With so many Apple employees heading off on vacation, Apple Classical is less and less likely to be an end-of-year surprise.
In its initial press release last August, Apple said Apple Music Classical would combine “Primophonic’s classic user interface that fans have come to love, with many more extra features.” (Apple Classical app names are found in code strings within other Apple software.)
Time is running out fast in 2022, but there are three possibilities:
According to the press release, this was already part of the plan.
With the addition of Primephonic, Apple Music subscribers will get a vastly improved classical music experience, starting with Primephonic playlists and exclusive audio content. In the coming months, fans of Apple Music Classical will discover the best of Primephonic, including better browsing and searching capabilities by composer and repertoire, detailed viewing of classical music metadata, plus new features and benefits. Get a dedicated experience with features.
It comes down to discoverability and organization. Apple Music, Spotify, Amazon Music, and other mainstream services with tens of millions of subscribers simply can’t keep up with the level of deep search and meticulous metadata granularity classics fans want. . Primephonic is happy to provide.
Apple praised aspects of the service when announcing the acquisition, giving Primephonic credit for “search and browsing features optimized for classic, premium-quality audio, curated expert recommendations, and Extensive contextual details about repertoire and recordings”. The standalone Classics app gives Apple Music a unique edge over other paid music services. Whether that will help move the needle in overall subscriber numbers is less clear.
It’s easier to provide such detailed functionality to classics fans in a siled app than to cram it all into Apple Music. However, Primephonic’s service was shut down in September 2021, shortly after he acquired it, making the customized experience unavailable to listeners. And wait times for replacements have been longer than some would have liked.
Primephonic customers got six months of free access to Apple Music, but that access expired in February. Curiously, February was also the time when “Apple Music Classical” and “Apple Classical” began appearing in some of his Apple chords. 9to5Mac After doing some research, I found out that much of the Primephonic team is now on Apple Music, so even though the new app is MIA, the bands are mostly working together.
The Barge We reached out to Apple spokespeople Jessica Bass and Sam Citron for comment on Monday, but have yet to receive an update on the status of Apple Classical.