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Strange feelings looking at this... This is almost exactly the product I failed to get into YC with back in 2017... All the same ideas as far as the UX goes wit

• lwhi 4y ago
  So a band camp for classical music is required?
  • leviathant 4y ago
    My wife composes choral music and "new music". (what many here would consider classical) and has been using Bandcamp since 2009 with pretty good success. But even that gets tricky, as she is not the performer for any of the recordings. It's a strange world though, when so many people focus on centuries-old music by dead German men, that's going to be harder to market. My first glance at Apple Classical a few weeks ago suggests that it's trying to cater to that crowd. Bandcamp is better for living composers (and preforming musicians) than a lot of other traditional options. For example, if you have a successful performance is a piece, Parma Records will reach out to you and offer to do a "professional" recording. They'll ask for $20,000 and you'll get a box of CDs (not sure if they do that last part anymore but I would not be surprised). A surprising amount of musicians go this route, because they don't know any better. Anyway, point is, Bandcamp is awesome.
    • vjulian 4y ago
      Is Bandcamp oriented towards performers? I think I see what you mean in relation to what audiences Apple is presumably trying to cater to, though I have no market knowledge as to how “classical“ music audiences truly segment. Apple Classical becomes similar to Apple Music a way to (re-) discover both old catalog and new releases. Listening to Toscanini this morning, the performance and music sounds as fresh in 2022 as it always did.
      • n0tahacker 4y ago
        I know an artist who has a bandcamp profile, but doesn't make a lot of money over it. It's mostly a business card for getting booked. But that might apply to Spotify for not very well known artists, too.
  • 1123581321 4y ago
    Bandcamp isn't nearly as well organized as this new service, but its feed of new releases sorted by genre exposes me to lots of indie classical music recordings.
• ar9av 4y ago
  I love how patient classical music fans are when people ask THE SAME QUESTION over and over and over again on forums as to why there’s a need for a separate classical music app. You classical music fans rock…
  • qbasic_forever 4y ago
    I would say the classical music fans deeply tremolo instead of "rock".
• nordsieck 4y ago
  > I wanted to apply the Steam business model where people would actually buy album again (and not tracks a la iTunes). Could you expand on this a bit? I am very much a track oriented person. Why do you think it would be better to force/encourage people to buy albums?
  • pell 4y ago
    I don't know what OP's business model looked like exactly. However, classical music is often composed and performed as full works, such as symphonies, operas, and concertos, rather than individual songs or tracks. These works are often intended to be listened to in their entirety and are structured in a way that builds upon and develops themes throughout the piece. Another problem is that the way classical music is divided into tracks is sometimes not universal. For example, there are some recordings of Mahler's Symphony No. 5 that are divided into five separate tracks (one for each movement) while others divide it into just two tracks (one for the first three movements and another for the final two movements). While there are many modern music albums that were intended to be listened to as full albums (e.g. "The Wall", "American Idiot" or "To Pimp a Butterfly"), I guess the track-based listening experience just won over in that part of the music world. That said, people often also just listen to a single sonata, aria, etc. in classical music too, of course, instead of always going for the 2 hour experience.
    • wiredfool 4y ago
      Listening to a Missa Solemnis that's broken up into about 5 tracks per movement. There are gaps between the tracks. Sigh. Gapless playback should be a hard default. (edit, and it's not a stylistic choice, some of the gaps are within words)
    • justincormack 4y ago
      Although in many cases the album experience is annoying, eg a violin concerto followed by a couple of short pieces to fill time. I don’t usually want to listen to all of them and end up making playlists to separate them again.
  • nine_k 4y ago
• User23 4y ago
  Has the sector ever survived other than thanks to public and private subsidies? Even in its heyday it was funded by Princes and Bishops and so on. Maybe the right approach is to lean into that. There are a lot of very wealthy people in China for example and many of them love classical music. It is sadly true however that the West increasingly appears to have no interest in maintaining its own culture.
