“Why is classical music so hard to enjoy on streaming services? In one word, it’s metadata,” writes Anastasia Tsioulcas on Thursday (6/4) at NPR. “Metadata is the information that coexists with every digital music file…. Say I want to hear Leonard Bernstein conducting Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 … with the New York Philharmonic. There are also four vocal soloists [and] the Juilliard Chorus, directed by Abraham Kaplan.… Who would be listed as the artist? … I try a little experiment. I look for Mozart’s … The Marriage of Figaro on Spotify [typing] just ‘Mozart’ and ‘Figaro’ into the search bar. I get hundreds of results back, but Spotify recommends that I start with the one in which the artist field begins with ‘Donato Di Stefano.’ … The track Spotify suggests to me is 4 minutes, 17 seconds long…. What is Spotify giving me? Ah, yes, the overture. But I only know that by hearing it. If I were a newbie, I’d have no clue…. For the vast majority of music fans … classical music remains distant and inaccessible. It’s everyone’s loss.” The article covers Pandora, Amazon, and iTunes Radio, and the classical streaming services from Arkiv Music, Classical Archives, and Naxos of America’s Classics Online.
Posted June 8, 2015
