music Right?

#72

Post by dharma1 »

saturdaysaint wrote: post #64
bryanlarsen wrote: post #31

What 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…

Funny, I've wished for some kind of built-in compressor (as in the audio dynamics effect) for car listening - when dealing with road noise, city noise, treadmill noise, etc., I'd like to be able to turn up the volume without getting my ears blown out by the brass.

If you are streaming to your car audio from an Android phone, there are a couple of DSP effect apps that include dynamics compression among other effects - DSP Manager and Viper4Android

Re: Why Can't Streaming Services Get Classical Music Right?

#73

Post by dharma1 »

It's quite ranty, seems the author didn't really do much research - in this thread there are several promising classical only streaming services mentioned -

http://www.contraclassics.com http://www.idagio.com http://composed.com

Composed look like they will be doing a good job - https://composed.recruiterbox.com/jobs/fk0hpm5/

The recommendation engines on Spotify, Tidal etc are usually rubbish for anything, so I'm not surprised it's the same for classical.

I've found Youtube to be the best place for more niche music, and their recommendation engine is pretty good. Sure it's not super high bitrate but does the job for me. Ads are the only annoyance.

Re: Why Can't Streaming Services Get Classical Music Right?

#74

Post by ashmud »

splat wrote: post #63

Even native music players don't get classical right. It's virtually impossible to shuffle through a classical music library because you always get plopped in some movement in the middle of a piece. I've always wished that there were a way to group certain pieces together so that all the movements are treated as one piece for the purposes of shuffle. I remember someone else making this complaint about three years ago…

The closest you could probably get right now is editing cue files. Years ago, I would group together certain series of Pink Floyd songs when I converted to mp3.

Re: Why Can't Streaming Services Get Classical Music Right?

#75

Post by rspeer »

dogma1138 wrote: post #55
rspeer wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn't listening to it once you can find it, the problem is finding it. If you're looking for a particular work to listen to, not just the most popular thing by that composer, Spotify gives you no way to browse by work. You can either try to guess which translation of the title they used, or you can type the number the piece is identified by, and in both cases it will usually autocorrect you to something m…

Again personally i never had issues finding classical music on Spotify if that particular performance is available. I might not be a classical music connoisseur but merely a peasant that enjoy's common recordings and yo yo ma but i never had issues. I've also never had issues searching Spotify using an Opus catalog number, e.g. your example of Bach which seems to work just fine for me... http://i.imgur.com/VGHCcH3.pn…

They've gotten a little better at exact matches, but in the "BWV 588" example, you still have to scroll past a screenful of the Goldberg Variations. Sure, the Goldberg Variations are great, but that's not what I asked for.

That screenshot also highlights the problem that shitty performances rank highly in the search. Kevin Bowyer will probably play an organ piece with much more skill and subtlety than "Mutant Orchestra" on "Classical Halloween Bach from the Dead", but guess which one ranks higher.

Re: Why Can't Streaming Services Get Classical Music Right?

#76

Post by abruzzi »

pionar wrote: post #59
Expez wrote: post #42

This 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 typica…

> It works less well when the "songs" are 45 minutes long The pieces on streaming services (just like CDs) are not 45 minutes long, though. They're separated into movements that are typically between 4 and 10 minutes long. So, while you could listen to all of the Rite of Spring if you want for its entire 40 minute runtime (and I do a lot, as it's my favorite orchestral work), you usually don't. You might listen to on…

In fairness, while the 45 minute mark is rarely hit in a single movement, 15-20 minutes is the length of the opening movement of most symphonies from Beethoven and later. And many other single movements out there.

Re: Why Can't Streaming Services Get Classical Music Right?

