Classical streams gear up for Apple launch

The long-awaited launch of Apple’s dedicated classical streaming service is almost upon us. The new offering is based on Apple’s buyout of Primephonic, with many added bells and whistles.

Other services are preparing to meet the challenge. Here’s one upgrade today from Presto Music, a dedicated and trusted service:

We’re very pleased to be able to offer over 200,000 albums at CD-quality sound, and over 34,000 (including almost all new releases) at ‘Hi-Res’ audio quality (up to 24-bit, 192kHz). We have digital booklets for over 70,000 albums, the ability to download albums for offline listening on mobile, and a search engine built for classical music (which allows easy discoverability of composers, works and artists).

With our new streaming service, we move away from the pay-per-track model adopted by all the major streaming services and instead use a pay-per-second model. As many readers will know, classical pieces vary enormously in length, with a Mahler Symphony often racking up over an hour for just 4 ‘tracks’ (movements) whereas a recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations would generally cover 33 tracks in under an hour. This means that on other services a single listen to the Bach album generates more than eight times the revenue than a listen to the Mahler Symphony.

Furthermore, on the major streaming services, classical and jazz listening is also diluted by other genres. We suspect that the average classical and jazz listener will often make specific time to listen to music, sitting down and focussing on what they are hearing, and as such they’ll listen to a lot less music during the day than a typical pop or casual listener who may choose a playlist and press play first thing in the morning, and then leave it running all day until they go to bed at night. By focussing on just classical and jazz we avoid this dilution problem, and ensure that the labels, composers and musicians receive their fair share of revenues.

Read on here.