Apple takes a bite of Philharmonia Orchestra
NewsApple Classical has goine quiet over the suummer as it digested the hard core of orchestras with which it has signed agreements for exclusive recordings.
Now the squirrel has stirred to add London’s Philharmonia Orchestra to its winter hoard.
The deal is said to include exclusive recordings every month, old and new. The first will be Elgar’s Enigma Variations, conducted by Sir Andrew Davis, recorded live at Fairfield Hall, Croydon, on April 18, 2007, remastered in Spatial Audio.
Apple already has a deal with the London Philharmonic Orchestra.
Really? Is there a genuine market for this? And who will remember, amid a never ending stream of digitization, that such exclusive relationships exist? Puzzling.
Clearly there is still money in the classical music recording business or so many recordings wouldn’t be pumped out annually.
For whatever reason, Apple has decided that they want to try monopolize the streaming side of this industry. (While the market may not be huge, my guess is that classical listeners are willing to pay more and are less sensitive to price increases than your average Spotify user.)
The “exclusive” recordings have been a mixed bag. I’ve enjoyed the MET and SFS recordings; offerings from other orchestras/operas have been seemingly random, underwhelming performances. It’s almost like they’re holding back their best stuff and giving Apple the second tier recordings.
The different streaming services have nearly equivalent music catalogues, and there is little to differentiate one service from another. Having exclusive albums is a way to attract customers.
Imagine an extreme case, if Apple took the nuclear option and made the entire BIS catalogue exclusive on Apple Music. You can be sure that some people will switch their streaming service to Apple.
Spatial audio is Apple’s DRM-protected proprietary technology. Apple buying up BIS and future recordings from orchestra in this format represents a real downturn from labels releasing SACDs with 5.1 surround sound. With SACDs (if you own a hacked player like many collectors do), you could copy the recordings in surround sound to your media center or keep backups of them on a hard drive somewhere.
Apple uses Dolby Atmos for spatial audio, and it is not proprietary to Apple. In fact, Amazon Music and Tidal already began to offer Dolby Atmos albums over a year before Apple.
However, Dolby Atmos received little attention until Apple began to promote it heavily as a feature of Apple Music, even pushing record labels to convert their existing albums to Dolby Atmos.
The biggest reason for Apple’s promotion of spatial audio is that they can tie it to selling billions of dollars of AirPods and HomePod speakers that can play Dolby Atmos.
On that subject, how is Sir Andrew D ? Anybody know ? Apparently he was very ill recently