
Why Can't Streaming Services Get Classical Music Right? - abruzzi
http://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/04/411963624/why-cant-streaming-services-get-classical-music-right
======
bryanlarsen
What 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.

~~~
_mulder_
Unfortunately 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
Headphones.

------
na85
They'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
Never 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
The 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
Again 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
They'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
Don'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 :)

~~~
rspeer
I've spent a while making a Bach playlist, so yes, I do have these things
basically bookmarked by now. But it sounds like you're telling me that search
is easy as long as I know exactly what I want to find.

The problem with classical metadata is when you know the _work_ you want to
find, and you want a quality performance, but you don't necessarily know:

\- What "title" it was given. Titles are neither consistent nor unique. You're
telling me with confidence that you can search for "Canzona in D", which is
ridiculous, it only finds performances that used that particular mix of
English and Italian to title a piece written by a German speaker.

\- Whether a particular recommended performance is going to be available on
Spotify

\- Whether you can click on the "album" to get the rest of the movements, or
whether you just found a standalone track

\- Whether the "artist" is going to list the composer, the performance group,
or one famous performer

So it takes a lot of trial and error. I know I need to do _some_ work to
search, but they're not even trying to put the appropriate data in. It's like
browsing a bookstore that's sorted by color.

The problem here is that all of Spotify is built around the "title", "artist",
and "album" tags, which were originally added to MP3s as a way to catalogue
popular music from about 1950 to 2000, and _none_ of which are a consistent
way to organize classical music. Classical music is organized by composer,
work, movement, arrangement, and a whole lot of performers.

If you get deeper into listening to classical music, you will find that there
are choices besides "Bach from the Dead" and "dreadful orchestras from the
Soviet days", and you'll also find that the metadata situation is not as rosy
as you make it.

~~~
porker
Are your classical playlists public? I've given up looking through Spotify's
catalogue for the reasons you outline.

~~~
rspeer
I've been kind of half-assed about "releasing" them so far, but yes! Here are
my Bach playlists:
[http://rspeer.github.io/blog/2014/09/25/bachify/](http://rspeer.github.io/blog/2014/09/25/bachify/)

------
Expez
This 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
> 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
In 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.

------
skywhopper
Bad 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.

------
Intermernet
Strangely, 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
Both 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.

~~~
Intermernet
Thanks for the reply, I'll do some checks, but I'm pretty sure that I have
crossfade disabled in spotify, and will double check my settings in other
players.

Interesting to hear "older mp3s do not have the necessary additional data". Do
you happen to know when this info was introduced? Is it stored in the ID3
header, or in the actual MP3 data? Can I "losslessly" change the files to fix
this?

I'm especially interested as Google Music will happily replace tracks from my
(backed up) library with "matched" tracks, but it still gets the track timing
slightly wrong, even when played through other media players. It doesn't seem
to matter where they come from, they don't reliably play "gaplessly".

~~~
tommyd
I have no idea I'm afraid, just going off a fuzzy memory. This seems to go
into a lot more detail than I ever could:
[http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Gapless_playback](http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Gapless_playback).
There's no way to go back and fix old files, but I know iTunes has done
flawless gapless (when the source files are good, e.g. ripped from CD in
iTunes) for about 10 years (I remember getting the firmware update on my black
iPod video, ahhh now that was a beautiful looking bit of kit! Not very
waterproof as it turns out though...)

Google Music doesn't play gapless properly, which is incredibly annoying, and
indeed I struggled to get any player on Android to play gapless as well as
iTunes. Poweramp was the closest I could find. Ended up going back to iPhone
for that and other reasons. Not sure how iTunes Match handles gapless as I
could never get it to upload my library properly, never mind play it back...

I still feel there is a big gap in the market for a _really good_ cloud music
repository. Hopefully Spotify can get in to that space, their player is the
best out of the ones I've tried (though still a lot of room for improvement).
I did try using Subsonic briefly but the clients were horrible.

------
jasonkester
This 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.

~~~
sisl
You'd be targeting a niche market, not only because of the 3% market mentioned
in the article, but because I imagine that all "serious" classical fans (i.e.
serious enough to switch to consider using a dedicated streaming service) is
also likely to have a big album collection. In other words, you'd likely be
targeting a very fast-saturated market.

And that's besides the legal/licensing horrors.

That being said, I think there might be some promise in an add-on for spotify
(web-api / browser extension) or iTunes. Just extend the interface with some
more metadata. Surely there are some good databases that can be relied on.

~~~
mayaross
The other problem with this market as a business opportunity is that the
audience is diminishing, aging and slow technology adopters.

Go to any classical music concert and you will see that under 30s are in the
vast minority. Look at how many venues open each year playing modern popular
music (ie pop, house, indie, etc) and how many open playing classical music.
I'm an active classical music fan in London - one of the classical music
capitals of the world - and I cannot name a single classical music venue that
has opened within the past 3 years.

Your market is, quite literally, dying.

It's sad. It's a huge loss for us as young people. But the only way a
classical music streaming service can survive is through association with one
of the big (probably existing) platforms.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
The market is actually fairly constant, because older people - usually middle
class - gravitate away from pop and become more interested in classical music
in middle age.

The Proms aren't going to go away, nor are concert series in most of the UK's
bigger cities. Nor is Classic FM, which is pretty much just Spotify with DJ
chat and someone else's playlist, and is a good gateway pusher to classical
recordings.

And middle class families will keep giving their kids piano and cello lessons,
because that's what they do.

What's happened more - according to people I know - is that the intake at the
Royal College and the Royal Academy is almost exclusively posh kids now,
because rich parents are the only ones who can afford to hothouse and support
their darlings through the exams. It was much more diverse a couple of decades
ago, because music education - all education, in fact - was much more freely
available.

That will do more to kill classical music than Spotify's metadata will,
because it will become something that isn't made available to most of the
population.

------
wodenokoto
Similar 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)

------
splat
Even 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-
musi...](http://sigma-star.com/blog/post/startup-idea--classical-music-
playlist)

~~~
ashmud
The 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.

------
dhowden
I'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
I 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
Sounds 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.

------
sneak
"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
Consistently, 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.

~~~
masklinn
And you've got the bonus that FLAC uses vorbis comment metadata which is
completely arbitrary (the vorbis spec has a list of non-mandatory examples of
fields)

------
saturdaysaint
She 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
I 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!

------
dharma1
It'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.

------
alwaysdoit
The 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.

------
vermooten
I 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
The "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).

------
chiph
WCPE 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
Hit 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.

------
gkanapathy
The 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.

------
leecarraher
i 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
Your 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
The 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
Can you link to some examples?

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
Google 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.

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sleepyhead
There 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)

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cillian64
Urgh, 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.

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BostonEnginerd
I 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.

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bryanlarsen
This 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
[http://musicbrainz.org/](http://musicbrainz.org/)

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TorKlingberg
I have heard advertising for composed.com, which specializes in streaming
classical music. I have not tried if they get it right.

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panglott
Is 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.

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tempodox
The 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?

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thisjepisje
If I'm not mistaken Classical Archives does streaming:

[http://www.classicalarchives.com/](http://www.classicalarchives.com/)

------
tbarx
[http://www.idagio.com](http://www.idagio.com)

------
jsundram
Pareto Principle?