#77

Post by dogma1138 »

rspeer wrote: post #75
dogma1138 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again personally i never had issues finding classical music on Spotify if that particular performance is available. I might not be a classical music connoisseur but merely a peasant that enjoy's common recordings and yo yo ma but i never had issues. I've also never had issues searching Spotify using an Opus catalog number, e.g. your example of Bach which seems to work just fine for me... http://i.imgur.com/VGHCcH3.pn…

They've gotten a little better at exact matches, but in the "BWV 588" example, you still have to scroll past a screenful of the Goldberg Variations. Sure, the Goldberg Variations are great, but that's not what I asked for. That screenshot also highlights the problem that shitty performances rank highly in the search. Kevin Bowyer will probably play an organ piece with much more skill and subtlety than "Mutant Orchest…

Don't search by a pure opus or a BWV number then if you search Canzona in D + Insert Performance Details you'll find it.

Never had an issue finding what i wanted, i didn't mind to have to scroll and i treat Spotify's search just as i treat Google's search, the secret to finding stuff on Google is to figure out what the 100000 idiots that searched for the same thing before you actually searched for before ending up clicking on what you really want.

The 1st several results will be SEO's then couple of promoted ones then you'll find something that you can actually use, and Spotify isn't any different I'm pretty sure that record companies pay directly or by accepting lower fees in exchange for Spotify to promote their records, so yep Classical Halloween Bach from the Dead might be promoted, or it might be there because more people actually enjoy listening to it just as most people would probably enjoy TSO's version of Mozart's and Beethoven's works with a nice jam more than some dreadful orchestra from the Soviet days of eastern Europe.

Streaming providers aren't the Library of Congress don't expect them to give you exactly what you look for since they assume like any other search engine that you don't know what you are looking for and they also need to make some money on the side, but if you don't give up and are willing to waste 10 seconds you'll find what you want and then well just hit the bookmark button.

P.S. If you want to listen to a specific performance why are you searching the work and not the "artist"?

For the most part there will be more performances for a given work than all the recordings a single orchestra can record in it's life time. Want to listen to a recording by Sydney's symphony orchestra? Search for Sydney Symphony Orchestra, click it scroll down till you find it not the other way around :)

Re: Why Can't Streaming Services Get Classical Music Right?

#78

Post by Mithaldu »

justincormack wrote: post #56
Mithaldu wrote: post #23

The very same issues plague modern music too. I listen to a lot of electronic music, which comes with a lot of people making remixes and such. Those are already a massive pain. 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…

Can you link to some examples?

I have a few examples:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmDDpJnnplA (challenge: what exactly is the vocal arranger's name here?)

I like that particular rendition of the song, however note the sheer amount of other renditions of it: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=hibikase

---

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQKGUgOfD8U

The same, there's an astounding amount of variations: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=echo+vocaloid

---

For the last one i have two different variations i prefer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kn15unrb7qw (try figuring out how you'd tag that one in the first place)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUGHBR-lxrU (my favourite version with a vocaloid)

And all the variations: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=rockbell

---

Then there's also the question of names. On of my favourite arrangers goes by うたたP, or is it utataP? He actually uses both.

Re: Why Can't Streaming Services Get Classical Music Right?

#79

Post by dhowden »

lamby wrote: post #46
dhowden wrote: post #35

I'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.

Sounds interesting. I should look into it.

At the moment I'm messing with some simple Machine Learning to better detect things like "Johannes Brahms" == "Brahms, Johannes" == "Brahms" for names in composer/artist fields.

Re: Why Can't Streaming Services Get Classical Music Right?

#80

Post by gkanapathy »

The author goes on a lot about metadata and bad search interfaces for it. Yes, classical music metadata doesn't fit with the "simple" pop music artist/album/song format. (Though the "featuring" and remixes in pop music also mess that up.)

Often people try too hard to fit data into a fixed schema or ontology. It made sense when data storage and retrieval was based around tabular and relational data, but in these days of search engines and document databases and JSON, it's just unnecessary. Instead of pre-determining the fields you search on, you should search with free text, then refine with whatever metadata happens to be available.

So instead of messing with Spotify's "artist" search, you could just go to Amazon (or Google) and type in "Beethoven's Ninth Bernstein New York Philharmonic" and you'll almost certainly get back the items you want near the top of the list.

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