8 ms·
Why Can't Streaming Services Get Classical Music Right?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- jsundram 11y agoPareto Principle?
- na85 11y agoThey're simply not built for it. Most streaming music services are built for people that want to listen to deadmau5, g-funk or top 40 while they put on their party dresses and pre-drink. A lot of us also use them to stream random tracks while we work: stuff with no lyrics, etc. But a bespoke solution for streaming classical music should ideally have metadata fields for all those things: conductor, soloists, orchestra, recording venue, date, etc. etc. I'd be willing to bet that internally most of those services are using nothing more sophisticated than the id3 tags I remember mucking with in winamp back when Napster was still a thing.
- dogma1138 11y agoNever had issues listening to classical music on Spotify, on Ultra the sound quality isn't an issue, neither is finding what exactly you wan't since you can find specific performances by an orchestra or even a specific conductor.
- rspeer 11y agoThe 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 more popular. There used to be a way around this, where you could type, say, :spotify:search:"BWV 588" into the search box and it would show you only exact matches for BWV 588. Doesn't work anymore. There are lots more problems. But you could read the article.
- dogma1138 11y agoAgain 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.png http://i.imgur.com/VGHCcH3.png
- rspeer 11y agoThey'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.
- dogma1138 11y agoDon'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 :)
- sneak 11y ago"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 Symphony, for example, is a watery shadow of itself when I hear it (listening on very good headphones) at 160 kpbs on Spotify's free service. Lossless sound is one of the biggest points of differentiation that Tidal is trying to make for itself, but so far the scope of their classical offerings and the quality of their metadata have been a disappointment." This person has never ABX tested 160kbps lossy versus lossless. This bogus and unfounded claim calls the rest of his expert assertions into question. Even on ideal headphones/amp, I know no one who can consistently identify 160kbps from original PCM in an ABX test.
- creshal 11y agoConsistently, maybe not. But I have a few songs in my library that, despite 256kbps bitrate, have half-second encoding artefacts (i.e., maybe six seconds in some 80+ hours collection) that always made me go "whoa, why does my speaker sound funny? …oh, it's that song again" until I canned them – I had them both as MP3 and FLAC in my library due to just importing everything on my HDD. After I wasted time checking speaker cables for the fifth time, I just deleted the MP3 versions. With FLAC/PCM you simply don't have any "is the bitrate sufficient? Is there no encoder nor decoder bug that introduces artefacts despite sufficient bitrate?" questions, which for me is worth the increased storage requirements.
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- jasonkester 11y agoThis 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.
- justincormack 11y agoI have been telling people this for years, including people already running music businesses but they havent listened. Its a good market as people will pay more, even though the total market size is smaller.
- birdsbolt 11y agohttp://musicbrainz.org/ http://musicbrainz.org/ already has this data available.
- andybak 11y agoYep. And I was participating many years ago when we figured out a pragmatic way to handle the mapping between simple ID3 style fields and the complex needs of classical - so that non-classical aware media players were at least usable. I wrote the first draft of this: https://wiki.musicbrainz.org/Style/Classical https://wiki.musicbrainz.org/Style/Classical but I haven't looked at Musicbrainz for many years to see how the rules and tools have changed. However - no-one else since has even tried to tackle this problem.
- eafkuor 11y agoHow would you even start a startup like this one? Where do you get the money and manpower? I'm assuming you need a couple of lawyers as well
- rhaps0dy 11y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTOlrN5-UGU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTOlrN5-UGU Just a couple? Apparently you should not mess with music. http://www.ycombinator.com/atyc/#n4 http://www.ycombinator.com/atyc/#n4 "a rogue state with nuclear weapons"
- Intermernet 11y agoStrangely, 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-able audio. Why can't we get canonical track timing for albums (down to the sample) and base the playlists accurately off them? Does anyone else have this problem, or am I doing something terribly wrong? I've come across this problem on iTunes, WMP, Spotify, VLC, Google Music, Soundcloud and pretty much any other digital audio player out there that isn't designed for production (Traktor, Serato, DAWs). The fact that Traktor and Serato get this perfectly right hints that the "consumer" products just don't really care about this problem.
- tommyd 11y agoBoth 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 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.
- gagege 11y agoWhat music do you listen to? Because I have literally never found an album that does gapless. Does the free version not get gapless playback?
- tommyd 11y agoHouse, techno, general electronic stuff. Here's an example of an (excellent) mix album split into tracks that plays perfectly for me: https://open.spotify.com/album/4ZYcd1FAY9GjtIphGqL4Ot https://open.spotify.com/album/4ZYcd1FAY9GjtIphGqL4Ot (and I mean perfectly, I'm pretty anal about these things ;))
- TorKlingberg 11y agoI have heard advertising for composed.com, which specializes in streaming classical music. I have not tried if they get it right.