• waboremo 4y ago
  It's interesting how despite classical music having such a surge of listenership (thanks largely in part due to video games), they've been unable to do much about it. You contrast this with the likes of the vinyl industry, which has capitalized on its revival through packaging and branding to the point of outpacing CDs... it's a pure shock that this step by Apple is really the only thing being done. Just like vinyl, I don't think the solution is digital!
• pwinnski 4y ago
  I can definitely see why they passed. In 2017, it was already clear that streaming options render any music-purchasing platform niche at best, and a shrinking niche at that. Sad, but true.
  • lelag 4y ago
    It's only true as long as the content owner play with it. The day the content owner stop wanting to license their catalog, the platforms die. The majors let themselves go into that trap because they failed at finding a viable digital model and the streaming platform showed them a way to keep making some money. Show them a better model that works and they will follow the money. In 2017, the classical music market was shrinking but still worth half a billion a year with 50% of that still being physical sales. I'm still convinced there was a market to capture. For classical, streaming is not an option: most content on streaming services are old (albeit often great) records from the past coming from the majors catalog (which they don't care much about). That's 4 or 5 catalog. All the independents rejected the model because they can't make any money there. Streaming is the death of the classical recording industry. Simply. There is no money in streaming. The sad part is that the average classical music consumer has generally a lot of disposable income available but no way to spend it on a good modern product, in a way that support that industry. I don't know much about it, but it's probably true of Jazz too.
    • adriand 4y ago
      I wonder if a key element is direct connections with fans. My 13-yo daughter is obsessed with classical music and her favourite performers seem to have strong YouTube presences. Outside the classical world, if you look at a site like Bandcamp, that idea seems core. The business model also seems exactly like what you are talking about, both for performers and for the site. I see a lot of very obscure, niche electronic stuff that is supported by hundreds of people. That may only be thousands of dollars, not tens of thousands. However, it’s an economy. And compare earning $10 for the sale of a single album to the number of streams you need to earn that much revenue. We are talking orders of magnitude difference.
• slaymaker1907 4y ago
  For actual classical musicians, I'm not sure how much they would ever realistically make off of album sales. Most are funded through donations AFAIK and then through ticket sales. There's a reason why almost no one in the classical scene cares about piracy aside from maybe sheet music (even then, the photocopier is used pretty heavily).
• m463 4y ago
  Is the classical music industry dying? I think people listen to classical a LOT, when watching movies. could it be like "poetry" which is dying... but might just be off-stage doing song lyrics?
• livelielife 4y ago
  I think most classical music, by virtue of having been written along time ago and having been recorded rather well already, has no need to keep being re-recorded. I blame the nature of digital assets for this; all we gotta do is keep copying all those files into brand new digital media and we can listen to what's been already recorded forever.
• tgv 4y ago
  I've used Idagio for 6 months. They have a reasonable interface, good performances and sound quality, but their catalog is indeed limited. There are hundreds of performances of the same well-known works, but there's not (very) much beyond it. I've discovered about 100 fairly unknown composers through YouTube that I consider quite good, but many of them are missing from Idagio, or are listed with one or two works. Their catalog also lacks discoverability. There's nothing to relate Karl Goldmark to Brahms. I also dislike the subscription model, heavily. So, I still buy albums (mostly from prestomusic, in case someone wants to know). > the sector is only surviving thanks to public and private subsidies. That could never change. Streaming will make it worse, though.
  • Donckele 4y ago
    Any youtube recommendations?
    • tgv 4y ago
      Try these channels: https://www.youtube.com/user/KuhlauDilfeng2/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/KuhlauDilfeng2/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/robt0007/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/robt0007/videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9g5M2trqPDiGn5fC_dl63g/playlists https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9g5M2trqPDiGn5fC_dl63g/pla... https://www.youtube.com/user/hrSinfonieorchester https://www.youtube.com/user/hrSinfonieorchester https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwbbr8FKVrWLF8T81RI7Lxg/videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwbbr8FKVrWLF8T81RI7Lxg/vid... https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPfJe8fU94SE8CjtKOf-zxQ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPfJe8fU94SE8CjtKOf-zxQ https://www.youtube.com/user/ElbphilharmonieHH https://www.youtube.com/user/ElbphilharmonieHH https://www.youtube.com/c/AVROTROSKlassiek https://www.youtube.com/c/AVROTROSKlassiek A bunch of names (with the letter A): Eugen d'Albert, Franco Alfano, Flor Alpaerts, Volkmar Andreae, Malcolm Arnold, Kurt Atterberg, Georges Auric.
