“Primephonic, a Dutch-American app that streamed a wide catalogue of classical music … was acquired by Apple Inc., which aims to fold the service into Apple Music,” writes Mihir Sharma in Friday’s (9/17) Bloomberg. “Why would the world’s largest company be interested in a closely held startup with a relatively small user base, a few dozen employees and no startling technological innovation to boast of? The answer: Primephonic understood the future. Apple has realized that streaming services will succeed or fail depending on whether they master the four things the tiny company, along with its classical-music peers such as Idagio, have figured out: metadata, discovery, curation and quality…. Apple is hoping to absorb Primephonic’s DNA. Right now Apple Music, like most music-streaming services, is laughably bad at providing metadata beyond the most basic track information … [and includes] howlers such as Apple Music listing the composer of the Pathétique Sonata as ‘unknown.’ … Without metadata for conductor, orchestra, composer or movement, you can’t find the recording you want…. Recommendations and music discovery become virtually impossible…. Classical music fans are who you should seek out if you want to figure out the future.”
Change font size