- leecarraher 11y agoi 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 new independent cluster. The example being, I like romantic era classical, but i don't thumbs down at the first note of a classical/period classical piece. It's that openness that retrospectively is killing the model. A human curated classical playlists like on 8track, I suspect produces a better experience (of course depending on who put the list together). Crowd sourcing beats collaborative filtering here it seems.
- baldfat 11y agoYour 100% correct saying centuries of music all labeled as classical is the first problem, BUT I would say the sub-genres are fairly strong. Your example for Romantic period is almost 100 years of music from 1820 to World War I. 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).
- Mithaldu 11y agoThe 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: 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.
- justincormack 11y agoCan you link to some examples?
- TheOtherHobbes 11y agoGoogle Hatsune Miku. See e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSyWtESoeOc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSyWtESoeOc Vocaloid is an example of marketing genius. The software appeared in the UK, and most people thought "Huh - sounds like a squeaky robot" and ignored it. In Japan they gave one of the packs a name and invented an anime character for it, and made it possible to share music and 3D animations freely. The crowdsourced market exploded into a huge cult following, with some of the best J-Pop writers creating popular vocaloid songs. And then there were holographic tours and parties, and Hatsune Miku became half in-joke, and half viral marketing diva with a distinct personality. The best songs are very good indeed, IMO.
- Mithaldu 11y agoI have a few examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmDDpJnnplA 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/results?search_query=hibikase --- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQKGUgOfD8U 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 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 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 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 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.
- sleepyhead 11y agoThere is http://www.contraclassics.com http://www.contraclassics.com. It's a Norwegian company and the service is designed and developed by http://nordaaker.com http://nordaaker.com
- BostonEnginerd 11y agoI actually have this exact same issue with managing my music collection. It's all about getting the metadata consistent and there's no easy solution for that.
- skywhopper 11y agoBad metadata is the plague of the current long-tail world of Internet commerce and services. Classical music is a fantastic example, as is map data, online shopping, and pretty much everything else on the Internet. 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.
- bryanlarsen 11y agoWhat 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 loud enough to cause hearing damage. An orchestra has several of them, along with 50+ other instruments. Loud orchestras are loud enough that freaking cannons do not necessarily overpower them. So next time you're listening to classical music (or jazz), crank it up, and discover how much more you enjoy it. Unfortunately, you'll ruin streaming and radio, though. They're often compressed, ruining that huge dynamic range. Each piece will have a different level, so you'll constantly be playing with your volume knob to get it set correctly. Which is really hard if you've never heard the piece before -- is it supposed to be loud or quiet? And if you're listening to the radio with the volume set correctly, the announcer will start screaming at you. I love the CBC's Julie Nesrallah's voice, but I can't listen to her program because they have her voice turned up way too loud. If they turned it down the program would be much more enjoyable, and people would enjoy the music more because they'd turn their radio up to hear her properly.
- DenisM 11y agoBetter 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.
- _mulder_ 11y agoUnfortunately 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.
- ceequof 11y agoHeadphones.
- panglott 11y agoIs classical music distribution a problem that streaming can easily solve? In pop music, you have people singing in different national languages in perhaps hundreds of commercially viable genres. Classical music certainly has genres (opera, early music, modern), but it's a coherent tradition, so switching between subgenres is more like switching between classic rock and contemporary rock than between rap and country. Moreover, classical music is in wide supply, as many mid-sized American cities have a quality classical radio channel (say, on NPR), regular amateur performances, and even professional orchestras and other companies. Besides, good-quality classical recordings are cheap and widely available in a wide variety of formats. EDIT: My point was that perhaps the benefits of a good streaming service are lower to classical consumers (than pop music, which focuses more on unique individual performances). If the costs are higher and the benefits lower, that could be a sufficient explanation.
- tempodox 11y agoThe internet makes the technical problems of the long tail almost vanish, but maintaining all that metadata is still work. And the music streaming services make enough money in the mainstream with practically no work at all, so why should they care?
- dhowden 11y agoI'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 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 symphony at once). - enumeration detection. - splitting multiple artists into separate fields (common where you have Conductors and Orchestras as the artist). - reads iTunes XML Music Library files, or will extract metadata from supported audio files in a directory tree (see https://github.com/dhowden/tag https://github.com/dhowden/tag for supported formats!). - store your music in the cloud (Amazon S3 supported), locally (on the same machine that hosts the UI server), or on a remote file store. - web UI (using ReactJS), music played through HTML5 audio. Amongst the things that are still in the "plan": - gapless playback (HTML5 makes this a bit tricky/messy). - Opus codec support (for streaming to mobile devices). - many more things!
- lamby 11y agoI 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.
- dhowden 11y agoSounds 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.