    • n0tahacker 4y ago
      For classical guitar: https://youtube.com/@SiccasGuitars https://youtube.com/@SiccasGuitars
  • 4y ago
• TylerE 4y ago
  Orchestral music has always depended largely on essentially donations, back to the patronage that kept many of the great composers at least fed, if not rich.
  • wmeredith 4y ago
    This is basically all art.
  • jancsika 4y ago
    You missed the word "dying" in the OP. The popularity of orchestral music has waned to the point where what you are loosely calling "essentially donations" gets a lot less bang for the buck these days. Just for a single example-- the count who funded the Mannheim school got musical rockets in return, ones that became the envy of all of Europe. Of course orchestral developments were happening in other locations as well; in general this set off a kind of orchestral space race. You can track it through history all the way to Bayreuth and beyond. Hell, there's probably a line from those orchestral crescendos to the "orchestra hit" General MIDI instrument. At the height of all that orchestral fervor you've got, for example, an opera composer as a member of Italy's first parliament. How many people on HN can even name a living composer? Now imagine $living_orchestral_composer at the helm of a nationalist movement in the U.S. I've read the preceding sentence three times and brain just outright refuses to come up with imagery for that. So while I guess you can squint and see the historical funding of orchestras as "essentially donations," there's a big difference between donating to a historical society and donating to the red cross. The 19th century funding of orchestras was much more like the latter-- funding for something that is essential to living (or at least in the U.S., essentially to being taken seriously by Europe). Today it's like building model trains for your ears.
  • AlecSchueler 4y ago
    Not always, though. You had church funding and then patronage from the state. Beethoven famously ushered in a new era with his 5th symphony when he secured am advance from the bank to produce it, being the first large work to be produced through commercial investment. Individual patronage continued through the 19th century with notable examples like Tchaikovsky, though increasingly commercial aspects were present. Coming the 20th century funding for academia became the norm. Older composers became teachers and younger composers secured funding for their thesis compositions. At the same time the recording industry exploded. Even avant garde cumposers could make good money by starting their own companies to press and publish their records. Over time interest in orchestral music has plummeted. I guess there's a mix of reasons for this. But today it will prove very difficult to gather the funds for a large scale composition, preformance or recording, never mind all three.
• echelon 4y ago
  > But unfortunately, this wont change the fact that the classical recording industry is dying and that the sector is only surviving thanks to public and private subsidies. Bet $100 that all classical music will be AI generated (synthesized and composed) in just three years. Supply side will be infinite.
  • johndill 4y ago
    I'd have to disagree. Classical music would be the LAST thing AI could do well. Hard to but technique, nuance, opinion, interpretation, style and the greatest utterances of our troubled civilization into an algorithm. Pop, dance, rap, blaalads....maybe. Classical and Jazz? Never going to happen.
    • MagicMoonlight 4y ago
      Lmao, classical and jazz are the two simplest forms of music. Without any lyrics to generate its basically just generating some simple patterns in basic instruments. There’s no way you’d be able to tell.
      • wizofaus 4y ago
        > classical and jazz are the two simplest forms of music Uh, have you actually listened to any of it? At all? There are some non-Western traditional types of music I'd agree can have a level of complexity not usually encountered within the Western classical or jazz genres, but it's fair to say all over forms of Western music are vastly simpler in terms of harmonic language, tonality, form/ structure, instrumentation etc. None of which I believe would make it harder for AIs to generate, as computers can manage complexity rather well. What I expect AIs to not be good at is to conjure a truly original and distinct sound world significantly different to anything that's come before, but that still captivates audiences. Which is arguably what the greatest human composers & musicians have generally achieved, in any genre.
        • jshaqaw 4y ago