- dhowden 11y agoI'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 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 symphony at once). - enumeration detection. - splitting multiple artists into separate fields (common where you have Conductors and Orchestras as the artist). - reads iTunes XML Music Library files, or will extract metadata from supported audio files in a directory tree (see https://github.com/dhowden/tag https://github.com/dhowden/tag for supported formats!). - store your music in the cloud (Amazon S3 supported), locally (on the same machine that hosts the UI server), or on a remote file store. - web UI (using ReactJS), music played through HTML5 audio. Amongst the things that are still in the "plan": - gapless playback (HTML5 makes this a bit tricky/messy). - Opus codec support (for streaming to mobile devices). - many more things!
- vermooten 11y agoI had exactly this prblem when I signed up to Qobuz yesterday. Just as the author did, I typed in 'Mozart magic Flute' and got all kind of crap back in no specific order. They did however allow me to select a specific CD and sort of 'save' that. 'Brahms Clarinet' didnt do well at all. Metatdata designed for pop / rock doesn't work for classical. I cancelled my Qobuz sub after a few hours on the basis that they didn't even TRY to solve this problem.
- dhowden 11y agoThe "Album-Song" organisational metaphor just doesn't work for classical music. However they could do quite a lot with the current metadata: grouping tracks using prefixes etc. One of my biggest gripes is that searches often return individual "songs", whereas for classical music you're generally looking for something that spans multiple tracks (and so what to see more context in the search output).
- bryanlarsen 11y agoThis sounds like a problem that could be easily solved through crowd sourcing. 1. Set up your metadata format with enough fields and flexibility. 2. Let your users help you fix your metadata, wiki style. 3. Profit
- mojotoad 11y agohttp://musicbrainz.org/ http://musicbrainz.org/
- tbarx 11y agohttp://www.idagio.com http://www.idagio.com
- tbarx 11y agohttp://www.idagio.com http://www.idagio.com
- Expez 11y agoThis 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.
- pionar 11y ago> 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 only the Introduction to The Sacrifice, which is only about 4-5 minutes.
- abruzzi 11y agoIn 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.
- wodenokoto 11y agoSimilar 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)
- thisjepisje 11y agoIf I'm not mistaken Classical Archives does streaming: http://www.classicalarchives.com/ http://www.classicalarchives.com/
- chiph 11y agoWCPE in Wake Forest NC streams classical in Windows Media, MP3 and Ogg Vorbis formats http://theclassicalstation.org/listen.shtml 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.
- keithpeter 11y agoHit the Ogg stream and it loaded in VLC (Devuan linux, basically Debian 8, on my old Thinkpad). Oddly enough, given the OA, I can't find any information within VLC about what I'm listening to. The announcer has just explained that it was a Brendel recording of a Mozart sonata. Nice station. Edit: the what's playing page has a full time plan of the 'broadcast' with links to purchasing the particular recording being played. Those links contain the full performer/artist information.
- cillian64 11y agoUrgh, I made the mistake of trying out the Classics Online HD.LL mentioned in the article. I had to make an account before I could actually find out the payment/subscription details, and only after getting that far did I discover that the "web-player" requires a special streaming plugin with no Linux port. None of this was helped by the website being godawfully slow to do anything, and it popping up a box asking me to install the plugin every 10 seconds when I wasn't even trying to play music. Finally I get sick of all of this and try to delete my account, which is, as far as I can tell, impossible.
- saturdaysaint 11y agoShe 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 last 2 - 3 years. Yes, finding a specific recording is sometimes hit-or-miss, but I've found world class recordings of just about everything I've looked up, and it's almost always easy. It's pretty easy to spot a Deutsche Grammaphone or Naxos recording, and I find that the services are getting better and better at surfacing high quality recordings when you search for a given work. It's odd that she doesn't mention Apple Music since it has been in the news - I find their metadata and presentation of that metadata to be worlds better than Spotify or Rdio.
- keithpeter 11y agoI 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 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!
- splat 11y agoEven 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 and, to my knowledge, nothing has happened since: http://sigma-star.com/blog/post/startup-idea--classical-music-playlist http://sigma-star.com/blog/post/startup-idea--classical-musi...
- ashmud 11y agoThe 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.
- alwaysdoit 11y agoThe metadata is provided by the labels. For their top-selling popular music that they earn songwriting and performance royalties on, the metadata is typically very thoroughly checked and accurate (although there are still mistakes). For classical music that is long out of copyright for the music, they care a lot less and the metadata is filled with mistakes. Most streaming services make a decent effort to try to clean up the metadata, but to a large extent, it's just a case of garbage in, garbage out.
- dharma1 11y agoIt'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.contraclassics.com http://www.idagio.com http://www.idagio.com http://composed.com http://composed.com Composed look like they will be doing a good job - https://composed.recruiterbox.com/jobs/fk0hpm5/ 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.
- gkanapathy 11y agoThe 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.